Adam Mcdowell - Death to the Chicken Finger

Cut up a fresh, bone-in chicken breast and youll notice that it naturally separates into two distinct parts: a larger, teardrop-shaped lobe of fleshthe piece of meat that you probably think of when someone says chicken breastand a more narrow piece sometimes referred to as a tender.

The chicken finger originated in the need to find something to do with that tender, explains food historian Gary Allen in a short history of the convenience food published online five years ago. Chicken fingers, Allen says, were seldom seen before 1990 or so, but by the end of the 1980s, fear of saturated fats turned many North Americans away from beef and toward chicken. Increased demand meant billions of additional chicken breasts were processedbut what was the industry to do with the tenders? The answer is on childrens plates.

We can look at Allens mini-history of a mini-food as a metaphor for how cuisine has come to be divided in contemporary North America: The prime cuts go to the adults while the less healthy morselsdressed up in extra salt, fat and sugar and processed almost beyond recognitionend up on the kids menu, both in the family restaurants that traffic in such fare, and at home.

For a generation, many North American parents have indulged childrens picky eating tendencies by sticking them in an endlessly repeating loop of chicken fingers, burgers, pizza, plain pasta, mac and cheese, and grilled cheese sandwiches. Anyone who has sat down for a meal with youngsters over the past 25 years will recognize this list of typical kids foods. Pushed out of the picture, to varying degrees for different children, are fruits and vegetables and anything else that might challenge them, from spicy delicacies to unfamiliar proteins. To picture what this might look like to a visitor from almost anywhere else in the world, imagine we just mashed up some bread and cheese and mechanically separated chicken flesh together, called it Kiddy Chow, and bought it by the bag to rip open to feed the tots.

Mealtimes for children were quite different just a few decades ago. Over the past few months, Ive spoken casually and in formal interviews with dozens of people about food and childhood. As a general rule, people who grew up in North America and are now over the age of 30 recall that when they were children, kids ate what the adults ate. Families usually dined together at the table. There might have been foods you didnt like; depending on the rules of the house you might have been expected to try them or even finish them. Or you might have been free not to, as long as there werent too many foods you were refusing. Either way, it wouldnt have occurred to you that an adult was going jump up from the table to prepare you something precisely to your liking. And if you didnt eat, you might have to wait quite a while for the next opportunity: Studies show that North American kids snack more often and consume more calories than they did in the 1970s. So what happened? What stopped us from feeding normal adult foods to children?

Adam McDowell took a group of younguns to Le Select in Toronto to see if theyd eat adult-style food.

Alex Urosevic for National Post

Knowledgeable fingers are frequently pointed at the gradual extinction of the family dinner, which in turn usually gets blamed on parents busy schedules, which in turn gets partially blamed on hockey practice and piano lessons. Michael Moss, a New York Times reporter whose investigations into the evolution of processed food led to the 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat, knows its easy to fall into the habit of feeding beige foods to children because hes done it many times himself. Im a parent of two boys, living in Brooklyn, being highly motivated by work [with] long hours, having these kind of fractured dinners, says Moss. When youre crazy busy and youre not focused on this goal of having an adult kind of meal for the entire family, you can succumb to that immediate feedback from the kids to go the easy way and serve highly palatable but sort of limited types of food.

The busy house with a full freezer turns into something almost like a restaurant, and the kids get what they want, with the food industry playing an instrumental role in exploiting childrens preference for nutritionally dubious foods.

Adam McDowell took a group of younguns to Le Select in Toronto to see if theyd eat adult-style food.

Alex Urosevic for National Post

The 1980s and 90s saw the advent of countless convenience and snack foods, from fruit and chicken nuggets pressed into fun shapes to sugar-laden yogurts and foods kids could assemble themselves. Grocery stores increasingly sold meals that resembled fast food. As Moss chronicles in Salt Sugar Fat, these products, many of them portable and/or frozen, helped transform the North American diet. Their flavour profiles, packaging, and advertising and marketing programs were often designed to appeal specifically to children with a sophistication that made the 1960s breakfast cereal explosion look limited and quaint.

And why wouldnt a child, given the choice, select from typical kids menu items? The sensation of biting into a toasted cheese sandwich or pizza, Moss observes, especially when its hot and gooey, and with all the aromas... is actually quite powerful from a psychobiology and sensation standpoint.

Regardless of the processed food industrys role, putting children on their own restricted, bland diet would never have been possible had parents not gone along with the shift.

Observe what happens when you try to challenge other peoples children by feeding them something unfamiliar. Its often the parents themselves who will push back, giving up before a battle has even begun (She wont eat that). A less challenging food like grilled cheese and fries offers a path of least resistance, guaranteed to succeedif success is narrowly defined as getting the kid to actually eat it.

By now, the effects of the modern kids diet are relentlessly well-documented. Diverse eating habits tend to lead to healthier children, and those who dont eat their fruit and veg are more likely to be overweight or obese. Just two out of five children were getting their five servings of fruit and vegetables a day as of 2004, and this year Statistics Canada will conduct another survey to find out if the problem has worsened. Children and adolescents are twice as likely to be overweight or obese as there were a generation ago. Twenty per cent of Canadian children and youth were overweight as of 2011 and a further 12% of them were obese. In 1979 (incidentally, the first year a McDonalds Happy Meal was served), around 14% of children and youth were overweight, and childhood obesity practically didnt exist in Canadafigures for children under 12 were so low that government reports treated the problem as a statistical zero.