Pardon the digression, but have you already harvested stuff from your garden? You are in Arkansas right? I didn’t realize that the growing season down there was so much earlier.
I remember serving our own side dishes rather than having them plated. No conflict. My sister was picky. I’ve always liked vegetables.
Oh, yes. We’ve had greens since March. Kale, turnip, tender mix. You eat them really young. In fact that’s the best way. Green onion. Early English peas.
Squashes and cukes for most of the month of May. I have edible, tho’ not quite perfect yet, grape tomatoes. My regular tomatoes are hand sized. We’ve fried a few green. I’d rather wait for the red.
Purple hull peas and beans are blooming.
Corn is a foot or more high.
I don’t grow cruciferous veggies.
★ the only veggie we have had trouble getting the kids to eat is cabbage.
All the adults will eat it. I think maybe it’s the smell of it cooking that bugs them.
One of my kids refused to eat any vegetable that wasn’t a potato or corn on the cob except for the shredded lettuce in tacos. Refused. Damn right I hid some in our food. For example, I could put kale through the food processor and use it in pasta sauce and clam chowder (surprisingly, it didn’t change the color very much. I used a lot of bacon in my clam chowder which pretty much disguised what little flavor the kale had). The entire family ate these and we thought they tasted fine. Another example: the only vegetable she would eat at the Ethiopian restaurant was the yellow dal, because she mistakenly thought it was corn. I didn’t tell her otherwise. Ordinarily she reused beans or peas of any kind.
Lots of kids have weird eating disorders and will eat only mac & cheese, pizza, and hotdogs if given the chance. And kids who will literally starve if they’re forced to eat something they can’t tolerate. My nephew was like this. To blithely say hiding vegetables in food is terrible under any circumstances is to show that you’ve never had a child with these issues. Consider yourselves lucky, not superior parents.
Nowadays, my grown daughter will eat a few vegetables. My now-grown nephew also has expanded his palate.
I’m going to @Spice_Weasel who may have input.
My youngest two went thru a chicken nugget-only phase.
I rode it out. I knew it would pass.
Now, there are fake meat veggie nuggets. I wonder how they would have liked them?
My kids loved Brussels sprouts until they encountered the kid-meme about them being yucky (put about by presenters of childrens TV, etc).
I doubt it’s a major factor. If it’s a factor at all, it’s because people have gotten the idea that it’s better to eat more than you want or need than to let food “go to waste,” not because children have been taught not to leave their vegetables uneaten.
The fake chicken nuggets I’ve had are almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
100%. I grew up with compulsive eating problems, I said to myself, my kid is not going to have these issues, I am going to cook fresh, healthy meals for my child and that is all he will ever know.
Well it didn’t work out like that. My son has a pediatric feeding disorder in which he only eat a limited range of foods, mostly foods that are bland-colored, brown and crispy, due to sensory issues. And honestly it’s one of the greatest sources of frustration I have as a parent. My son has improved with so many things but I haven’t seen him make much progress at all with eating. The problems started at 12 months when we had difficulty transitioning him to solid foods. He has lost foods along the way. He just started feeding therapy again.
At a certain point you just have to let it go. The pediatrician wasn’t concerned, he’s in the 86th percentile for height and is a healthy weight. We took him to a dietician. She wanted him to get more calcium and vitamin D but said otherwise we’re doing great at covering the nutritional bases despite his limited diet. So one of the goals of feeding therapy is to get him into some kind of nutritional supplement. So far he has rejected the ones we’ve given him.
Sometimes he doesn’t eat at all. Last night he ate a single fish stick before going to bed. It seems to ebb and flow but whenever we have too many days in a row of him not eating, I get worried.
People ask frequently, are there really more kids with autism these days or are we just diagnosis-happy? Yes, there are more autistic kids, and I think one reason there seemed to be fewer autistic kids in the past is that autistic kids had lower chances of survival. I think a lot died during pregnancy complications and I think a lot died from malnutrition because they wouldn’t eat anything. If my son were alive in the 1800s he would eat bread and nothing else. This is one reason I am grateful for processed food - I try to keep him from eating too many sugary things, but the kid lives on protein bear bites, protein granola bars, crackers, dried fruit, nuggets, and protein waffles. I feel we owe a debt of gratitude for Kodiak and I’ve thought of sending them a letter telling them to market to autistic parents. Their foods taste normal and innocuous but are loaded with protein. And yes my grocery bills are outrageous.
He won’t touch vegetables or even fresh fruit - anything fresh is right out. But I can give him nuggets with vegetables inside. I don’t think it’s realy sneaking.
And for the record I’ve tried sneaking stuff into his food before. He knows. He always knows. He’s like the princess and the pea, for food.
We struggled for a year or so with my younger daughter, whose appetite basically turned off to her detriment. The same thing happened for me around that age, and to my sister.
It happened especially on vacations when she was around 7 or 8: in the morning she’d feel sick, too weak to get out of bed. She’d also say she didn’t feel like eating anything. She would’ve had a very light dinner the night before. If we could persuade her to eat something–anything–whether a bowl of cereal, or a peach, or a slice of buttered toast–she’d perk right up and have enough energy to be a happy, playful child. But we had several mornings where it was a complete battle to get her to put any food at all in herself. We tried a couple of times letting her not eat, and it meant that she would be extremely lethargic all day.
After a year or so she grew out of it and is a fine eater. But damn did that time suck.
It’s a myth that most kids naturally detest all vegetables. If everybody tells them that all kids hate all vegetables, they may believe it; but while many kids dislike some foods (not all the same ones) most of them like enough veggies to keep them healthy, if given half a chance. (There are exceptions with specific sorts of sensory issues.)
The best way to get your kids to eat vegetables is threefold, and the first two will probably work even if the third isn’t possible:
One: offer them high quality vegetables.
Two: Eat those vegetables yourself, with genuine enthusiasm. (If you can’t stand something in particular, just leave that something off the menu.)
Three: if at all possible, let them grow something themselves. Small scale! no six year old wants to have to weed an acre of garden.
On some children, that will flat out backfire. And quite possibly make a large mess all over your table, from a kid who genuinely can’t help it.
Some foods made me literally nauseated when I was a child. An attempt to swallow them would only have made them come back up again. I once sat for hours at the table at a camp because they said I had to eat something that I knew was going to make me immediately puke if I tried; I figured they’d be just as mad at me for puking on the table as for not eating it, and I hate puking. (They caved, eventually.)
I was lucky: my mother (who also grew up in the Depression, and who never wasted a thing) was very good at telling a kid who really couldn’t stand something from a kid who would just rather eat dessert (and my father deferred to her decisions in this.) When it was something I really couldn’t stand, she never tried to make me. When it wasn’t that bad but was something I really didn’t like, I only had to try one bite.
And the result of all that is that I now love most of the things I couldn’t eat or just seriously disliked as a child; because I don’t have them all tangled up in my head with somebody trying to force me to eat them.
– my mother also was no fool, and she wasn’t about to make different meals for everyone at the table. If I didn’t want to eat what was on the table, once I was old enough to make myself a sandwich, I was welcome to do that instead. The available sandwich materials were all also reasonably healthy, at least by the standards of the time.
Chocolate zucchini bread! (and it freezes well.)
I wouldn’t be surprised; because “the real thing” doesn’t taste particularly like chicken, or at least not like chicken not bred, fed, and prevented from exercising with the aim solely for production of as much white meat as possible in as short a time as possible. Regular chicken nuggets don’t taste to me of anything other than the breading; though I’ll admit to having had them only rarely, because to me they only taste like the breading and I’m not that wild about that style of breading, let alone about paying meat prices for it.
Not to mention that the meme it is out of date . Better-tasting variants have been the standard for a while now.
When my kids were little, my father grew brussel sprouts. We let them pick a sprout and eat it right there in the garden, raw. They really enjoyed that. Brussel sprouts look so weird.
My kids like all the cruciferous veggies.
I don’t think hiding vegetables in lots of bread and sugar is the best way. And there are limits to how much time and effort should be put into making nuggets. Of course many toddlers are fussy and children should ideally eat what is served.
My mother would put out plates of raw broccoli or brussel sprouts to eat while waiting for the meal, which seems a good approach.
But I “hide vegetables” in adult foods I make all the time. From dishes that begin with mirepoix or the trinity to soup, meatloaf, pasta sauces, sandwiches, nachos, chili, breakfast smoothies, curries, appetizers and more. These aren’t powders of uncertain nutrition, but actual healthy vegetables and other nutritious additions you often would not suspect were there. I find this useful, though still serve many other vegetables which I enjoy.
Sure, your toddler won’t die of scurvy. The fact they can get some nutrients from beans or nuts is great if they eat those. But the goal is not just to get enough vitamin A and iron but healthy polyphenols and fibre. We know the importance of a strong start and are learning the importance of gut microbiomes and a variety of foods. The goal is not to become obsessed with nutrition and minutiae, of course, but to encourage healthy habits. Still, I don’t see a reason to limit effective approaches. You couldn’t pay me to drink green tea all day. But add some to a smoothie - I don’t know by taste that it’s even there and don’t have to think about it.
Do you have to “sneak” chocolate into food for kids to eat it? Do you have to “disguise” bacon as anything else? Of course not. Kids (like adults) eat those because they taste good.
If they’re not eating their vegetables, it’s either because their vegetables don’t taste good, in which case the solution is to prepare vegetables so they do taste good. Or it’s because even though the vegetables taste fine, they’ve been conditioned to expect that they’ll taste bad, and “hiding” vegetables so they’ll eat them is just another part of that conditioning.
Me too. As an adult I love love love thé Brassicas. But as a kid, not so much…
I defy you or anyone else to prepare a Jerusalem artichoke that I’ll like. I have never been told they don’t taste good by anyone else.
Mid-dau cut pattypan squash into tiny dice and put it in her spaghetti sauce. She told no one.
We all knew it immediately.
The kids weren’t fooled. They ate the spaghetti. Not a drop left. None.
She wasn’t trying to hide it as much as trying to use it up.
When the kale was young she made smoothies for the kids with it. Banana, vanilla yogurt, frozen strawberries and chopped kale. A tiny bit of lime.
They thought it was a dessert.
I like kale wraps. The kids are not fond of older kale so won’t touch it. I really like kale. It has to be ancient before I won’t eat it.
I’ve never actually had Jerusalem artichoke, but I’ll concede that there are some vegetables that taste bad to some people. Myself, I’m not fond of asparagus nor eggplant. But there are so many other veggies to choose from.
Different people have different tastebuds. But it’s a rare person who genuinely doesn’t like any vegetables, at least aside from conditioning and/or terrible preparation.
I don’t like okra. But there’s plenty of vegetables I do like. And while the range that I liked was smaller when I was six, it was plenty wide enough to keep me healthy.