LogFAQs > #976150396

I'd argue that threatening starvation as an alternative can fall under the umbrella of "beating." It is, after all, using physical pain and harm as a punishment to effect the behaviour you want. Sure, there are cases where there literally isn't anything else to eat and insisting that the kid eat something they don't like is a matter of necessity instead of a voluntary decision, but even then there's ample room for parents to work with children to understand the pickiness and work through it instead of just forcing them to eat something they don't want and hoping that makes them grow out of it.

Picky eating is a symptom of an underlying eating disorder significantly more often than most people think. It's just more socially acceptable (especially for men) to be picky than to attach some sort of anxiety or trauma response to certain foods, so that's what most people jump to when labelling the behaviour, and the individual in question will generally go along with that instead of trying to explain it (especially where they've likely been labelled as such since they were young and never had an opportunity to consider further explanations).