Tasty Read Free Page B

preferences of my own children, born two years apart, were apparent as soon as they began to eat solid food. Matthew, the elder, relished extremes. He started eating jalapeños in preschool and liked coffee from the time he was nine.Every so often, usually in the summer, he would sit down with a lemon or lime, quarter the fruit, add salt, and devour it with the peel. His sister, Hannah, craved bland, rich flavors, and the foods she ate tended to be white or beige: cheese, rice, potatoes, pasta, chicken. She preferred chamomile tea to coffee, and milk chocolate to dark. Yet both were picky eaters: they knew what they liked and rarely departed from it. Getting them out of their respective comfort zones to try something new was nearly impossible.
    This combination of divergent tastes and limited likes turned grocery shopping or restaurant-going into a kind of Rubik’s cube challenge; only pizza satisfied everyone. I made most family dinners, and struggled to get them out of a rut dominated by the same handful of dishes presented with only slight variations in a weekly cycle: pasta, roast chicken, or chicken nuggets for Hannah, hot dogs or shrimp in Szechuan sauce for Matthew. My wife, Trish, and I were more adventurous, but the convenience of this routine dragged us in, too.
    The appetites of children are a crucible where the forces of chemistry and culture collide. The sweet tooth, the scourge of modern nutrition and dentistry, is crucial to childhood development. In newborn babies, sugar acts like aspirin, soothing pain. The Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, a think tank that studies taste and smell, found that children with a strong taste for sweets also had higher levels of a hormone tied to bone growth. A yearning for sweets pointed early human children to then precious sugars in fruits and honey, and when combined with sourness, to citrus fruits packed with vitamins C and D.
    Picky eating is likely a holdover from the same epoch, when humans lived together in small migratory groups andchildren—thanks to their tendencies to wander and to shove random things in their mouths—faced a constant threat of poisoning. Today, a limited diet is a danger to long-term health, and in its most extreme form pickiness has been labeled an eating disorder, called food neophobia.
    Children have strange tastes because they are bizarre creatures. Taste and smell develop earlier than other senses, so a fetus’s sensory universe consists almost entirely of the smells and tastes in amniotic fluid. This makes a lasting impression. In another Monell study, the babies of women who drank a steady diet of carrot juice during their pregnancies or during breastfeeding later took a shine to carrot-flavored cereal.
    Then, between birth and the ages of two and three, a baby’s synapses—the connections between neurons that form networks in the brain—multiply from about 2,500 per neuron to 15,000 (an adult has 8,000 to 10,000). This temporarily ties the senses together. Young children live in a fugue of overlapping sensations, one reason why early flavor experiences evoke not just meals but entire moments. As children age, experience gradually trims the thicket of neurons, and better sensory connections emerge. During this process, kids’ tastes vacillate between conservative stretches and probing, adventurous periods.
    During the teen years, intense tastes fade along with the physiological demands and evolutionary imperatives of childhood. A subtler palate takes their place, though the original likes and dislikes never quite disappear. This muting allows the range of tastes we can experience to increase, and our reservoir of food memories and associations deepens. Sensations bubble up, synapse by synapse, from chemical reactions in the nose and mouth. Meanwhile, food engages the other senses, tapping the mind’s capacity for learning, understanding, and appreciation. Back and forth it goes: the mind