I personally don't believe that fussy eaters (i.e. the sort that don't eat any vegetables as opposed to the sort that eats most things but doesn't really fancy broccoli) are born they're created. Any more than children are born obese or born with eating disorders except for the rare cases where children suffer from medical conditions. You don't have fussy eaters in countries where food is scarce.
I also really believe (and there's plenty of research to support this) that families who eat together where possible (of course, not always) and parents who involve children in preparing good food and model eating a variety of good food rarely have fussy eaters. Fussy eating is very rarely anything to do with the taste of the food itself but to do with children's fear of the new or issues to do with control, asserting independence etc.
Loads of times that you hear parents say, 'my little Jimmy won't touch peas' or whatever that child has never actually tasted peas or tasted it once and never been given it again.
it amazes me that certain parents accept their child's fussiness about food as 'natural' in a way that they would never accept their child's refusal to share their toys for example. You would never get a partnt say, 'Oh little Jimmy can't share his toys. He just doesn't seem to like to do it.'
By the way, I am not saying that food should ever be forced on children or made a big deal of that just exacerbates the problem. We just put the food on the table (preferably involving the children first) and then eat it. If the children don't eat something then it's taken away with little if any comment. And we never stop putting a food stuff ont he table because our children have said they don't like it.
I know that this strategy works.
Our 3 year old has never eaten lettuce. Then the other day when there was a salad on the table that the rest of us were all eating she just picked some up and ate it.
I can imagine that if the dcs ate separtely (and esp if I had prepared separate meals for them) this would never have happened. It would have been too easy to accept that dc2 just doesn't like lettuce and she would not have been enoucraged by the example of the rest of us eating it.