dynagirl

Parents need to take control, and stop feeding the processed food corporations our dollars in the name of convience and feed our kids nutritious foods from the beginning. I know that this is easier said than done, but if we take the time to feed a baby nutrition-dense foods early on, his palate will be trained to like those foods. If we feed a kid processed foods with added fat, sugar and salt, her palate will be trained to like and seek only those flavors.

I really don’t understand the whole kid-parent food battle. [Disclaimer: I am one to talk, since we don't have kids yet, but still...] I’m always amazed when parents complain about their kids’ eating habits – “they’ll only eat X!” – and yet, they don’t provide a better example, and they keep providing the junk food. (And then they wonder why everyone’s fat!) I remember being horrified around age eight when my nasty cousins wouldn’t eat anything – one would only eat celery sticks with peanut butter, and the other would only eat “Chef” Boyardee ravioli. NOBODY in that family would go near an onion (a situation which my brother and I later tried to turn to our advantage, by ordering extra onions on the pizza if we knew they might “happen” to turn up at dinner time when their parents would go out with ours…).

Do parents in France or China go through this? Is this food battle a cultural phenomenon, or is it part of pediatric development? I’m inclined to think it’s a bit of both – kids go through a scaredy-cat period, which makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint: you don’t want them to put any old plant/rock/whatever in their mouths, just as they start toddling around and are able to wander a bit. However, this food-anxiety gets reinforced by parents who give in to this, and who probably don’t cook much on their own anyway.

I clearly remember being told, “This is not a restaurant!” If a kid truly doesn’t like something, they don’t have to eat it – I’d pick the beans out of my chili* and give them to my mom, but the rule was that you had to have one bite of something before rejecting it, and that there were no alternate meals available. (Somehow this was not the case when there were lobsters at stake; thankfully, I outgrew that phobia!) My brother and I were also involved in the kitchen as soon as we could be – helping, doing science experiments (making butter by rolling a jar of cream across the floor to each other), and always tasting and talking about the food. In a small town in Iowa, we learned about the world with cookbooks and a globe.
The article’s point about jarred baby food is a good one. Why would I feed them pre-processed food at that age, when I wouldn’t think about it at a later one? It’s a perfect application for my mini-Cuisinart, doesn’t feed into the baby-industrial complex, is better environmentally, and will be better nutritionally and for fostering curious, adaptable kids.
Yes, I eat beans now, and love them.

UPDATE: It appears that kids’ early diets and the diets of their mothers (through milk) influence their lifelong taste preferences – so get that kid eating diverse foods early, and eat a balanced, interesting diet yourself.