Kids can learn to love raw oysters

And other fun facts from a conversation with "Picky" author Helen Zoe Veit

A few weeks ago, I turned in my first draft of my book about diet culture in medicine. To celebrate this milestone, I went out to dinner with my family. I ordered raw oysters, one of my favorite special-occasion treats.

My husband is a vegetarian, so I had a whole plate of oysters to myself. Until I thought: Why not offer one to my kid?

I showed him how to add a little cocktail sauce or lemon, slurp up the briny delicacy, and set the shell back on the platter of ice. My son, approaching age 5, was game. He gave the oyster a lick. He smiled and said that it tasted salty. He gave it a few more licks. To my disappointment, he wouldn’t go past that stage, and he eventually handed it back to me, uneaten. (Although was I really that disappointed? More oysters for me!)

I kept thinking about a book I had gotten an advance copy of last summer: Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History, by the food historian Helen Zoe Veit. She meticulously traces the history of how American kids have eaten throughout history – including Native American children, immigrant children, and enslaved children – and offers up a refreshing and empowering perspective on the way we feed our kids now.

One factoid from her book that I couldn’t stop repeating to friends was this: American kids used to love raw oysters. Raw oysters! Totally crazy, right? They were abundant, easy for kids to forage for on their own, and most of all, delicious. Now, we think of raw oysters as a food many American adults don’t even like – let alone their kids. I’m imagining what would happen if I send my kid to school with raw oysters in his lunch box. The drama!

And yet, Helen offers abundant historical evidence that not only did American kids eat oysters, they loved them. My son isn’t there quite yet, but I’m hopeful after a few more outings I’ll soon have a dining companion to share my beloved celebratory snack.

What I loved most about Helen’s book was that it offers up a vision of food as a source of pleasure, a source of nourishment, and a source of community. That’s what I want food to be, and yet talking about childhood food culture in 2026 sometimes feels like being pulled in totally contradictory – and yet equally dogmatic – directions.

If you don’t let your kids have treats, it will backfire and they’ll forever have a broken relationship with food!

If you do let your kids have treats, their palate will be distorted forever and they’ll be at risk for metabolic disease!

Feeding our kids can feel like a battle, an activity that requires us to pay somebody for their expertise, and occasionally a true medical emergency. Yet Helen’s book reminded me that much of this dogma is historical and contextual – and that as a parent, I have much more agency that I’m sometimes led to believe.

Below you’ll find a lightly edited transcript of a conversation between me and Helen. I hope you enjoy her work as I much as I do!

Mara: We have to start with the oysters, obviously. You write that oysters were popular in 18th and 19th century America amongst both adults and kids. And now they’re a high-end, fancy food for adults. How did their reputation change?

Helen: The existence of our modern food supply means that so much of our food has gone through a factory. It’s been processed and homogenized. We’re used to these tastes and textures and shapes that are modern industrial forms. Like we’re all used to Ritz Crackers. Those seem normal to us. They even seem natural. Whereas, a raw oyster seems just so weirdly shaped, and it’s got such an incredibly intense taste and smell, and the texture is – there’s all sorts of weird things going on with the texture of a raw oyster.

Oysters are so firmly in our genre of adult foods. There are others, too – like we think of coffee, bitter greens, spicy foods as iconic adult foods that we assume is an acquired taste. We now think of the acquisition of taste as taking place in adolescence or even later. It turns out that humans really are capable of acquiring taste in earliest toddlerhood. Some tastes are undoubtedly easier to acquire than others: things that are sweet and fatty and salty tend to be easier. But the evidence is just overwhelming that when given foods again and again and again – some foods will take multiple repeated exposures for a child to accept – but children can accept them.

Foods that we think of as adult also tend to be high status. Oysters have this kind of cultural cachet now. That makes them seem fancier to us. But to me, growing up, oysters were not particularly fancy. They were really common because I lived right on the coast, in a seafood community. I would go to a drive-through restaurant and get a shrimp burger on a white roll and a lemonade. This was not fancy at all.

Mara: One thing you emphasize in the book is that historically, American children were much hungrier than they are today.

Helen: When we hear that children in the past ate widely, people often assume that it was because of scarcity. And it’s true that many people didn’t have enough to eat – poor children or enslaved children, children of poor immigrants – they were especially unlikely to be fussy at all about food. They ate eagerly and indiscriminately when they could.

However, America was the most abundant country in the world in the 19th century. The average American had plenty to eat. And children with plenty of food and plenty of choice – whether they were children on prosperous farms or Native American children living in situations of abundance or the wealthiest children living in Gilded Age mansions – they weren’t picky either. But it did have to do with hunger, as you said, because children – even children who had plenty to eat overall – often came to their meals with a good appetite.

Mara: Why?

Helen: They were using a lot more calories. There was just a lot more walking in American life back then. Children were fully expected to help do chores much more than children today.

Children in the 19th century weren’t snacking very much. Snacks were just logistically difficult. There weren’t shelf-stable snacks. There weren’t bananas or yogurt in the refrigerator. Sometimes kids might have eaten a little bread between meals. They might have foraged fruit on their own. There are descriptions of kids doing this. But they weren’t grazing. It wasn’t a culture of heavy, semi-continuous eating. Which a lot of kids do today. They’re given snacks at school, in the car on the way home. It’s just so easy.

Yet we know how much a good appetite sharpens our interest in food.

Mara: My husband always says that “hunger is the best spice.”

Helen: I am absolutely for every child in America having enough to eat. I’m for throwing our energy and our money at the problem of food insecurity. Roughly one out of five children in the wealthiest country in the world live in food insecure households. That is a national scandal.

But it doesn’t mean that hunger in all cases is negative. I think we can reconceptualize hunger before meals as this really wonderful tool. You know, it’s something that can even be pleasant. If you’re able to satisfy your hunger, the food tastes better, you enjoy the meal more. And so having a little bit of hunger is not necessarily negative in the way that we’ve been told it is, often by snack companies. A lot of our current attitudes come down to corporate food marketing that emerged in the second half of the 20th century.

Mara: You write about the rise of so-called “expert advice” for childhood feeding in the 19th century. What was going on?

Helen: Most Americans in the 19th century just fed kids whatever they themselves were eating. There was no such thing as children’s food or adult food. But we start to see advice emerging at this time because of fear. So many children were dying in the 19th century. Mortality rates were so high. Kids are constantly dying of diseases like measles and mumps and scarlet fever and diphtheria. They didn’t know about germs. They didn’t know about bacteria.

(Editor’s note: Thank you, modern science, for bringing us vaccines!)

And so many reformers said, “Maybe it’s the food. Maybe the very fact that children are so omnivorous is too much for their little bodies. Maybe the food is making them sick. It’s too stimulating.” And that idea was very powerful. By the early 20th century, middle class parents are listening. This becomes this kind of fashionable, scientific, modern form of parenting – to really go out of your way to feed your children differently than you yourself are eating. And to feed them bland food. No one in the early 20th century was saying that kids like bland food, but they were saying that kids need it.

Mara: That’s so interesting. The idea is born that children have an innately different sense of taste.

Helen: Children’s feeding advice just kind of gets a toehold in modern culture. We see these zigzags. They tell them to eat plain food. And then by the 1930s they’re, “Oh, actually, we should really be feeding kids lots of fiber and vitamins and fruits and milk.” And by the 1940s, Dr Spock published his best selling The Common Sense Book of Baby And Child Care book, he said that parents should really stay out of their kids’ lives. Parents shouldn’t tell kids what to eat. Mothers in particular.

Dr. Spock was a Freudian. He was really interested in mothers and their potential to do harm to their children psychologically. He gave all of this advice that is really still with us. He said that kids have natural instincts that will prompt them to make good food choices on their own, as long as mothers don’t transfer their own neuroses to their kids. But if mothers are too active in telling kids what to eat, or if they make dessert a reward for eating vegetables, kids will never gain a sense of authentic fullness. At the same time, Spock was offering menus for kids that look totally crazy to us today, filled with things like liver loaf and jelly brain and tomato aspic.

Mara: Oof. That kind of advice feels really familiar. “Don’t pass on your disordered relationship with food to your kids.”

Helen: It really still dominates thinking today. Parents are so scared that they’re going to do the wrong thing and mess their kid up. At the same time, they’re being told that health is really important and diet can affect kids’ growth. It just becomes this unbelievably stressful quagmire for parents.

Mara: I’ve read some criticism of your book that it doesn’t do enough to acknowledge eating disorders.

Helen: The eating disorder pattern I think is most relevant to this book is Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, or ARFID. It’s extreme picky eating that’s not related to body image. It’s extreme wariness about new foods, reluctance to eat varied foods, often with sensory issues or aversions to texture. ARFID is real. Undoubtedly. Kids are suffering with ARFID. Parents of children with ARFID are suffering. The really difficult to conceptualize thing about ARFID is that it’s also really new. When we think about the history of our species, hundreds of thousands of years, we don’t see children with ARFID-like behaviors in any meaningful numbers until the late 20th century. It was classified as an eating disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013. In terms of our history as a species, that it’s not even the blink of an eye.

There are clear cultural factors with ARFID, just as there are with other eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia. That suggestion – that it’s not just a case of immutable biological factors – can be very painful to people who are suffering from ARFID.

One thing I want to emphasize to all parents: It is not parents’ fault. This is not about individual behavior. It’s a mass phenomenon. This is about the emergence of mass childhood pickiness that was caused by concrete historical forces. And one of the biggest historical forces was the sort of advice we got about “how to be the best parents.”

Mara: I think about that a lot as a physician. How disorders – or more broadly, my patients’ experiences – can be both cultural and biological at the same time.

Helen: I certainly have tons of friends who have children who are picky. These people are excellent parents. They are loving, involved parents who are doing the very best that they can.

One of the many ironies of this story – and there are a lot of ironies – is that the very advice we have gotten as a culture about how to be a good parent and how to protect our children has actually reinforced and cemented pickiness. We’ve been told to be very cautious about feeding our children because it might cause a variety of bad things: it might cause dysfunctional relationships with food, long term aversions, eating disorders, obesity. None of these phenomena were at all common in earlier time periods.

I realized, like from the early days of working on this book – it took me 10 years to write – that this was terribly difficult for a lot of parents to contemplate. Suggesting, even just in a neutral way, that kids weren’t considered to be picky in the 19th century, a neutral historical observation, was personalized by many people almost immediately. It was taken as a critique of their parenting. I struggled with that a lot personally. I was never someone who was telling my friends how to feed their kids. I usually avoided talking about my book, actually, because I didn’t want to get into that sort of emotionally fraught conversation with people in a social setting.

Mara: Your book helps me understand that it’s a collective, cultural issue. It’s not about any individual parenting decisions. Sometimes it can feel like we can choose one of two paths around food: No limits, all the processed foods, dessert for breakfast. Or rigid, supposedly “healthy” eating that can cause some disordered thinking about food. But that’s such a false dichotomy!

Helen: There’s this sense that there’s one option of having a buffet of processed foods or desserts at all times, versus being a “healthy eater,” but psychologically miserable and hungry. I think there’s a third way. I really think it’s possible for kids to be healthy and happy. Kids can genuinely take pleasure in food, including foods that we think of as “adult foods.” I came to think of this book as really being about pleasure. I want to get us back to a more pleasurable relationship with food and less stress for families. That’s my number one goal.

Thanks, Helen! Such a pleasure to chat with you. I found Picky very empowering. Check out Helen’s book here.

What do you think? How does culture shape the way we feed our kids?