Back in the day, vitamin and mineral deficiencies were much more common than they are now, so people who say that have a point. However, eating a can of spinach will not confer instant superpowers (I’m looking at you, Popeye!).
I personally don’t have a problem with sneaking veggies into food unless the child is allergic or intolerant to them, or they significantly affect the taste or texture.
BTW, my older niece has always loved raw broccoli, and her first complete sentence was “I want more dip.”
Not a parent. I think a better way would be to offer soup or other mixes where they are just there and unavoidable.
We have to remember kids tastebuds are different than ours. I used to HATE asparagus. Now it’s my go to veggie.
My wife used to hate green beans as a kid. Once her mom forced her to eat them. The result was the dinner that was already in my wife all over the table. She’s perfectly fine with green beans now. Not sure about the other people at the table…
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.
So according to that, you just haven’t had okra prepared correctly or you’ve been told they’re bad too many times.
Yeah, I had some Mandarin orange “chicken” nuggets I got from Trader Joe’s, and they were very tasty. I think they were tempeh.
I liked a lot of veggies growing up, but I hated yams, sweet potatoes, and banana or butternut squash, which everybody else liked. I had to eat them, so I’d take as big a bite as I could and wash it down with a gulp of milk without chewing it. I’m lucky I didn’t choke myself to death.
I took them to mean vegetables in general, not some specific vegetable. If children aren’t eating any vegetables at all, then I think it is for one of those reasons. If a kid won’t eat okra but will eat peas (or the other way around), then my guess is that they just don’t like okra, give them peas instead and try some other things for variety.
My non-spectrum kid just plain old didn’t eat. I couldn’t hide veg in foods because not enough food was eaten. Sigh. What she didn’t eat in vegetables, she at least made up for in fruit? Now as a teen, we continue with our “try one bite” rule but it’s a lost cause overall, I think.
I did get the Dino Chicken Nuggets that are made with like… a pea or cauliflower or whatever puree in the chicken slurry. Teen saw the commercial and was horrified that they existed, that she’d never fall for it and I fell off the couch, crying laughing while she indignantly scoured the freezer to her horror.
One of my childhood friends said the same thing happened to her when her mother (who we realized later was psycho, for other reasons) made her eat an olive.
I do hope the parents involved in this have ruled out the child actually having a medical issue with a given food (such as allergy) before lying to the child about what they’re actually eating, which is going to cause significant trust issues in the parent/child relationship when it’s discovered. Is asserting power really worth having your child decide they can’t believe what you tell them and ignore you on bigger issues?
When I was very young (it is one of my earliest memories) my mother forced asparagus on me and I choked on to an extent that it came out nose. I never ate asparagus again till I was grown and now I have come to love it.
Our kids were pretty good with veggies. We tried to grow snow peas but they ate them off the vine. Same with cherry tomatoes, although they couldn’t keep up with how fast they grew. Their favorite veg was broccoli, although stir fried, not raw from the plant.
One DIL was quite picky. She claimed to be allergic to all fish and shell fish, although she later admitted that she had never tasted any. A couple of their boys love sushi and my son takes us all to his favorite sushi bar when we visit. But his daughter was the pickiest eater I have ever seen. At one point, it seemed that the only things she would eat were fries, bread, peanut butter and milk. I guess you could do worse. Once we were all on a cruise and she asked for peanut butter. They brought her a couple of individual packs and she had a hissy fit because they were the wrong brand. As she got older, she did improve and, oddly enough she works for the Instant Pot company as a helper and it seems she will eat anything if you can cook it in an Instant Pot. She once made a commercial for them, but I don’t think it has ever aired. Anyway, she grew up on her limited diet.
Sneaking and lying about it is one thing, adding carrots to pasta sauce or spinach and parsley to rice is just the way we cook it. Just sprinkle more parrmesan on it I’d tell the kids.
I was also of the mindset to offer an adequate variety of choices at mealtimes then set it and forget it. Im not gonna be the food police monitoring intake or cajoling a picky eater to try a bite of everything.
I cooked a lovely meal now we’re gonna eat in peace god dammit!
What might be criminal is feeding babies melatonin. My coworker does this frequently enough with her youngsters. Is that safe? Sounds bizarre but she does co-sleep with the toddler so is it more for mama not the baby?
I’ve always liked asparagus; but I didn’t like eggplant as a child. But my mother made an eggplant parmesan when we had visitors, that everybody always raved over. (I’d have something else to eat.) Seeing the grownups so enthusiastic about it, I’d ask for one bite; and then say ‘no, I still don’t like eggplant’.
But I noticed that each time I tried it I disliked it a little less. And then, as a grownup, I started growing eggplant. I love it now.
Even aside from the medical issue, I wouldn’t advise straight out lying about it. But I don’t think you’re required to list the ingredients if the kid doesn’t ask. Most people of any age don’t check the ingredients of everything they eat, unless there are allergy issues.
Sure; but I wasn’t allergic to any of the things that made me want to puke. (I don’t seem to be allergic to anything other than poison ivy.) And I could eat some of them in other forms – raw tomatoes were fine, tomato sauce was nauseating. Noodle kugel was fine, spaghetti was nauseating. It’s a different problem.