I'm suffering from a mild case of carniphobia. I don't mean the fear of carnival people (small hands and cabbage aroma notwithstanding), but the fear of meat. More specifically, the thought of feeding it to my daughters.
Now that they're almost nine months old, I could start introducing meat into their diet (between 8-10 months is the usual recommendation), but I'm really dreading it. I'm not sure why, exactly. I'm not a vegetarian and never have been. I don't have a problem with eating animals in principle -- the way the animals are raised and treated is a whole separate issue -- and yet for some reason the idea of putting meat, especially pork or beef, in my innocent babes' mouths seems akin to putting makeup on their faces or vodka in their bottles. There's something unsavory and vaguely barbaric about it to me. Did any other (meat eaters) out there feel this way?
Maybe it's just pureed meat that freaks me out. I don't think the girls are ready to handle little chunks of actual meat yet, so I'd have to put the stuff in the food processor or blender, which keeps bringing to mind: A.) That nauseating fake Saturday Night Live commercial for the "Bass-o-matic" with Dan Aykroyd and B.) That disgusting scene in the movie Gremlins where one of the gremlins gets, well, blended. Gremlins is, to this day, the only movie I've ever walked out of, and it was blender scene that put me over the edge. I was ten years old, at a friend's birthday party, and I remember sitting out in the lobby with the mom and another girl who wanted to leave, eating Junior Mints and opining that the movie really ought to have been rated R. Wikipedia tells me that Gremlins was, in fact, one of the movies that prompted the institution of the PG-13 rating.
But back to pureed meat. (If I must....) I just don't think I can do it, or even buy it in a jar. I'd rather wait a few months until the girls have some teeth and are really proficient finger food eaters, and give them actual little bits of meat. In the meantime, I'm perfectly happy to stick to proteins like egg yolks (we tried this for the first time this past weekend) and lentils and tofu. I don't even really like tofu or tofu-based products that much myself, and yet I feel much better about giving the girls tofu than giving them chicken smoothies or pork pudding. I'd be up for giving them fish, too. When can they eat fish? And how about "fake" meats made of soy and quorn, like Boca burgers and Chik'n patties?
But, more importantly, what is this all about? Am I, perhaps, actually a vegetarian in deep denial?
Clio sez: Eat toys, not meat!
