First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

But since our children are not conscious that they are consuming beets, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord.

It is something we learn. A parent feeding a baby is training him or her how food should taste.

From four to seven months, it seems that there is a window when humans are extraordinarily receptive to flavor, but by following current guidelines on exclusive breastfeeding, parents tend to miss it.

The early exposure of babies to flavor—both in utero and through milk—works as a kind of “imprinting,” as Gary Beauchamp puts it. We become emotionally attached to these early aromas. As we saw in Chapter 1 with the “flavor window,” younger babies are more open than older ones to new tastes.

The experiment proved that when your only food choices are good ones, preferences become unimportant.

has driven some affluent parents to become a little unhinged.

What matters most for determining whether your tastes will be healthy ones is not whether you have a sprout-hating gene, but how your genetic predispositions interact with your food environment.

ketchup became a beloved children’s food partly because it is one of the few elements in a meal a child can add themselves.

Rapley’s innovation was to let babies learn chewing first.