Sanford Bell, who has investigated the food impulses of children in America, finds that girls have a greater number of likes and dislikes in foods than boys of the same age, though at the same time they have less dislikes to some foods than boys.  The proclivity for sweets and fruits shows itself as soon as a child begins to eat solids.  The chief fruits liked are oranges, bananas, apples, peaches, and pears.  This strong preference for fruits lasts till the age of 13 or 14, though relatively weaker from 10 to 13.  In girls, however, Bell notes the significant fact from our present point of view that at mid-adolescence there is a revived taste for sweets and fruits.  He believes that the growth of children in taste in foods recapitulates the experience of the race. (S.  Bell, “An Introductory Study of the Psychology of Foods.” Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1904.)

The heightened nervous impressionability of pregnancy would appear to arouse into activity those primitive impulses which are liable to occur in childhood and in the unmarried girl continue to the nubile age.  It is a significant fact that the longings of pregnant women are mainly for fruit, and notably for so wholesome a fruit as the apple, which may very well have a beneficial effect on the system of the pregnant woman.  Giles, in his tabulation of the foods longed for by 300 pregnant women, found that the fruit group was by far the largest, furnishing 79 cases; apples were far away at the head, occurring in 34 cases out of the 99 who had longings, while oranges followed at a distance (with 13 cases), and in the vegetable group tomatoes came first (with 6 cases).  Several women declared “I could have lived on apples,” “I was eating apples all day,” “I used to sit up in bed eating apples."[187] Pregnant women appear seldom to long for the possession of objects outside the edible class, and it seems doubtful whether they have any special tendency to kleptomania.  Pinard has pointed out that neither Lasegue nor Lunier, in their studies of kleptomania, have mentioned a single shop robbery committed by a pregnant woman.[188] Brouardel has indeed found such cases, but the object stolen was usually a food.

A further significant fact connecting the longings of pregnant women with the longings of children is to be found in the fact that they occur mainly in young women.  We have, indeed, no tabulation of the ages of pregnant women who have manifested longings, but Giles has clearly shown that these chiefly occur in primiparae, and steadily and rapidly decrease in each successive pregnancy.  This fact, otherwise somewhat difficult of explanation, is natural if we look upon the longings of pregnancy as a revival of those of childhood.  It certainly indicates also that we can by no means regard these longings as exclusively the expression of a physiological craving, for in that case they would be liable to occur in any pregnancy unless, indeed, it is argued that with each successive pregnancy the woman becomes less sensitive to her own physiological state.