First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson Read Free Book Online

a maximum of four and a half years, during which time they were always at the hospital.
    No friends visited, and those who were not orphans had little or no contact with their parents. While in the hospital nursery, their lives were subordinated to the needs of the experiment. Such an arrangement would never be allowed now, though Davis evidently cared for the children very much, in her way. She adopted two of them, as a single mother: Abraham G (the plump cherub) and Donald, the passionate orange eater. Many years later, after Donald was dead, his widow recalled that he and Abraham had always been “easy to cook for” and “happy to try all kinds of foods”—they remained omnivores all their lives.
    It was such an extraordinary, audacious, borderline-crazy project that Davis attempted: to get to the heart of where children’s food passions come from. It’s just a shame that her experiment proved so easy to misread. Time and again, Davis’s orphanage has been held up as evidence that appetite is mostly genetic, and, as a consequence, that the foods children like or dislike are a sure guide to what their bodies need. Davis’s food orphanage has been taken as proof that in their natural state, likes and dislikes are genetic and highly individual, like fingerprints: our tastes are a matter of nature, not nurture. What this interpretation fails to take into account is that the biggest thing Davis did was to radically restructure the food environment of the children.
    There was a “trick” to the way the experiment was set up, as Clara Davis was the first to point out. The real secret was in her choice of the thirty-four items on her list, which were all unprocessed whole foods. With such foods preselected for them, it didn’t matter which ones the children were drawn to on any given day, because, assuming they took food from several of the bowls at each meal, they could not help but eat a diet of an excellent standard of nutrition. Davis said that her choice of foods was designed to mimic the conditions of “primitive peoples,” though the heaping bowlfuls were surely more plentiful than any hunter-gatherer regime. The experiment proved that when your only food choices are good ones, preferences become unimportant. The “fifteen patterns of taste” resulted in a single healthy whole-food diet, because of the setup. Not one of the children was totally omnivorous, but nor were their likes and dislikes a problem, as they so often are in normal family life. There was no option to like unhealthy food and dislike healthy food.
    Davis herself concluded that her experiment showed that the selection of food for young children should be left “in the hands of their elders where everyone has always known it belongs.” Instead of the “wisdom of the body,” Davis spoke of the “glaring fallibility of appetite.” It was obvious to her that there was no “instinct” pointing blindly to the “good” and the “bad” in food. The two most popular foods overall in her study were also the sweetest: milk and fruit. Had she offered the children a free choice of “sugar and white flour,” those staples of a 1930s diet, it is unlikely they would have ended up in such fine fettle. Self-selection, she concluded, would have little or no value if the children were selecting from “inferior foods.”
    The real test, Davis recognized, would be to offer newly weaned infants a choice between natural and processed foods. This was to be have been her next experiment, but the Depression dashed this prospect, as her funding ran out at the crucial moment. Davis never got the chance to test the effects on appetite of the “pastries, preserves, gravies, white bread, sugar and canned food” that had in her lifetime become so popular. Her experiment left a powerful legacy that took no account of the trick at the heart of it. Doctors, particularly in America, interpreted her experiment to mean that children’s appetites are inbuilt and