Food for thought The baby snack scandal

Have you shopped for children's food recently? The lumpy purees and porridge of yesteryear have been joined in supermarket aisles by brilliantly marketed pouches, smoothies and biscotti that many parents feel offer good nutritional value. However, the reality is a bit harder to digest

- Bee Wilson

A couple of years ago, nursery manager Melanie Smith, who runs Portland Kindergarten in Lincoln, noticed that many children were eating in a new way. Or rather, they were not eating in a new way. A significant percentage of the toddlers in her care were now refusing to try any element of the nursery's small morning meal (which always includes fresh fruit) or their lunch, which might be something like spaghetti bolognese, fishcakes with vegetables, or mild chillies and curries. This new generation of infants "just don't seem to like texture", comments Smith, who has been involved with the nursery for 35 years (before she took over, her mother ran it for 25 years). In the most extreme cases, Smith and her staff found themselves feeding three-year-olds who vomited at the very sight of a cooked lunch.

During the 10 years that Smith has been in charge at Portland, there have always been a fair number of picky eaters. A degree of "fussiness" about food is nothing new for this age group - it can be an entirely natural developmental stage. It's called neophobia: fear of the new.

Smith says it was a normal part of nursery life to have children who struggled with certain vegetables or ones who "liked dry food but not wet food". The difference now, Smith says, is that the nursery is seeing a lot of three-year-olds for whom follow-on milk plus commercial baby food and other packaged snacks form "100% of their diet". At the same time, Smith says there has been a "massive increase" → in toddlers with tooth decay, as well as a rise in the number of children reaching the age of three who are more or less nonverbal. She attributes this speech delay to the fact that the skills and muscles needed for chewing are related to those needed for speech.