When I was dating, picky eating was a total deal breaker. In fact, early in my relationship with my now-husband, Doug, I feared I might have to cut things short when I casually asked him where his favorite place to get sushi was and he said he didn’t have one.
“You like sushi, though, right?” I said, hopefully and with, I’m sure, a hint of desperation. I liked this guy and I didn’t want to have to dump him due to unadventurous eating habits.
His answer confused me: “It’s okay, I guess.” With a little prodding, I learned that, having recently moved to San Francisco from New England, he’d only had supermarket sushi, so I figured I could cut him a little slack. Within the week, though, I dragged him to my favorite sushi bar, and to my delight, he was intrigued. Three months later, Doug had become a sushi expert, learning the Japanese names—from aji to uni—for all of his fishy favorites. Turns out, Doug wasn’t a picky eater at all. His only problem was lack of exposure. Long story short, Doug and I eventually got hitched and I breathed a sigh of relief, now that I no longer had worry that I’d unwittingly end up doomed to eternity with a picky eater. But a few short years later, my fear reared its ugly head anew when my son was born.
Given that my older brother and I grew up in the same home, yet ended up with completely different eating styles—I was always adventurous with wide-ranging tastes, while he subsisted on Cheerios, pizza, and red meat well into adulthood—I’ve never been convinced that parents wield much influence over kids’ eating habits. Yet once I started feeding my own baby “real” food, I became consumed with the desire to somehow program him to love both healthy foods and those I find delicious. I read classic and lauded baby-feeding books, but it was two new books that emerged as favorites, not because they answered my one burning question—how do I ensure my son doesn’t grow up to be a picky eater?—but because they gave me permission to simply feed him good food and hope for the best.
What I love about food writer Matthew Amster-Burton’s Hungry Monkey is that it's not about what your child should eat or how to get him to eat it; his position is simply that picky eating isn’t a “problem.” He goes so far as to cite scientific research finding that even the pickiest eaters get all the nutrients they need—so why worry about it? Further, forcing a kid to eat vegetables won’t make him like them any more, and could even make him pickier. Instead, he advises offering the same foods you like to eat and letting your child choose among them. If you’re worried that it is your parental duty to train your child to be a vegetable-lover, Amster-Burton suggests you just get over it. Just like my husband became a sushi lover as an adult, Amster-Burton assures us, a broccoli-hating child can grow up to adore the stuff. And his recipes—for grown-up foods that he swears his daughter loves, including shrimp curry, green chile enchiladas, and corn pancakes—are a welcome bonus. But there's one small problem with Amster-Burton’s approach—a little thing called “mama guilt,” which he touches on ever so briefly in his introduction when he says one thing he’s learned as a stay-at-home-dad is that “moms feel guilty about everything.” While Amster-Burton may be immune to this phenomenon, I do feel guilty when I park my son in front of a Muppets video, forget to put sunscreen on him at the park, or watch as he gingerly picks the potato chunks out of his stir-fry and leaves the green veggies untouched.
Luckily, Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious is the antidote to mama guilt. Seinfeld’s book isn’t any more about teaching your kid to like healthy foods than Amster-Burton’s, but where he advises looking the other way if your kid rejects the good stuff, she espouses tricking him into eating his veggies by hiding them in foods he loves—and she provides plenty of recipes that do just that. I must admit that I feel funny about tricking my toddler into doing things, but if sneaking zucchini into his beloved mac & cheese or spinach into his pancakes assuages the mama guilt even a little, it’s all right by me.
These two books may not provide guarantees that your kids won’t be picky eaters, but they both provide plenty of hope that, one way or another, you can feed your child well without handicapping him for life. Now my one big question is this: How old does my son have to be before I can serve him raw fish?
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