Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History is an academic book—based on a decade of archival research and grounded in thousands of primary sources—but it’s not just an academic book. More than I would have imagined when I started, it’s a bit personal. I talk a little about my own family and my own children at the beginning. The epilogue contains what you might call parenting ideas, because the lessons for the present were so obvious in this case.

Mass childhood pickiness turns out to be culturally specific. It does not exist in all times and places. That can be shocking to people because we’ve been told pickiness is natural, biological, and evolutionary. People assume that if children in the past or in other cultures weren’t picky, it must have been because of scarcity—children must have been forced to eat foods they hated since there were no alternatives.

But when you look at the past—my book starts in the early nineteenth century—what becomes obvious is that children weren’t just forcing down foods they hated. They approached foods we think of as acquired or adult tastes with enormous pleasure. Real pleasure. Sometimes this was because of scarcity, but the United States was also the most abundant country in the world in the nineteenth century. Children growing up in middle-class or wealthy households who had choices and alternatives were loving food, too—many kinds of foods.

So the argument that mass childhood pickiness is natural and inevitable doesn’t hold up. That can be very hard for parents to hear. Mass pickiness is a historical phenomenon. Biology plays a role, and some people are more prone to pickiness than others, but prolonged pickiness as an inevitable developmental stage is simply not true. An analogy I think about is gender. Two hundred years ago, most Americans would have said women couldn’t be athletes, public speakers, or political leaders—and even most women would have believed that based on their own biological experience. Our experiences of biology are shaped by culture.

I felt it was important in the epilogue to break down the historical changes that led to mass pickiness and then talk about concrete steps parents can take to reverse those changes in their own families. Some are easier than others. Some are more comfortable to hear. We’ve been told by psychologists, advice givers, and marketers not to do the very things parents did in the past to produce non-picky children. We’ve been told those things will mess kids up psychologically, create dysfunctional eaters, obesity, eating disorders.

One lesson from history is that most people in the past weren’t harming their children psychologically when it came to food. When Americans expected kids to share family foods, kids grew up liking family foods. They also generally grew up with healthy body weights and healthy relationships with food. Problems like eating disorders, widespread dysfunctional relationships with food, prolonged family conflict around food, and mass obesity only emerged in the mid- to late-twentieth century, just when mass pickiness emerged. The idea that teaching kids to like family foods will definitely harm them psychologically doesn’t hold up.

Ongoing thread. More from Helen Zoe Veit to follow.