Why Do I Have to Eat That?: Why the Same Dinner Tastes Completely Different to You and to a Grown-Up — and How Liking a Food Actually (Questions Kids Actually Ask) - Softcover

Vale, Arion

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798170523047

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

"Just try one bite."

They are not being fussy. They are tasting something else.

People are built with different bitter-taste switches. If a child has the sensitive kind, that sprout is genuinely not the sprout you are eating — it is sharper, louder, and harder to swallow. That is measurable, and almost nobody explains it to children.

This book does, in twelve ideas with a picture each.

• Why your mouth is not their mouth — and why "stop being fussy" is, quite literally, asking for a different mouth
• Why children want sweet so much more than adults. Asked to pick their favourite sweetness, children chose about eleven teaspoons of sugar in one glass — nearly double cola. It does not fade until adolescence. It is a stage, not greed.
• Why nobody's first coffee is nice — liking is learned, across many unremarkable meetings rather than one brave bite
• The one thing that stops all of it working, which most of us do every evening. In a proper experiment, pressured children ate less and said far more negative things about the food.

Then it takes apart two things everybody repeats and nobody checks: that carrots improve night vision (British wartime propaganda, invented to hide radar), and that sugar makes children hyperactive (twenty-three blinded experiments found nothing — and in the best of them, it was the mothers who were told about sugar whose behaviour changed, not the boys').

No food rules. No portions. No diet claims. It never tells a child to eat anything — because the evidence says that would work against the book.

Ends with the question that actually helps: "Is this the first time, or the tenth?"

For readers aged 5–9, and the grown-up doing the voices. Book Four of Questions Kids Actually Ask.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798170523047
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 32