Peace in our dinnertime: what the new science on fussy eating could mean

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/14/fussy-eaters-science

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Science rides to the rescue of the parents of fussy eaters, suggesting that genetics might play a part. And, yes, we did need rescuing. People can be fantastically disapproving of children with intractable ideas about food. It’s just one more little detail that worsens a situation that’s already frustrating, impractical and suffused with guilt and worry.

Because both my father and my brother had been fussy eaters, I was determined that my own sons wouldn’t be. My sons were not going to be like those dreadful brats who only wanted pizza. I know how the judgmental folk think. I used to think just like them.

Nor would I be like my own mother. She would tell my brother that if he didn’t eat up, he’d become a “bag of bones and the binman will take you away”. Far from getting my brother to eat his dinner, it put me right off mine.

Things started well. Images of my toddler son tucking into kippers for breakfast or gnawing on a chop bone, like some tiny Henry VIII – they now seem so absurd that it’s an effort of will to reassure myself that they’re real memories of regular occurrences, not comforting fantasies.

Creamy or cheesy sauces were totally out. Or an absolute favourite. Carrots had to be raw, but not grated

By the time my second son came along, four years after the first, dietary preferences had kicked in big time, and food options were quickly falling away. I vowed to redouble my efforts. Breastfeeding was followed by little homemade weaning cubes of pea-and-mint puree or butternut squash risotto, lovingly frozen for handy use – thanks, Mark Hix. No dice.

Calpol was the first casualty. When my second son got fevers as a small baby, it was unbelievably hard to get some Calpol on the inside of him. He’d thrash his head around wildly, intensely desperate to avoid that syringe of sticky pink. Even when one of us held him in an iron grip while the other squirted, he’d gather the paracetamol-laced sugar in his cheek and fire it out again in a fierce trajectory that managed to be scary and comical at the same time, especially when it got you right in the face.

Life went on. One son couldn’t abide mashed potatoes; the other couldn’t bear boiled potatoes. One loved pasta, but not with tomato or bolognese sauce; one couldn’t bear pasta, although some tomato or bolognese sauce made it acceptable. Creamy or cheesy sauces were totally out or an absolute favourite. Carrots had to be raw but not grated. Peas were OK with one – but only in a mug, not on the plate touching the other food. One son loved roast chicken; the other couldn’t abide it.

My single triumph was that both liked wholewheat bread and hated white. This was great, because packed lunches were an essential. Though your children’s preference for Superior Bread is no foundation stone on which to construct the entirety of your self-esteem, believe me.

Even the things they ostensibly liked, you’d have to observe them eating. A cache of bananas meant for eating on the way into school was discovered in the outside wheelie bin. A return from a stay in hospital revealed seemingly random clouds of fruit flies, tracked to listlessly nibbled apples hidden in boxes of Lego and Playmobil shacks. A happy period of healthful smoothies ended abruptly with the realisation that son number two was flushing them straight down the loo. The parents of other fussy eaters were allies, especially the ones whose children weren’t all fussy eaters. If children could be brought up in the same way, in the same household and still be radically different in their eating habits, then maybe it wasn’t all my fault.

With my own sons, it eventually became clear that taste wasn’t the only sense that they experienced atypically. The younger one experienced smell more strongly, noise more sharply, light and dark more intensely. Taste is a sensory process, and neurologically it can be a bit out of whack. It can be a single, standalone anomaly – sensory food disorder. It can flag up a wider sensory processing or integration disorder, or the presence of dyspraxia or attention deficit disorder. Many people on the autistic spectrum have particular relationships with food that can seem very odd to others, because sensory processing difficulties are more often than not strongly present.

I’m aware that for many these labels are just a way that middle-class parents write off their own failures. But I’ve come to understand that in the nervous system and the brain there can be many debilitating anomalies – sometimes genetic, sometimes environmental, sometimes a mixture of the two. Sometimes the neurological system is capable of compensating for those deficits, and children literally grow out of them. Sometimes it’s not.

It’s wrong, I’ve concluded, to berate children for their sensory experience of food. Wrong and pointless. Just making sure, by persuasion, by cunning, that they eat something close to a balanced diet is parenting enough.