Strollerderby
How to Raise a Foodie
Step One: Lovingly hand-puree baby’s first foods, taking care to use only organic vegetables and lots of herbs and spices so baby’s palate develops.
Step Two: Continue to feed baby everything under the sun as she develops into an adventurous eater by the time she turns one, diving into plates of pad Thai and roasted mushroom risotto with abandon.
Step Three: Keep feeding your toddler everything under the sun, even when she literally spits it back in your face, on past her second birthday when she simply stops eating.
Step Four: Fingers crossed behind your back, tell all your friends she’s a foodie.
My kids should have been foodies. They were born into it. Their parents are both chefs, and would sooner eat asparagus in February than eat processed food. And we did Steps One and Two with great success. Unfortunately, we also did Step Three. By that time, however, we didn’t care that our oldest son wasn’t a foodie. We just wanted him to eat.
My sister, with whom I share a communal household, found this quite funny, and even wrote about it for Babble. Now that my youngest daughter is nearly one and eating everything under the sun, I’m enjoying Step Two while I can, knowing that Step Three is just around the corner.
I’m not the only one to harbor not-so-secret hopes of raising an adventurous eater. Matthew Amster-Burton wrote a book about it, “Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).
“I really didn’t want to fall into something where I was cooking separate food for her,” says Amster-Burton. “Luckily, pretty much from her first mouthful of solid food, Iris was way more interested in what we were eating anyway.”
Sure, that’s how it starts.
Now Iris is 5. Does she still eat sushi and Thai chicken salad?
Of course not.
Amster-Burton concedes that his daughter may be slightly less picky than other kids her age, but if so, “it’s by a factor of like 5 percent.”
But that’s not the point, insists Amster-Burton.
“She has a vast interest in food beyond what she actually likes to eat,” he said. “Someday, that’s going to pay off.”
That’s what I keep telling myself.
Photo: The New York Times
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7 Comments
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amWell, I can offer SOME hope. My kids were also “adventurous eaters” as babies and young toddlers, and both kind of shut down as older toddlers and preschoolers, but now that both of them are nearing adolescence and predictably love chicken nuggets and hot dogs, they DO seem to have retained some of advantages of their early exposure. (For my part, I never ONCE stopped offering, even if I had to deconstruct the meal into small piles of ingredients. That salad may have dwindled to a few pieces of lettuce and a carrot for a while, but it never disappeared.) Offer them pizza and popsicles, and they will eat. Put salad and curry in front of them, and they’ll eat it, too. Just a bit less enthusiastically. Some things they will choose over nuggets, too, like pesto, sushi, kim chee, and injera. If I hadn’t continued to offer it, they’d never know they liked it.
Keep trying. I won’t say dinner is always a joy, but I don’t make two meals and I don’t make too many concessions.
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amMy kids, ages 6 and 4, are polar opposites when it comes to eating. I patted myself on the back with my firstborn. She still eats well, and tries new things all the time. She tried raw oysters on the half shell a couple of months ago and loved them (we overheard the waitstaff at the restaurant talking about it…”hey did you see that little kid eating the oyster?”). We’ve gone to sushi restaurants and she has pointed at the octopus and said she’ll take it, and has. She definitely has food preferences, but still, at least she is adventurous.
Then there’s my little one. As above, she was good early on. Just gaped open her mouth like a baby bird and took it all in. When she turned 2 she decided to only eat carbs–bread, rice, noodles. I refuse to make special meals for her, and she often goes without if she doesn’t like what I’ve prepared. She refuses to try new foods, and has even literally GAGGED when I’ve made her try what I think are kid-friendly foods like mashed potatoes (I think we bred all the Irish out of her, alas).
My take on this? It has to largely do with the individual child, not what the parent does.
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amSheri, I agree with your approach. My kids are only 2.5 now, and just starting to get pickier. I’m sure that’s about to get worse, based on what I’ve heard from every parent I’ve ever talked to about this. I just don’t worry about it. I think all I can do is offer healthy, interesting meals and snacks, and they can eat or not eat. I know they aren’t going to starve themselves. That isn’t to say that we never have chicken nuggets or macaroni and cheese. I also know that every kid and every family is different. I just think that, for us, not making a big deal out of meals is working for now. Maybe that will change when they are older and I am more worried about them being hungry in school, or they are more stubborn about their food choices. I just hope that this approach will end up working out for me the way it has for you!
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amMy nephew only eats sweet hawaiian bread, some lunch meat, american cheese food slices, and gummy bears (supplemented with coca-cola). When the family sits down to eat he hovers around the edge of the table as if he can’t figure out what we’re doing. He’s 5, and was diagnosed with an eating disorder 2 years ago. Personally, I think part of his eating disorder is that his parents feed him that crap.
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amMy younger two aren’t pickey eaters, but then i’ve never really made a big deal out of it. If they don’t want to eat what we are eating, then they are done until the next meal. So they eat. My five year-old always says he doesn’t like whatever it is we are eating and we “ignore” him and start to eat. He joins in when he figures out it isn’t a big deal.
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amTotally! I was sure Iris was going to be an awesomely adventurous eater when she ate a bunch of spicy enchiladas at 9 months. I was a total tool.
Although I wish I could tell you how to get a picky eater to eat, I wrote a whole book ostensibly on the topic but didn’t really figure it out.
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amThank you! I always get so tired of hearing people talk about what adventurous eaters their 11-month olds are. Seriously, kids that age will literally put anything in their mouths–please don’t tell me your toddler is a “foodie” when I just watched him switch from chewing on your dirty sneaker to sucking on some hummus without batting an eye.
I want to hear from people with 3 y/os who only eat foods that are orange. Tell me how to get a picky eater to eat, not how to feed someone who finds eating grass the height of culinary sophistication.
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