I have just been reading an article in The Times Magazine (16 November 2002)1 about small children who have eating problems - not anorexia but something more akin to phobias about putting certain kinds of substance into their mouths; some of them have had health problems throughout their lives & may have been fed for long periods through a tube; for others the source of the problem is more mysterious but seems to flow from some traumatic encounter with taste or texture, or a simple lack of learning how to eat at an early age
I think that I have a healthy attitude towards food, a willingness to try almost anything at least once, but in endeavouring to comprehend this problem I was led to remember a not unrelated, moderately traumatic encounter of my own
When I was a toddler in the late 1940s my father was a telephone engineer in rural Derbyshire. As such, a lot of his job involved visiting isolated farms to work out how they might be provided with a land line &, in those days of rationing, it was not unusual for a farmer to express his gratitude with a gift of food
Just before Christmas 1948 - I was 3 years old. Daddy came home one evening, letting a cold blast of air through the kitchen door, & dumped a sack on the floor. As he greeted my mum I, intrigued, approached the sack; despite the joint parental warning 'Not to touch' I thrust my hand inside …
I can still recall the horror of that small hand encountering the warm - throbbing? - feathers of dead poultry
That horror was later reinforced by watching the Young Farmers Wives competing in the poultry dressing competitions at the annual Derbyshire Agricultural Shows - shows to which we had privileged access because my father was responsible for providing the temporary phone lines required
But these traumas never put me off eating chicken, & in adulthood I even learned to cope with poise with the intimate preparation of animals for food, though I would still prefer not to have to pluck feathers, & chicken feet revolt me in a way that blood & intestines do not
I can even prepare liver with equanimity, even though I remember that my mother could hardly bear to touch it when raw, bloody & riddled with gristly blood vessels which need to be scissored out
So what do I conclude? Merely that the link between trauma & effect is not simple …
1 Neill, Fiona 'Eat it all up' pp24-28
