Calendar of Events
Note: Meetings are usually held on the second Sunday of each month, September through May, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. Currently we are meeting via Zoom, but in-person meetings are held at the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Services Center, 4805 Edgemoor Lane, Bethesda, Maryland, and occasionally at other venues. The meetings are open to anyone. However, certain meetings may require a fee.
How American Children Became the Pickiest Eaters in History
February 9, 2025 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Speaker: Helen Zoe Veit, Michigan State University
SPEAKER’S BIO
Helen Zoe Veit is a historian of American food specializing in the 19th and 20th centuries. An associate professor of history at Michigan State University, she is the author of the forthcoming book, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History and Why It Matters (St. Martin’s Press, 2026), and Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (UNC 2013), which was a finalist for a James Beard Award in Reference and Scholarship. She directs two major digital projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities: the What America Ate project on food in the Great Depression; and the America in the Kitchen project featuring 200 of the most significant cookbooks in American history. She has edited three books with MSU’s American Food in History book series, including Food in the American Gilded Age. Veit’s writing on food history has appeared in a variety of academic journals and in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.
TALK DESCRIPTION
Are children naturally picky eaters? It surely seems like it today. We’ve probably all heard that children have biologically keen taste buds, that they’re naturally sensitive to texture and color, and that they’re evolutionarily cautious about new things. We don’t expect them to enjoy “adult foods” like leafy greens or spicy curry—even children we don’t think of as especially picky. We might remember disliking certain foods when we were children ourselves, or we might be raising a child now who is persistently picky despite everything we’ve done to introduce new foods. Yet, surprising as it may sound, the idea that children are naturally picky is quite new. A hundred years ago—and for centuries before that, most Americans assumed that children were naturally curious about food, and almost all children quickly learned to enjoy a wide variety of flavorful foods, including all sorts of vegetables. So how did we get where we are today? This talk tells the story of how mass childhood pickiness emerged over the twentieth century, and how in recent decades most Americans forgot that a world filled with cheerfully un-picky children was ever a reality.