When my son (now 21) was 2 or 3 he started disliking any type of vegetable and would not eat anything that could have vegetables hidden in it. I was a young parent at the time I viewed this behavior as a battle of wills. It eventually got to the point of vomitting at the table.
After several years of frustration, I read an article in Discover magazine about super-tasters. Super-tasters have a super sensitivity to all tastes, but it seems that bitter tastes are what they really have a problem with. The article included a way you could test for it at home. The test involved putting green food coloring on the tongue and placing a piece of paper with a one inch square cut out over the tongue. You then counted the number of taste buds that matched a type in the picture in the article. If the number was over a certain amount, you had a super-taster.
I now feel guilty about all of the torment we went through trying to force him to eat what was served. I suspect he developed some type of eating disorder from all of this. If I had to do it all over again, I would never force him to eat anything but limit the amount of things he did like to eat to a healthy level.
I would recommend against the whole “everything on your plate” bit. If the kid wants seconds on the meat it’s reasonable to say he has to eat his green beans first, or at least some of his green beans. It’s reasonable when you serve something new to get him to try it.
WhyNot has really good advice. Keep trying new things, because eventually you will hit on something he likes.
I was a picky eater and I had picky eaters. None of them starved. (Although one of them, in his early 20s, is 6’3" and weighs about 110. Healthy, though.) Once this becomes an issue it just gets worse. With boys it seems to resolve itself when they become teens, but that’s the point where, with girls, it can really get worse.
We had a secret spaghetti sauce. The secret was that hidden in the redness of that sauce were carrots, zucchini, squash, and various other things that would not have been eaten if they’d been detected (along with other things that were obvious, like pieces of green pepper, so they could be avoided–or not). You can hide things in the meatballs, too. Spaghetti was always a popular meal.
My mother had two different ways of dealing with my picky eating (well, mine and my siblings’). She would invite the picky eater to divide the food on her plate into two piles, and mom would get to pick which pile I had to eat. The other option was the “three”: take three bites, or eat three pieces, whichever is more appropriate. Like Stranger, I hated green beans more than anything on this earth. I can still remember sitting at the table long after everyone else was gone, staring at three green beans on my plate. I eventually got to the point where I could swallow them whole, so as not to taste them. To this day, I’ll pick green beans out of whatever I’m eating if I can do so without seeming rude. I had the same problem with eggs and, again, if I can avoid them now, I do.
A college friend’s mother had an alternative approach: if anyone at the table didn’t eat something or said they didn’t like it, they got double helpings. The kids in that family apparently learned early to keep their mouths shut about what they liked.
I like WhyNot’s approach. I wonder if I would like green beans or eggs now if there weren’t all this psychological baggage that goes along with them.
Mom did that too, with spaghetti sauce or other things. In fact, one of our favorite desserts was chocolate zucchini cake!
I was a picky eater and I have vivid, bitter memories of adults pressuring me to eat something I didn’t like. I hate to hear people talking about forcing their kids to eat something, to the point that they gag and throw up.
I don’t try to force my kids, but I do use bribery sometimes. I’ll offer a reward, like a special dessert, if they agree to try a certain food item. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The reward at least makes them reconsider the food they’re rejecting.
one note on Hilarity’s idea - watch the kid carefully. If the kid is seriously allergic to something, ‘sneaking’ it in might not be good for him, either. And I’ve got family members who can tell something has/had onions, carrots, or mushrooms just by the smell or taste, no matter how ‘finely’ prepared. For two of the ingredients (carrots and mushrooms) it is a matter of dislike, for onions it is a matter of where is the nearest ER.
For a while our kid reacted oddly to green beans - thought it was an allgergy but more likely it was just from rolling the kid in curry powder.
As for what Athena noted - yeah. Some veggies my kid wouldn’t touch frozen, but fresh or canned, sure. Others the opposite way. Right now he prefers canned peas to frozen (and defrosted).
Could she go to the buffet with you and have some input on what you get for her to eat? Give her, say, a choice between green beans and carrots (or whatever other vegetables they have). She gets to feel like she has some control over what she eats, you get her to eat something healthier than hot dogs.
I have a great little essay by Orson Scott Card, describing how he was cured of his pickiness. He spent his youth living on white bread, peanut butter, bananas, and a few other things–then he had to go live in Brazil. He spent *an entire month living on nothing but bananas *before he caved and ate something else–and promptly discovered that Brazilian food is way better than American food.
Otherwise I have no suggestions, since my kids are not picky. This is good, since our oldest has several food allergies and if she was picky on top of that she would probably starve. The other has to eat a very high-fiber diet because she keeps getting stopped up.
It doesn’t matter. According to my taste buds, green beans are the devil’s food. Even the smell…shudder *[d have happily gone without dinner in order to avoid eating the blasted things.
I am a picky eater - always have been (seriously, my parents’ story of my first lie was me, as a pre-verbal baby pretending to choke on tomato soup because I didn’t like it). I probably always will be.
My parents had the “you will clean everything on your plate” rule - and the only time they deviated from that was the few times it became “if you don’t eat it now, you’ll have it for the next meal, and the next, until you do eat it.” with punishment at the end of the meals where I didn’t finish. It was partially a contest of wills - but it was also that I really, really, really didn’t like the food. WhyNot’s approach, making it not a battle but still not catering to my every whim and desire, is what I wish they would have done.
I have always wondered about people who can’t taste “hidden” foods. To me, chocolate zucchini cake tastes like zucchini; chocolate cake tastes entirely different. The same is true for “we hid it in the sauce” it still has flavor and for a lot of items, it still has texture (or for some foods, it changes the texture of the item in which it’s “hidden” to the point where that becomes inedible).
My older son is at the age (4) where he either hates everything or loves everything, and sometimes hates tonight what he loved this morning. When I make dinner, I accomodate him somewhat–I’ll make him something easy like turkey dogs or chicken nuggets if he wants it. He will often end up eating Cheerios. He’s perfectly happy with that, and it is no real effort. He cannot get dessert unless he eats a fruit or a vegetable. If he really wants dessert, he will happily eat a banana or an apple, or raw carrots or some corn. It works out okay, and over the course of a week or two, he’ll have eaten a decent amount of food that’s good for him. It’s kind of a shame, because he used to be very adventurous about food and that was always fun.
The little one would eat no food except cookies and soymilk (he’s got a milk allergy) for months, when he was around 13-14 months old. The dr told us that cookies and soymilk wasn’t so bad, as long as he was eating. He doesn’t like meat much, and he survives most of the time on pasta, potatoes, rice, crackers–well, if it’s a starch, he’ll eat it. He eats the occassional turkey dog, likes peanut butter, and will eat Gerber graduate (microwavable meals in a tub) stews with meat sometimes.
We don’t fight the food issues. The only time I get annoyed is if the 4-year old asks me to make him something and then decides he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t do that often, since he knows that mommy gets really pissed off about it. Everything I’ve ever read about kids says not to push them on food issues and make sure they’re not eating just junk. Works for me.
I’m in the same boat. I have one vivid memory during a camping trip of my mother forcing me to sit in a dining tent and eat every last scrap of the fat I had cut off my meat. I hated fat. That incident made me positively grossed out by it – to this day I trim the living hell out of my steaks and roasts. I know you’re not supposed to for the sake of flavour, but I absolutely have to. Fat and gristle (and really any other bit that isn’t properly meat) just gross me out of existence.
Bacon is excepted. Cooked properly (that is, not crispy, but not rubbery), bacon fat renders and assumes the same texture as the meat so it’s all good.
I would agree: Don’t force them. If it’s to the point of vomiting then you can be pretty sure they really don’t like it, and forcing them to eat it will just make them dislike it more. Give them food. Let them eat of it what they like (or only give them what of the night’s meal they will eat) and forget about the rest. As long as they’re eating healthy, there’s really no earthly reason you need to try and force them to like other things.
Oh, the fights. The lovely summer evenings spent sitting at the table, looking at stone cold okra (which I still will not touch). The vomitting after plums. The crying and the anger of my Dad re my food intake. Me getting so upset that I cannot stop crying. Wanting to please my parents, but also hating them for doing this to me. As you can see, it has stuck with me.
I hated the whole sorry business. Parents: you are NOT in control of your child’s intake. You can control the options presented and that’s about it.
I mostly agree with whynot’s advice, but seriously, I think there is something to the super-taster thing. It is only now, in my 40’s that I LIKE the taste of (mild) onions–I could never eat a raw one, even now. It’s now that I find myself adding pepper to dishes, and upping the garlic. The texture of a food has alot to do with the distaste for it, IMO.
Looking back, so much of the crap was all control and obedience–and their(my parent’s) food choices. I found as an adult that I liked oranges-my parents (who spent several years in Florida; I was born there!) NEVER bought oranges or grapefruits. So, I never had one. They preferred apples–gag me. Too many negative associations for me.
I will seriously go hungry, even now, rather than eat a number of foods. But I like some Chinese; I love Italian (real Italian, not Ragu etc); I like some French cooking etc.
IMO, unless the kid is Failure to Thrive or not hitting growth milestones, don’t agonize over it. Follow the common sense here and relax–your kids will get there someday.
It did have a different texture – think carrot cake – but the chocolate was pretty overwhelming. Plus, mom never called it “chocolate zucchini cake.” If I remember correctly, it was “chocolate magic cake.” The purple cabbage she shredded on the salad was “purple magic.” I think her name for jicama also included magic. We ate a lot of magic back then.
I have to agree with WhyNot. I too was a picky eater as a child and I remember quite well vomiting up some chicken noodle soup that my mother insisted I eat. The vomiting wasn’t intentional on my part - I didn’t think to myself, “Ha, I’ll show YOU!” - I just really really didn’t like chicken soup and I gagged as soon as it hit my throat. It was the same way with most vegetables and a lot of other stuff. I remember sitting at the table long after everyone else had left, staring at the food I was told I’d have to eat. I was - and am - incredibly stubborn and had no problem sitting there until bedtime rather than eat whatever it was I hated.
If my parents had employed the methods that WhyNot and others have described, I’m sure that we wouldn’t have had a bleeping war every night at dinner. Not that I blame my folks - they were saddled with three picky eaters whose like/reject lists were not congruent and they did the best they could.
FWIW, I’m not a super taster, in fact I like really spicy food. That was a lot of the problem when I lived at home: the food was just way too bland for my taste. To this day I put hot sauce on pretty much everything but cold cereal.
My mother is a picky eater with an extremely sensitive stomach, that gets worse as she gets older. Anything the least bit spicy or greasy makes her incredibly ill. She can’t eat tacos anymore (and she always made them with sloppy joe seasoning, rather than proper taco seasoning).
Growing up, her parents used to force her to foods she hated, and it only made her an extremely stubborn, bland eater. She HATES trying anything new.
Seriously, people, the more fuss you make over your kid not eating stuff, the worse it gets. The kid won’t starve.
When I was kid, my options were to eat what was presented or have a fried egg sandwich- and that I had to try one bite of everything. I HATE fried egg sandwiches, but I spent a lot of nights eating them.
As it turns out, I became a very adventurous eater. It also turns out that the only kind of food I don’t like is hte meat-heavy working class America food my family largely served (think shake’nbake). The moral of this? Present clear options and choices, but don’t coddle and don’t freak out. Most people grow out of it or discover a few simple rules about what they like or don’t like.
