WHY do poor children have poor diets?

Some commentators contend that healthy diets are too expensive. Others argue that wholesome options are affordable and that junk foods that seem cheap are hardly a good deal. But both camps overlook what most parents know well: Children are picky.

Finicky eating can frustrate any parent. But pickiness has particular effects on the poor. By understanding these effects, we can do more to improve the diets of low-income children.

I spent over two years studying how 73 Boston-area families decided what to feed their kids. Some families made more than $100,000 a year. Some made ends meet with little left over. Others were poor. I wanted to know how parents actually choose what to feed their families, given the situations they face and the resources they have. I quickly learned that poor parents not only have to calculate how much their food costs, they must also consider what happens if no one eats it.

Describing her grocery-shopping routine, a poor mother from South Boston with a 3-year-old son quickly highlighted waste: “I get my food stamps on the 5th and I try to make them last for a month, but that’s really difficult because toddlers waste a lot of food.” When another poor mother’s kids refuse what she cooks, she thinks of things she could have purchased instead. In the direst cases, parents worried that if children rejected food, someone else in the family would go without.