There is a huge difference between what kids are fed in restaurants around the world. I got to thinking about this when I read Kids menus – do they dumb down children’s diets?. Certainly, in many countries they do.
Kids have different tastes than adults, and things taste—and smell—stronger to them. They have a strong affinity for foods with basic flavors: salty, sweet, fatty. They have more taste buds in more places than we adults do.
Why would God, or mom nature, or the creamy goodness of evolutionary intelligence make kids this way? Kids get into things. Most of those things end up in their mouths. Best to make them spit out the things that can kill them—bitter things, for example—and eat the things that fulfill basic needs (fat and salt) and things that are ripe (sweet).
I agree with the article referenced above, that kid’s meals in restaurants don’t challenge them to eat unfamiliar foods.
The problem isn’t that kid’s meals at restaurants exist, it’s that in countries where food is mostly industrial (where most of the restaurants are corporate chains) kids are never weaned off these foods. So the kid’s menu is always the same—Deep fried chicken nuggets (ground up chicken so they can avoid chewing), greasy hamburger and fries, and spaghetti with bland tomato sauce—and only changes in portion size when you look at the “adult menu.”
In Italy, very young kids get to eat spaghetti with butter and cheese at a restaurant, and later graduate to the full spectrum of flavors that a fine adult cuisine offers.
As we age we actually lose taste buds. That’s because an adult in any reasonable society learns what is good to eat, and doesn’t have the same need to avoid foods the might be bad to eat. There is no reason not to eat, for example, slightly bitter foods, like cima di rape that are not poisonous. Reasonable societies wean kids off the primary flavors of food as soon as those kids are old enough to deal with the complexities of good food.
The fly in the ointment is food cost. In an industrial society, there is great benefit to keep us all on a juvenile diet. Fat, salt and sugar are cheap. You don’t need a developed palate to enjoy them. Profit levels are very high for such foods, even when the cost to consumer is low. So you find, for example, sugar in everything, including (duh!) in American “Italian” salad dressing, a travesty.
Fat is cheap because people have been told to be afraid of it, yet it finds its way into lots of industrial foods, especially foods destined for children, because of the cheapness and the child’s desire for it—desire to store an essential ingredient that is an evolutionary remnant from the days before herding when fat was scarce.
It’s just another reason I like living—albeit part time—in Italy. Restaurants are extensions of the family kitchen, not an industrial production line where beancounters rule and larders are full of it.