Whatever their core condition may be, these children cannot behave at the table because the food is causing them such distress.

Given that neophobia is a deep-seated fear that the unfamiliar food will cause you harm, it can help if the child witnesses someone else eating the food and surviving—preferably even enjoying

Most public health campaigns aimed at changing diets are based on the idea that, once we are made to see that certain foods and behaviors are unhealthy, we will give them up. The evidence, however, shows that change in diet does not work like this.

Appetite is a profoundly social impulse. To a large extent, our likes and dislikes are a response to the environment we eat in. From our first toothless tastes, we are picking up cues about which foods are desirable, and which are disgusting, which, sadly, are so often the very ones the grown-ups most want us to eat.

But since our children are not conscious that they are consuming beets, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord.

There has been a real sea change in clinical thinking about anorexia over the past two decades. The prevailing view among those who treat it now is that it is a largely heritable condition of the brain rather than a symptom of having an overbearing mother or seeing too many ads featuring thin models.

nourishing, health-giving family meals, eaten in loving company, are so important for a child’s well-being that everything else in life must be made secondary to them.

the basic paradigm that at certain times, every day, we stop, we sit, and we eat.

The idea was that pickiness—even extreme pickiness—is a developmental stage, something that children will grow out of as they get older. A feeding disorder can look like a form of extreme childishness—and indeed, some of the forms that it takes do involve children who won’t consume anything but milk or baby food.