I love entertaining, having friends, family and neighbors over for dinner. Once those dinners started to include kids, I started to notice something, moms always have a list of things their kids won’t eat, or ask, “What are you making for the kids?”
One time, I was making pizza, this is an easy work around the adult food/kid food demands because you just make several kinds of pizza and everybody chooses what they want. I was grating the cheeses for the cheese pizza and just as I was grating the asiago cheese, a mom walked into the kitchen and said, “What kind of cheese is that?”
I said, “Asiago”.
“Can you leave that out? I don’t think my kids will eat that kind of cheese.”
Are you Raising Picky Eaters?
Several things struck me about this request. One, the mom wasn’t positive that her kids wouldn’t eat it, she just thought they might not and didn’t want to take a chance. She also wanted me to change the cheese pizza I had planned for ALL of the kids to one that suited her kids. Also, if she hadn’t walked into the kitchen at that exact moment, she would have never known that asiago was on the pizza in the first place. So, me being me, I challenged her.
“How about this. How about we make it just like I was going to make it, and you give them a chance to eat it? If they really don’t like it, I’ll make a cheese pizza with JUST mozzarella on it.”
The look of surprise on her face when they not only ATE the pizza, but said that they LOVED the pizza was telling. She hadn’t really tried to expand their food horizons, before. She hadn’t even tried to get them eating other kinds of cheeses other than the few cheeses she knew for certain they would eat. While this seemed crazypants to me, at the time, I can assure you that if I have learned anything at all from helping folks, it’s that she is not alone.
Are you raising picky eaters?
Another thing I’ve learned is that Americans have a particular brand of food dysfunction, and it plays out not only in obesity, metabolic disorders and eating disorders, but also in picky kids.
One of the biggest players in our food dysfunction is manufactured food realities. And it reaches FAR beyond food in bags and boxes. Everything from wanting steaks at our dinner parties to be the exact same size and shape to expecting that every pea in a bag of frozen peas be the exact same size as its bag mates. We want shiny round apples, a vine of uniformly red tomatoes and a carton full of perfectly sized eggs. But the truth is that food doesn’t come like that, it doesn’t grow like that, and I have chickens, so I know for a fact that eggs are not laid like that.
And it plays out at restaurants, too. They have dozens of little portioning tools designed to make the exact same salad the exact same way every single time.
We push uniformity and perfection in food because it can be controlled by producers and when it can be controlled they make more money. And no place does that play out more than in processed foods. Perfectly shaped cookies, granola bars, cereals, etc. And the more perfection in uniformity we push, the more people come to expect food that looks the same. And this plays out for kids because they come to expect perfection and uniformity in their food.
Think about the first foods most children are exposed to.
Cheerios, puffers, crackers, the list goes on, and they are all perfectly shaped. No overdone bits, no mixed up shapes. Mostly because we are hypersensitive as a culture about what our babies eat and if we can see that and come to expect that certain foods are exactly the same always, we can stop fretting over, at least, THAT food. These foods are also all white or some really pale color not found in nature, and definitely NOT green. And we are then surprised when we introduce foods that neither taste like nor are the color of paste, and littles won’t eat it. And this starts a never ending story of refined grains and bland cheese. We take those first rejections to heart and rather than just keep trying, we just keep giving into the least nutrient dense foods because we KNOW they will eat it. And I have fallen into this narrative myself.
And therein lies one of the biggest mistakes parents make when encountering picky eating behavior. We either take their rejection of what they put on their plates personally, or we choose not to even try in order to avoid confrontation, and then never try again. The truth is that this nurtures picky eating, and rewards the pickiest eaters with complete control. We let kids eat nothing but bland uniform foods until well into the school age years and then are completely flummoxed when those habits don’t change.
In fact, we are often told that picky eaters will grow out of it. But recent years, have shown that they don’t. And it’s largely due to the fact that even “adult” food is now manufactured with uniformity of size, shape, color and taste in mind. They never have to “outgrow” this addiction to refined foods because you can now buy full “meals” of refined food and nary a vegetable pass your lips. And unlike when I went to grade school, the food they serve in most school cafeterias is also manufactured. So we can’t even rely on what they might get served for school lunch as a way to expose them to other foods.
Really, the only way to break this cycle is to take the matter into our own hands. To expose even babies and the littlest of kids to a variety of foods. Even the ones we THINK they won’t eat.
It’s an American thing to give babies and littles ONLY the blandest foods, this is not a global de facto practice. And in recent years, it’s even come under a bit of fire as it doesn’t prevent allergies (there is some indication that it might actually contribute to food allergies because little systems never get exposed to a varied diet), and it is the beginning of an addiction to refined foods. And we can do better.
Happily, making baby food, which is not at all difficult, has grown in popularity, and it’s an easy way to add new flavors to diets once babies are eating solid foods. A little leek steamed and pureed into their peas gets them exposed to onion flavors without the punch of spanish onion. A few chunks of beet added to their carrots to get them exposed to the earthy flavor of other root vegetables. For littles, try a smidgen of goat cheese to dip their veggies in. And putting more variety on their plate every single time you make them a plate.
If you want them to eat more foods, you have to expose them to more foods, flavors and colors.
They won’t magically come to it on their own because we just don’t have a food culture outside of the manufactured realities of the food industry. And don’t get discouraged if they try it and don’t like it right away. Keep trying. Food tastes take time to develop, even for adults.
When it comes to our kiddos, there is no greater motto than “Be the change you want to see.” They look to us for every single they need including how to eat right.
You CAN change picky eating habits! You CAN make a difference! Start, right now.
Ginger Bakos is a Meal Planning and Food Budget Wizard who used to writ the blog Dinosaurs Are NOT Food. She is committed to helping moms feed their families well and within their budget, believing that everyone can, and deserves, to eat well! Her greatest passion is freeing moms and kiddos from the “kid food” cycle and guiding them to a healthful and positive relationship with real food. She converted her very own 3 year old Master of All Things Bread and Cheese to a beet and broccoli lover, and she knows you can make it happen in your house, too. You can contact her at ginger@dinosaursarenotfood.com.
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