Is any meal as hotly anticipated as a baby's first bite of solid food? As parents, we anxiously research our options. Baby rice versus sweet potato. Purée versus baby-led weaning. Offering the first morsel, we stare at the tiny face for signs of enjoyment. Will we get a smile or will it – the trauma! – be rejected?
So desperate are we to make our babies happy, we haven't noticed that we have got feeding the wrong way round. We try to give our children what they like, when really we should be trying to help them develop their palates so they relish a wider range of flavours.
Newborns the world over beam at the taste of sweetness and treat bitter foods like poison. If you only give them the foods that automatically make them smile, you are setting them up for a sweet tooth.
I definitely made this mistake with my daughter, our middle child. I bought a weaning guide and spent hours whipping up batches of vegetable mixtures. Every time she tasted one, I drew an emoticon next to it in the book. Butternut squash: smile. Broccoli: frown. Spinach: double frown. Ah, I thought, so she's not a green vegetable person.
What I did not fully realise then was that we are not born with our preferences. They are something we each have to learn for ourselves. When my daughter grimaced at a bite of spinach, she was not telling me that greens sucked. It was just a natural physiological response. As adults, we still pucker our mouths on tasting a slice of bitter lime, but it doesn't necessarily mean we hate citrus fruit.
If we want our children to eat a varied diet, we need to persist with offering them a spectrum of flavours – preferably without grimacing ourselves. The main way anyone learns to like anything is simply to try it a lot of times, in a positive way.
According to a government survey from 2010, 57% of British parents offer baby rice – with its bland, sweet flavour - as the first food. But a fascinating study published last year, involving 139 families, showed that babies weaned straight onto a varied vegetable diet in those early months are more adventurous.
One group of parents gave their babies a smorgasbord of different vegetables for two weeks. 'Day 1: Carrot. Day 2: Spinach. Day 3: Peas. Day 4: Swede', and so on. A control group were weaned onto the usual baby rice. On Day 15, both groups of babies were offered a taste of unfamiliar artichoke purée. The babies weaned onto a rainbow of vegetables ate significantly more of the artichoke.
The science suggests that any baby is capable of learning wide enough tastes to eat a balanced and healthy diet. The good news is that no one is doomed by their genes to be a chocoholic.
I'm not saying every child will find it easy. When you are trapped in teatime battles, it's annoying to encounter smug parents whose children will 'try anything – celeriac's her favourite!' Some babies are born with conditions that make eating trickier, such as a delay to the oral-motor system. I had no idea how fraught the basic matter of getting food from plate to mouth could be until my third child was born with cleft palate and he and I both struggled at mealtimes. He is now six and new dishes occasionally still provoke tears (usually his).
But recent work by feeding psychologists has shown it is possible for even extremely selective eaters to slowly broaden horizons. The secret is what Dr Lucy Cooke – a psychologist who works at Great Ormond Street – calls 'Tiny Tastes'. If the piece of food being attempted is as small as a pea or even a grain of rice, it is much less traumatic for a child to taste it. At clinics in America, this method has been tailored to fussy eaters on the autistic spectrum. In one case, a toddler called Jim went from eating nothing but toasted cheese sandwiches and hotdogs to enjoying 65 different foods. This is life-changing.
'Tiny Tastes' can also work with less extreme fussy eaters. Dr Cooke – who has trialled the method in UK schools and homes – finds it works best if the tasting sessions are done outside mealtimes, to reduce the pressure. The child chooses the vegetable to work on, which makes them feel less trapped. And they get a sticker for every taste – even a lick. I used 'Tiny Tastes' on my own youngest when he was four and was startled by how quickly it turned him from someone who said 'yuck' when he heard the word cabbage to a happy nibbler of raw green leaves.
Ultimately, that first meal matters less than all the ones that come after. Given the chance, children are capable of learning new tastes at any age. Even as adults, we can change our palates, bit by bit.
Oh, and my daughter? She's now 13 - and it turns out she is a green vegetable person after all.
NOTE: Following discussion on the thread below, the title of this guest post has been updated to better reflect the author's intentions.
Bee Wilson is the author of First Bite: How we Learn to Eat.