We had a little dinner-time mystery over here last week, when the one piece of broccoli on Poppy’s plate disappeared. Rockford and I had been talking over dinner and not really watching Poppy’s mastication all that closely. When it was time to clear the dishes, I noticed a suspicious absence of green on her plate. Usually, this means that the offending vegetable has been tossed to the ground or tucked next to Poppy in her seat. When the broccoli search party turned up nothing, though, we had to assume that she had eaten it.

Despite the Case of the Disappearing Broccoli, we’re still fighting the food wars. So I was interested to read today that Poppy’s aversion to new foods might not be my fault. According to The New York Times, it’s genetic! Which means it is my fault, but only sort of! Hooray for passing the buck!

The Times article was prompted by a study published in the that says “childhood neophobia” is only 22 percent environmental and 78 percent genetic.

The study says that children tend to start asserting control over their eating around the time they start walking. The study’s author, Lucy Cooke, blames pickiness on evolution. As she tells the Times, “If we just went running out of the cave as little cave babies and stuck anything in our mouths, that would have been potentially very dangerous.”

Although their timeline and ours aren’t quite in alignment — Cooke says this starts around age two, while Poppy started walking just before her first birthday — the basic premise, I think, seems sound. Pi was a pretty adventurous eater until right about that time. I thought it was just the switch from the smoothness of the baby food to the varied textures of big-people food. But maybe she was (and is) just trying to avoid accidentally poisoning herself.

The Times has a sidebar of expert suggestions, some of which we’ve actually been trying to incorporate and others (such as the following) that we may try soon:

Never say a child has to taste everything, but encourage sampling of new foods. Reassure children that they may politely spit it out if it tastes bad to them.

Keep things calm and turn off the television. Neophobic children sometimes reject food as a way to control an overload of stimulation.

Children younger than 2 should be given as many new tastes as possible, before the picky phase begins.

Isn’t it lucky for us that we have a new little test subject on the way for that last one?

The sidebar also includes a bit of wisdom from child nutrition expert Ellyn Satter that I might cross-stitch and hang on the wall (if I were the cross-stitching type):

Parents must not pin their hopes or their feelings of success on getting the food in the child. They need to remember they have control over what they put on the table. Over whether the child eats it, they do not have control.