Picky Eaters: Why America's Kids Stopped Loving New Foods

·51 min·5 clips

Author Helen Zoe Veidt reveals that 19th-century American children happily ate oysters, coffee, and corned beef.

The episode opens with Christopher Kimball promoting his Substack and introducing the main topic: picky eating in American children. He interviews Helen Zoe Veidt, author of a book on how American children became the fussiest eaters in history. Veidt explains that in the 19th century, children ate foods like oysters, coffee, and corned beef, and were seen as naturally curious eaters, not picky. She traces the rise of pickiness to early 20th-century reform movements that promoted bland, "safe" diets for kids, influenced by new nutrition science and falling child death rates. Veidt discusses neophobia versus pickiness and expresses optimism about changing attitudes. Earlier in the episode, Kimball interviews honey sommelier Marina Marchese, who defines honey as food, medicine, and more, noting its antibacterial properties. They conduct a blind tasting of five honeys, including Sourwood, sweet clover, goldenrod, honeydew from aphid droppings, and a bitter Sardinian honey. Marchese shares cultural uses of honey, like in Nigerian wedding ceremonies. The episode includes call-in segments where hosts answer cooking questions. One caller with vision loss asks about using other senses in cooking, and Kimball and co-host Sarah Moulton suggest relying on hearing, smell, touch, and thermometers. Another caller seeks a recipe for homemade corn curls, leading to a discussion on Pennsylvania Dutch food. Later, a caller asks about mixing pasta with sauce, and the hosts advise using rough pasta, less water for more starch, and cooking pasta in the sauce. Another caller inquires about powdered milk in baking. The episode concludes with a segment where Milk Street's digital editor Claire Lauer interviews comedian Josh Gondelman about the North Shore beef sandwich, a hyper-local Massachusetts specialty with rare roast beef, American cheese, mayo, and barbecue sauce on a griddled onion roll. Gondelman describes secret Facebook groups that rate these sandwiches aggressively.

As heard by us

A food-history conversation that rethinks why children resist unfamiliar flavors.

Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio reframes a familiar dinner-table problem, children refusing new foods, as a wider conversation about food history and changing ideas of childhood.

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Why you'd press play

Want to know whether a picky eater is cautious, conditioned, or living inside a cultural script?

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