Genetics are a lazy excuse for fussy eating

What was your favourite stratagem for not eating things you didn’t like as a child? Mine was to put the vegetable under a mound of mashed potato and play around with it a bit to make it look eaten. Otherwise, I simply mutinied, though in general I was greedy rather than picky. From the other side of the business, as a parent, I called broccoli stems “trees” to make them more inviting, and when I served up something that might raise issues – grey squirrel, say, or rabbit – I simply called it chicken.

Most of us have been there, either turning up our noses at food or trying to persuade a child to clear his plate. When Graham Greene was a boy during the Great War, he had the job of feeding his baby sister Elizabeth. “She was two at the time”, he wrote, “and would hardly have eaten anything at all during our nursery meals if I had not named each spoonful after a war-leader…’ This is General Joffre”, I would say, popping in a dreary spoonful of suet, ‘and this is General French…Hindenburg ….Allenby”. That beats the old trick of pretending each spoonful is an aeroplane.

Most of us feel a pang of guilt when children don’t eat. But now a new study from University College London says that three quarters of children’s food likes and dislikes can be blamed on their genes. Scientists conducted a study of 2,400 pairs of twins, identical and non-identical, and asked parents about their food habits as they grew up. The non-identical twins were much less similar when it came to being picky than the identical pairs.

No doubt the answers were all given in good faith, but I just don’t believe it.  If it really were the case that our picky eating is genetic, how come that the pickiness somehow disappears, genes or no genes, when food is scarce? Hunger somehow trumps genes then. When we tell a fussy eater to remember the starving millions (the invariable answer is to say, “they’re welcome to it”) you’re reminding him or her of the truth that being fussy is the privilege of the well-fed.

Children now are more likely to reject food than their grandparents or great grandparents, and that generational divide points to a different culture, the expectation that you’ll clear your plate. Genes are turning into a useful excuse for bad behaviour.