Read First Bite: How We Learn to Eat for Free Online Page A

to certain flavors (notably bitterness), while others are blind to them. There are also genetic variations in individual appetite, the speed at which we eat, and the extent to which people actually enjoy eating. We vary in how we chew, how we swallow, and how we digest. Some people are born with conditions that make it much harder to eat, such as a delay to the oral-motor system. I had no idea how fraught the basic matter of getting food from plate to mouth could be until my third child was born with a cleft palate; he and I both struggled at mealtimes. He is now five, and new dishes occasionally still provoke tears (usually his). Our relationship with food and weight is additionally affected by epigenetics: our experience in the womb. The “thrifty phenotype” hypothesis of biochemist C. Nicholas Hales and epidemiologist David J.P. Barker suggests that being undernourished in utero leaves people with a lifelong propensity for weight gain, an unfair fate to be handed so early.
    The question remains to what extent we are capable of overriding this genetic and epigenetic inheritance and learning new tastes. This riddle can seem impossible to unravel, given that children do not learn toeat under laboratory conditions. As we take our first bites, our parents are supplying us simultaneously with both nature (genes) and nurture (environment conceived in its broadest sense, including everything from cuisine to family dynamics to religion to cutlery and table manners to the ethics of meat to views on whether it’s okay to eat food off the floor if it was only there for five seconds). The two are so intertwined, it’s hard to tell where one starts and the other stops.
    In one remarkable experiment, however, a group of children did learn to eat under lab conditions. In the 1920s and 1930s, Dr. Clara Davis, a pediatrician from Chicago, spent six years trying to study what children’s appetites would look like if allowed to blossom in total freedom without any preconceived ideas of what tasted good. Davis’s results have often been taken as a clear indication that likes and dislikes are fundamentally inbuilt and natural, though, as we’ll see, Davis herself drew a rather different conclusion.
     
    In 1926, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Cleveland, Dr. Clara Marie Davis started the most influential experiment ever conducted on the question of food likes and dislikes. As a doctor, Davis saw many children with eating problems—mostly refusal to eat. Their appetites did not match their nutritional needs. She wondered what children’s appetites would look like freed from the usual pressures of parents and doctors pushing them to eat nutritious foods such as hot cereals and milk regardless of whether the children liked them. Conventional medical wisdom at that time was that children’s particular likes should not be indulged, lest they became “faddy.” Davis was not so sure that eating what you liked was automatically a bad thing.
    She borrowed a number of infants—some of them orphans from institutions and some the children of teenage mothers or widows—and placed them on a special “self-selection diet” under her medical care. The children—aged six to eleven months, who had never yet tasted solid food—were offered a selection of whole, natural foods and given free rein, day after day, to eat only what they wished. The full list of foods was:
    1. Water
    2. Sweet milk
    3. Sour (lactic) milk
    4. Sea salt
    5. Apples
    6. Bananas
    7. Orange juice
    8. Fresh pineapple
    9. Peaches
    10. Tomatoes
    11. Beets
    12. Carrots
13. Peas
    14. Turnips
    15. Cauliflower
    16. Cabbage
    17. Spinach
    18. Potatoes
    19. Lettuce
    20. Oatmeal
    21. Wheat
    22. Cornmeal
    23. Barley
    24. Ry-Krisp
25. Beef
    26. Lamb
    27. Bone marrow
    28. Bone jelly
    29. Chicken
    30. Sweetbreads
    31. Brains
    32. Liver
    33. Kidneys
    34. Fish (haddock)

    At each meal, the infants were offered a selection of around ten foods from this list, all of them mashed, ground up, or finely