Hey everyone, it's Omna. Welcome to another episode of Settle In. This time we're talking with

food historian and associate professor Helen Zoe Veit. She's the author of a new book called

Picky, how American children became the fussiest eaters in history. We talked about how kids

in America used to eat everything and anything. Little

omnivores is how she described them and why that changed. We talked about the irony of how

food abundance and having more food, cheaper food actually led to kids being pickier eaters than

ever before. And we also talked about what you should do. If you're the parent of a

picky eater, tips and tricks you can put into place right now that may help to alleviate some

of that stress. So settle in and enjoy my conversation with Helen Zoe Fight. Helen, welcome to

settle in. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me.

So selfishly, I wanted to read your book for a lot of questions I will ask in a coded way,

so as not to put my children on blast in this conversation. But this is a book. It touches on a topic

that a lot of families grapple with. Like how do you not make meal time a struggle every time? How do you

get your kids to eat more widely and in a more varied way? What was it that made you want to dig

into this in the first place? Yeah, well, two things really. One is that I'm a historian and I had

written previous books on the 19th century and I just kept bumping into sources describing kids in the past,

eating totally differently than they do today, and eating with pleasure.

There weren't these descriptions of kids as picky eaters.

There were these descriptions of kids as food lovers.

So that just piqued my curiosity.

And I also, I'd grown up in North Carolina in the 1980s and my parents had been northern college professors and they were sending

me to school with things like stews from the Moosewood cookbook and just really different food.

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