44 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
response. If you can find a body part
that’s not in motion, let me know.”
Most babies could use a dose of kale:
a half cup has more than a day’s worth
of Vitamins A, C, and K. The only prob-
lem is that they hate it—or so parents
and baby-food manufacturers seem to
assume. Two years ago, when Johnson
launched the study, she sent her grad-
uate students to find some commercial
baby foods made from pure kale or other
dark-green vegetables. They couldn’t
find any. The few that did exist were
mixed with fruit. “I sort of blew it off
at first,” Johnson told me. “I just sent
them out again and said, ‘Try harder.’”
They went to Kroger, Walmart, Whole
Foods, and Sprouts; they scoured the
organic markets in Boulder, then wid-
ened their search to the Internet. Still
no luck. The closest thing they could
find was a Polish product made with
Brussels sprouts. “That’s when I started
to get less frustrated and more inter-
ested,” Johnson said.
Food preferences are a chicken-and-
egg problem. Do we choose them or do
they choose us? The Good Tastes Study
was designed to tease such mysteries
apart. Over the next six months, a hun-
dred and six babies will pass through
Building 500 and try the samples. Af-
terward, two experts in human expres-
sion will scrutinize their faces on the
videos. They’ll divide their features into
zones of activity and classify every
twisted lip and wrinkled nose accord-
ing to a Facial Action Coding System.
The system can sort adult expressions
into emotional categories: Happiness,
Sadness, Surprise, Fear, Anger, Disgust,
and Contempt. But baby faces are too
pudgy for such specificity, Johnson says,
so she’ll settle for positive, negative, and
neutral. (When a baby makes a gesture
known as “the rake” and claws the kale
off his tongue, that’s negative.) She’ll
correlate those responses with the elec-
trode readings, compare them with the
babies’ reactions to a control substance
(oatmeal), and then circle back to see
how the parents reacted to their chil-
dren’s reactions.
Baby food shouldn’t be this hard. After
a few hundred thousand years of rais-
ing children, humans ought to have this
part down. No food has been more ob-
sessively studied, no diet more fiercely
controlled, no dining experience more
anxiously stage-managed. Yet we still
get it wrong. On any given day, a quar-
ter of American toddlers eat no vegeta-
bles. When they do eat them, the most
popular choice is French fries. Why don’t
babies know what’s good for them? And
why don’t we?W
hen my kids were young and pee-
vish and a carrot could cause a
revolution—when Ruby loved oatmeal
but hated Cream of Wheat, and Hans
loved Cream of Wheat but hated oat-
meal, and Evangeline wanted no break-
fast at all; when every dinner was like
the Yalta Conference and the table like
enemy terrain, booby-trapped with veg-
etables that could go off in your face—I
took courage from Calvin Schwabe.
Schwabe was a man not easily dis-
gusted. A veterinary epidemiologist at
the University of California, Davis, he
specialized in parasitic worms that get
passed from dogs and wild animals to
people and end up in their liver, lungs,
and brain. When Schwabe moved to
Davis, in 1966, after a decade studying
tapeworm infestations in Lebanon and
Kenya, he found the local culture a lit-
tle tame. He was famous for taking
grad students to ethnic restaurants and
chiding the chefs for not using authen-
tic ingredients. He hosted dinners of
grilled guinea pig and deep-fried tur-
key testicles.
Squeamishness is more than a minor
character flaw, Schwabe believed. It’s an
existential threat. Even in America, peo-ple go hungry every day although they’re
surrounded by perfectly nutritious food.
Pets, for instance. “Some 3,500 puppies
and kittens are born every hour in the
United States,” Schwabe wrote in “Un-
mentionable Cuisine,” his cookbook of
taboo foods, published in 1979. “The
surplus among them represents at least
120 million pounds per year of potentially
edible meat now being totally wasted.”
“Unmentionable Cuisine” is a work ofcalculated outrage, but it’s not “A Mod-
est Proposal.” It’s a practical guide,
Schwabe wrote, for the not too distant
day when people may have no choice
but to eat stewed cat (page 176) and
beetles in shrimp sauce (page 372). If
we were all just a little less finicky, we
could feed the world.
It’s a sensible argument, but then
food preferences are rarely amenable to
sense. Our tastes are us, we like to think.
We were born hating lamb or fermented
fish, even if half the world loves noth-
ing better. And it’s true that everyone
experiences food differently. The woman
beside you on the bus may have three
times as many taste buds as you do, and
different genes regulating those tastes.
Depending on which version of the
TAS2R38 gene you have, you may be
highly sensitive to bitter foods, mildly
sensitive, or not sensitive at all. People
with dense, hypersensitive taste buds are
often called supertasters, and are said to
represent about a quarter of the popu-
lation. Another quarter, with sparse, in-
sensitive taste buds, are called nontasters,
and the rest fall somewhere in between.
But it’s not that simple. Supertasters
don’t always live up to the name—in
some studies, they react to food just as
regular tasters do—and genetic effects
tend to fade. Children who are hyper-
sensitive to bitterness are often espe-
cially fond of sugar. But that predilec-
tion disappears in adults, while the taste
for bitterness grows. Being a finicky
eater makes evolutionary sense for
a toddler, lumbering around sticking
things in his mouth. Better to spit them
out if they don’t taste familiar. But we
learn to pick our poisons, and then to
love them beyond reason. We go from
Pabst to I.P.A., milk chocolate to dark,
latte to espresso, homing in on the bit-
terness we once avoided. “Our biology
is not our destiny,” Julie Mennella, a
biopsychologist at the Monell Chemi-
cal Senses Center, in Philadelphia, told
me. “We’re omnivores, and there is a lot
of plasticity in the brain.” Taste begins
as nature and ends as nurture.
The index at the end of “Unmen-
tionable Cuisine” is a gallery of horrors,
or a good bedtime story, depending
on the child: “Bat, baked,” page 209;
“Donkey brains,” page 165; “Dormouse,
stuffed,” page 208. Schwabe presents his
book as a collection of culinary taboos,