Ah, but you haven’t had mine, made with garlic and wholegrain mustard! Kidding, I really don’t argue with people about their food likes and dislikes.
Yes, kale definitely has a bitter flavor, but IMHO it’s a good bitter, at least set against the salty crispy pungency of the chip format. IMHO it also plays well with creamy white bean soup, though for opposite reasons.
However, I guess this is getting us farther afield from the ethics of spiking the family meals with extra veggie content, so never mind…
My husband will eat anything I cook as long as he’s not allergic. His meals are pathetic by comparison (he just dumps three canned goods at random into a bowl and eats it.) He loves when I cook with lots of vegetables. I often make extra portions of vegetables.
Not that I’m some perfectly healthy chef or anything. But I do cook with a lot of vegetables.
My son won’t eat anything but that’s just the way it is right now. He’s just started a second round of feeding therapy. Peas are an idea. Not sure how he would feel about them. (And the irony? He keeps demanding I read him Green Eggs and Ham in both English and Spanish. Are you getting the message kid?)
For a while my husband and I competed to see how many plant points we could get in a week. One point for every unique plant food. We got up to 50 most weeks. But it’s expensive to keep a diet that varied every week.
And i don’t think anyone has objected to using vegetables as an ingredient. If you like some kale in your bean soup (i use chard, personally, and it is a nice contrast) then by all means, add it. I think it’s the idea of hiding vegetable in ways that don’t affect the flavor, appearance, or texture of the dish that seems… Like not a good way to introduce your kids to eating a variety of foods.
That’s how I feel about spinach. Good in salads or in soups, stews, or casseroles as an ingredient, with one exception, and that is the spannkopita.
The grocery store up the street was clearancing some short-dated bagged spinach a while back, and I bought a couple bags, steamed them, and froze them in single-serving sized lidded yogurt containers. I still have a few of them, and use them when appropriate.
I think vegetables are okay. I’ll eat most of them. I try to eat more than five servings of vegetables a day, a goal which most people do not reach. For the fibre and phytonutrients.
This takes some work. It involves eating foods with extra vegetables that I might not normally include. Or choosing different snacks or sides then I otherwise would. There are many foods which I add to, say, smoothies, which taste neutral but I think are healthy. I don’t much like green tea. But adding leaves to a fruit smoothie seems easy.
Making ersatz nuggets out of spinach powder for your snapper seems ridiculous. More so if you claim you don’t or it leads to undesirable long term habits. But the principle of making meals more nutritious in a reasonably painless way seems sensible to me. And works for me.
The blurb about mixing spinach powder into pancakes reminds me of all the wisecracks we hear every summer about zucchini, which technically is a fruit.
People who do it have already done it the other way. How many years are you willing to let your kid go without eating any vegetables while you wait for them to step up? In the meantime, you can incorporate vegetables into their diet in small ways.
This is like hearing people say, “if you just offer them healthy choices, they’ll naturally learn to love them!” because it worked for their completely normal kids.
I mean, I routinely add spinach or kale to smoothies so I can’t taste them at all. I think a lot of people do this. We’re not putting it in there to taste it. We’re trying to sneak something healthy into something delicious.
My son used to eat blueberry pancakes, that’s another thing he stopped eating. Once I added a single real blueberry, chopped up into tiny pieces, to his blueberry pancakes.
Wouldn’t touch em.
Now I don’t know if you would call that sneaking but it failed on any account. But believe me if I could get away with it I would.
I understand that there are a small number of kids, mostly on the autism spectrum, who won’t eat anything that isn’t beige and bland. And yeah, getting enough nutrients into those kids is a challenge. But i suspect that a large fraction of kids who are picky eaters
are never allowed to get hungry
aren’t offered a wide enough variety of vegetables to find ones they like
Sure, a lot of kids aren’t offered vegetable choices because their parents never learned differently, and therefore they’ve never learned to like them. But I know several adults who aren’t autistic who just can’t abide vegetables despite being raised with them. It is what it is.
I don’t think that most parents who “sneak” vegetables into their kids’ food are doing it longterm in place of offering vegetable dishes. They’re supplementing their kids’ diets.
Let me be very clear where my perspective comes from and then leave the discussion:
I have seen many kids with dysfunctional approaches to food that have come from the anxieties of well intentioned parents. I have seen zero kids offered a wide variety of healthy foods and only modest amounts of treats and no power battles or tricks with problems from inadequate nutrition, even those who have stayed vegetables avoidant for years. Even in the autistic child population. Barring special populations like those with autism or swallowing difficulties the longest lasting avoidances have been in the parents who focused the most energy on it. Even in children with Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) the approach is basically the same: positive family meal time experiences modeling eating a wide variety of healthy food options and no coercion. Gentle encouragement and gentle reinforcement for experimenting with a taste at most. Hiding veggies in other foods is not part of the ARFID treatment plan. It doesn’t get them there.
The worst in my book is battles over food. Second worst is hiding healthy food inside crap choices. It only teaches eating crap. Having relaxed meals in which the vegetables are seamlessly incorporated into the acceptable main item, fine for all of us, even if not necessary, but still important, to my take, to also have identifiable vegetables on the plate most of the time and to model eating them.
Just to make something clear as I know I talk a lot about my kid’s feeding disorder. We do not push foods on him. I agonize and freak out about it on the internet but he doesn’t get all that drama. Sometimes I casually offer him something he looks interested in, he says no, and that’s that. The feeding therapy is also using this laid back approach where you just let him get comfortable with having unfamiliar stuff on this plate, moving up to touching it, maybe tasting it, without pressure. We’ve done this before, it didn’t really work, but maybe it will work this time.
But at a certain point you have to just let it go. Neither doctor nor dietician are overly concerned as the kid is very tall and a healthy weight. I don’t want to give him more food issues than he already has so I really make an effort not to turn it into a battle. The real battle is just me and my idealized vision of what it would mean to have a kid who ate a variety of foods. And I do worry about his nutrition and failing him in this way. But that’s my burden to carry, not his.
I like kale and spinach now. Not many other vegetables. When I was a kid if it was green i wouldn’t touch it. And even though I wasn’t a big fan of it, ketchup is a vegetable, and most kids eat plenty of that.
And my husband is still bitter about having been tricked into eating lobster as a child. He thought it was icky. It was hidden in something. Then he found out and felt betrayed.
I think that’s why i distinguish between having something as an ingredient and hiding it. Because of the dishonesty in hiding foods. Trust is more important than eating any particular vegetable.
Zucchini is, in some specific senses, a fruit. It is also, in every sense, a vegetable. Some vegetables are fruits, just like some vegetables are roots, and some vegetables are leaves, and some vegetables are other parts of a plant.
The botanical and the culinary meaning of “fruit” are different. Most of the best vegetables are actually fruits. That’s probably not an accident, fruits are designed to be eaten, after all.
The botanical and culinary meaning of “berry” are even more different.
I think that’s an important distinction to make. We are warned never to trick our kid into eating something. And we haven’t. In the case of the blueberry my object was not deception but just to see if he would eat it. My understanding is the more you push the worse it gets.
My son is probably never going to eat a wide variety of foods. I’d like to at least get him into a nutrition supplement which is why we’ve got him in feeding therapy, but I think the gains are likely to be small.
One of the main sources of stress about it is just the judgement you get from other people. I could do without that.
Raw vegetables sometimes are more acceptable. Sliced up sweet red bell peppers, carrots broccoli cauliflower snap peas celery alongside chunks of turkey and cheese with a yogurt / cream cheese dip, sesame sticks, pretzels would get my picky eaters interested in at least picking up sniffing and nibbling. That’d be my spouse(lol) to this day cannot abide grapes apples or any fruit with a skin I think my MIL may have peeled grapes for them.
Kidding, I really don’t argue with people about their food likes and dislikes.