I’ve always been a picky eater. It usually has something to do with the texture of the food in question. It’s not any kind of commentary on anyone’s cooking. If he’s like me, he is not doing it to criticize your cooking in any way.
Have you asked him what he doesn’t like about soup? He might not be able to tell you- I didn’t figure out that most of my food dislikes had to do with texture until I was in my 20s.
Is there some ingredient or flavoring that you put in most or all of the soups you make? It could be as simple as you putting celery in all your soups, and he can’t stand celery (I use that as an example because Mr Neville can’t stand celery).
Will he eat plain broth with nothing else in it?
And there are some people who just don’t like “sickness rituals”. I have a limited tolerance for that sort of thing- if you fuss over me too much when I am sick, I will snap at you.
Could he maybe associate soup with being sick, since this is a ritual your family has? When I was a kid, I had strep throat and my mom gave me chocolate ice cream to soothe it. For years, I couldn’t eat chocolate ice cream without my throat getting sore. Same thing with orange drink…my mom stopped and got me a McDonald’s orange drink one time on the way to the doctor. I threw up, because of my illness, and developed a lifelong aversion to any orange soda or drink.
Whatever his reason, I wouldn’t force the issue. Everyone I’ve ever met has some weird food pickiness.
I’m gonna chime in with the maybe he’ll grow out of it still camp. My boy’s nearly twelve and ate anything put in front of him until about seven, then became the world’s pickiest, now it’s eased up considerably and he’s only average picky.
He particularly hated soups, stews, casseroles, all sauces and chili, although he’d eat stew ingredients if I strained them onto a plate and he could pretend it wasn’t soup-like. Obviously it was a texture thing for him, although he himself never said that. One trick that helped get him back to trying different stuff was forbidding ‘junk’ foods with the same ingredients, like I wouldn’t allow him to eat Hot Pockets because they had chicken, broccoli and cheese and he wouldn’t eat my chicken casserole with the same ingredients. Well, Hot Pockets are cool of course, so he go to be all brave and prove he liked them and realized he really did like those ingredients, now he requests the chicken casserole all the time. If we were out to eat, I’d order him a cup of chicken noodle soup as an appetizer, he never wanted it but eventually he started hunting for just the chicken pieces and progressed to loving the soup and trying new soups and liking them too.
I hadn’t realized how much he’d grown out of it until my regular sitter went on vacation and a previous babysitter substituted for us. She was amazed that he willingly ate every meal she made without complaint, big change from a year or two ago. So keep the faith!
We have a son (now 10yo) who has been a picky eater for most of his life–to the point that he has gone through a few longish periods of zero growth. Even when he does grow, it’s measured in quarter inches. He turned 10 last week, weighs 45 pounds, and is just shy of four feet tall–about the size of an average 7yo.
He tends to go through phases of choosing what he wants to eat. When he was a toddler, he even got occupational therapy and speech therapy to get him to eat. The OT had me write up a list of the foods that he would and would not eat: Would eat: Ritz crackers, banana slices, Cheerios, macaroni and cheese. Would not eat: Saltines, any kind of fruit beside bananas, anything else you can think of. In other words, he ate a pretty good variety of textures, but he was living on bananas, mac n cheese, and an occasional handful of Cheerios. The only connection we could make in his choices of food was that they were all round.
His eating habits are getting better, but soup is not on his list of edible food as a general rule. We do keep PB&J on hand, and he has also learned how to make microwave quesadillas (take a flour tortilla, sprinkle shredded cheese on it, zap for 30 seconds, then roll it up), so he knows he can always get something else to eat if whatever we happen to have for dinner won’t appeal to him. Like your son, though, I can’t serve anything with sauce or gravy on it if I expect him to eat any of it. He does use ketchup liberally on a lot of foods, and he likes soy sauce and rice vinegar on rice (even when I’m not serving anything remotely oriental), but otherwise, he avoids liquid foods.
It can’t be all due to environment, BTW. We also have a 13yo daughter who–until the last year or so–would eat pretty much anything we served, with very few exceptions. When she was a toddler, she would eat practically anything if she had a puddle of golden mustard (not French’s yellow!) to dip it in. She also loves soup, so I keep in on hand for the few occasions when we serve something that she doesn’t particularly like.
I don’t see the big deal if he’s healthy. Different people have different tastes in food. I’m 20, and I haven’t voluntarily eaten fruit (in the gastronomical, rather than the botanical sense) in years, as whenever I have, I’ve found it disgusting. I don’t know many adults with no weird food aversions.
It is imperitive that you force your son to eat lots of soup. Just kidding. Children that age are prone to sudden cravings and aversions that appear and disappear without warning or explanation (or, in the case of one of my daughters and ham, even an admission that it ever existed). In the absence of an answer to the “what is it you don’t like about it?” question, and if there are no clues (he won’t take any soup from clear broth to chunky vegetable and meat -laden soups to thick stews to smooth cream-based soups) it’s a guessing game. This could be a dexterity problem with the spoon, but you can test that by seeing if he’ll drink a mug of clear broth. It could be texture, but you can test that with a variety of soups and/or a wand blender. If that doesn’t bring an answer and ingredients aren’t an issue, you might consider a couple of things. He may be simply asserting a chance to say “no.” If so, well, at least he didn’t pick something more contentious as the issue. He may, as the stock pot in your home simmers 24/7, simply be sick of soup for a while. Or, if your household draws a very strong parallel between eating soup and being ill, that may have put him off.
In any event, if he’ll eat a reasonably healthy diet without soup, it’s not as pressing an issue. One suggestion: I have been able to serve my children foods that they might otherwise snub by making it breakfast. Kids are hungrier then, more pressed for time, and the novelty value can push otherwise marginal choices over the hump.
I’m a little curious as to why it would be bad to pander to his quirk by fixing a separate meal for him at dinner, but it’s good to jump through hoops looking for a certain soup he likes?
I’m another person who grew up with strange food aversions that have lasted to this day: I turned vegetarian as an infant (spit out the meat baby food, devoured the fruit and vegetable baby food). My parents were obviously concerned about this (for the exact reason that Kiminy illustrates), but tried to work with me. For my younger years, I would eat hot dogs, sloppy joes, and bacon, but nothing else. There was one particularly memorable incident where I wanted desperately to get a Happy Meal, because I’d never had one, but the restaurant wouldn’t give me one with a salad… just chicken mcnuggets or a hamburger… and I sat for an hour with a chicken mcnugget in my mouth, refusing to chew or swallow, because my mom was trying to force me to not waste the food.
Rather than dealing with that every time they wanted to have a steak dinner, or eat out anywhere, my parents would indulge my vegetarianism (before it was trendy or easy in any way), but forced me instead to drink protein shakes and take vitamins, which were also gross but not as gross to me as the meat.
I still don’t eat meat, and have in fact restricted my tastes down to just eating bacon. I live a happy, healthy, full life.
I also don’t like soup.
One thing I had never heard as an explanation for my finickiness until two years ago is the possibility that I might be one of the few, the proud, the supertasters. If your son is one, maybe you should think about skipping the soup and start training him to appreciate wine or cheese instead?
I don’t know why you asked this but my Libra son was a horribly picky eater when he was younger and soup was almost at the top of the list.
I didn’t make a big deal about the pickiness with one proviso, he HAD to eat anything we was given if we visited someone (I can’t stand bad manners). I used this rule to get him to try things he wouldn’t eat at home (Grandmas can be ever so useful).
He is 13 now and eat will pretty much anything. In fact he ate aspargus for the first time yesterday without any coaxing and that surprised me. He proclaimed them “ok”.
We all have something we hate. As long as he will give most things a go don’t worry.
You know, I am perfectly willing to accept that I am (I grew up in a West Indian household, so my idea of spicy is quite different than our usual Southern cuisine)…but my Lady wife is not. She’s a fantastic cook by all accounts (she frequently hosts dinner parties, and she catered our own wedding). Guests aside, our other two sons eat like starving jackals at the table. It’s just been our middle one that’s been weird about it…and has been as long as I’ve known him (he’s my stepson…known him for 7 of his ten years)
But, like the lady says, he’s healthy, and pretty much where he needs to be weight-wise, so I’m not pressing it, especially since he’s exemplary in most other respects. As a person that loves to cook and to eat, it does bug me, though.
And upon reading Kiminy’s last post, I see that I’m going to have to reign in my 2 1/2 year old…he’s almost as big as her 10 year old! And he’s not a fat child at all…and his mom and i are itty-bitty little people, too. Weird.
YOu might have him read this tale, about Augustus Who Wouldn’t Eat His Soup. By the fifth day he was dead. It comes from Struwwelpeter, a 19th century German children’s book. Funny and macabre.
