How We Eat
I’ve already told you how nosy I am, so projects that answer “how X does Y” fascinate me. Also, I really like pictures of kids. Accordingly, probably just for me and no one else, the New York Times published a feature on what kids around the world eat for breakfast, launching a minor investigation into the nature/nurture dyad of how we categorize foods into “appropriate” meals. Breakfast-for-dinner, or brenner, according to my friend Brenner, always feels like an indulgence, though it’s just a delay of food “normally” consumed ten hours prior, whereas dinner-for-breakfast feels backward and disruptive. Why have we set up these arbitrary food barriers for ourselves? Who’s to say that fermented soybeans (or natto, a breakfast dish in Tokyo) aren’t a delicious meal for any time of the day?
The article opens with a hot take: “Americans tend to lack imagination when it comes to breakfast” — — which, ok, is totally true — — but moves on to assert that a widespread change in taste preferences can happen ridiculously early, if we try:
Parents who want their kids to accept more adventurous breakfasts would be wise to choose such morning fare for themselves. Children begin to acquire a taste for pickled egg or fermented lentils early — in the womb, even. Compounds from the foods a pregnant woman eats travel through the amniotic fluid to her baby. After birth, babies prefer the foods they were exposed to in utero, a phenomenon scientists call “prenatal flavor learning.” Even so, just because children are primed to like something doesn’t mean the first experience of it on their tongues will be pleasant. For many Korean kids, breakfast includes kimchi, cabbage leaves or other vegetables fermented with red chile peppers and garlic. A child’s first taste of kimchi is something of a rite of passage, one captured in dozens of YouTube videos featuring chubby-faced toddlers grabbing at their tongues and occasionally weeping.
I texted my mom to ask what she ate when she was pregnant with me; she was a 25-year-old nurse, and it was her first pregnancy, so I figured she consumed only a healthy cocktail of fruits, veggies, and fairy dust. Wrong: “I ate Ruffles potato chips, Lincoln apple juice IN THE BOTTLE, pizza with mushrooms and extra cheese, and vanilla shakes from Alpha Delta Pizza. And lots of gum.” Imagine me scratching at my tongue and crying.