"It's not your cooking, it's your genes!"

I have long believed that children's relationship with food was pretty much ingrained and not at all a product of environment or upbringing. Finally there is a research study out that proves me right. The cover article in yesterday's NY Times Dining In section is titled Picky Eaters? They Get it from You and it details the research done by Dr. Lucy Cooke at the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London and published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in August.

I love reading studies that took time and a great deal of money to prove things that a lot of mothers just instinctively know. For example the article relates that:

"Most children eat a wide variety of foods until they are around 2, when they suddenly stop. The phase can last until the child is 4 or 5. It’s an evolutionary response, researchers believe. Toddlers’ taste buds shut down at about the time they start walking, giving them more control over what they eat. “If we just went running out of the cave as little cave babies and stuck anything in our mouths, that would have been potentially very dangerous,” Dr. Cooke said."

But for kids who don't really come out of this phase, there really isn't much that can be done other than accept that mealtimes are going to be a headache until they go off to college. You can't just decide that you'll only feed them noodles, because I'm pretty sure that developing scurvy is pretty good grounds for the state to take your child away, so you just have to keep pressing new things on them (within reason) and listen to the moaning and bitching. That's just your job as a parent (or nanny, in my case) and it's somehow supposed to be a reward unto itself.