Earlier in the year my wife took the decision to become vegetarian and she has also cut out most carbohydrates from her diet. Now she is eating mostly salads and plant-based meat substitutes.
At the same time, our two kids are still young, and while we have a list of a couple dozen meals they will eat, it is still a bit limited and they don’t like many of the things I enjoy eating. They find my food too spicy and too ‘weird’.
I am pretty much an omnivore, but can eat salad, hotdogs, pizza, or tacos only so often.
So that means on a typical night our family of four is eating three different meals. To me this seems rather inefficient. I should add that both parents work and the family is usually not back home much before 6 pm.
So I am curious about what happens in other households with very different food preferences.
This happens in my brother’s house, and his kids are 13 and 15! Thankfully my brother has a fairly bland palate so the older one will generally eat what he eats. The wife is just learning to manage IBS so is often careful of what she eats or opts for something small. The younger one eats, I think, three things in total so they supply her with what she wants.
Saturday his in-laws were in town and made a nice big meal at grandma’s house. There was no way his kids were gonna eat it so he went to McD’s for nuggets for the younger, and picked up a pizza for him and the older, and wife ate at grandma’s.
FWIW four cousins of the same ages happily ate whatever was being made at grandma’s. So in my brother’s family, indulging the picky eaters is not the norm.
This is pretty common in our house too. Our two youngest children are very picky and limited eaters. The oldest child and my wife eat a wide variety of things, but don’t eat any type of fish, which I love. There are only about 2 or 3 meals we can be sure that everyone will eat. So we often end up with 3 meals.
I prepare 90% of the dinners in my house. I make a wide variety of things. Some the kids like, some they don’t. Regardless, I make one meal a night. If you like it, great! If not, find yourself something else to eat (leftovers, make yourself a sandwich, whatever). But I am not preparing an alternate meal. That way lies madness.
I need to add that the above is just based on the willingness or refusal to eat specific meals based on general likes/dislikes. If we were dealing with legitimate health issues (e.g. allergies, Celiac disease, etc.), then I would probably relent on this stance.
There were different food preferences in our house - and what it usually came down to was the four of us didn’t eat exactly the same meal but it often wasn’t something that required extra work or possibly a little extra work. For example, two of us might have pork chops while the other two had lamb chops - not any more work than cooking four of the same sort of chop. Or two burgers, two hot dogs. Two sweet Italian sausage and two hot. Or someone didn’t like chicken piccata so they got a fried chicken cutlet without any of the sauce. Something else that was common was different side dishes - two might have some kind of potato while the other two had rice, or there was broccoli and salad and some had both and others had only one. The times that did require extra work were the dishes that three people ate - if three were eating chicken feet or eel or octopus or roast beef , then the fourth would have something else.
That was my mother’s attitude, clear back in the 50’s and 60’s.
She did adjust things to some extent – there were a few things that one of us wouldn’t eat which she just never cooked, although I don’t think that included anything she really wanted to cook with; and back when I wouldn’t eat visible onions she’d cook some of the liver without and set it aside for me before cooking liver-and-onions for everybody else, which was simple enough. (I now put onions, often visible, in nearly everything. Forcing your kids to eat something makes it less likely, not more, that they’ll want to eat in when grown, folks!)
But if she and my father loved something and I or a sib wouldn’t eat it and there wasn’t a really easy modification – once we were old enough to make ourselves a sandwich, that’s what happened.
Wouldn’t work with really young kids, of course; I was the youngest, and don’t know how she handled that, because by the time I can remember that sort of thing I could make a sandwich. And if the question is about the overall inefficiency of having multiple people routinely make different meals in order to eat together – it’s inefficient, sure; but if it gets everybody to sit down and eat together in a reasonably good mood, seems to me it’s sure worth it.
I often make stuff like “choice pasta.” It’s pasta, and you have a choice as to what you put on it. So pasta, with available pesto sauce, red sauce, mushrooms, sausage, etc. Really just taking the diy assembly aspect of tacos or salad and applying it to one more meal. Similar buffet style meals are rice bowls/stir fry, fajita variation on tacos, nacho variation on tacos, and a pile of sides.
My suggestion is to investigate new low-carb vegetarian meals everyone may enjoy, and it’s not the end of the world if the kids have Cheerios for dinner.
I’ll have some of all the toppings, please – but not on pasta. Got any bread or potatoes?
I still have serious sensory issues with some kinds of pasta; and am not about to fill my plate with pasta that I’m not sure isn’t going to have one of those textures, and probably does.
Not sure if it was luck or something else, but my kids always happily ate whatever meal I prepared. I reasoned with them about the whole idea of eating. If they tried something and didn’t like it, they didn’t have to eat it again, but that just didn’t happen.
I also introduced them to dining out at an early age. I’d explain what was on the menu and make suggestions, but they ordered their meal and interacted with the servers.
I have one rather picky child. I’ll accommodate if it’s really easy (e.g., he hates sauces, so sometimes I’ll reserve a portion of stir-fry or whatever before I put the sauce on, that’s easy enough) but otherwise he’s just eating a very small meal or making his own. He has a couple of things he can easily make. (He is 9.)
My other child eats whatever we eat – it isn’t always her favorite, but she always likes trying new things. Picky child actually often has trouble with trying new things in general, so I don’t think it’s just a food thing.
Mid-dau cooks whatever she figured out for the whole bunch. We often have my Son and his kids, Ivy is here. The Lil’wrekker and her boyfriend and whoever else is hanging around. So her job isn’t for the lightweight kitchen chef.
Whatever she cooks is whatever she cooks. No one is treated any different.
Kids have kids night on Friday. Which is a problem all by itself. They have to agree. (6 of them, )
I can eat most meats. And we always have salad fixin’s.
It works for us.
Unless you count the grocery bill.
That’s the nice part of doing things disassembled. If the pasta is the wrong type, you can see it, and broccoli with mushrooms, pesto, and some sausage is a perfectly valid meal choice.
A tacos bar is really the king of this setup, because you can have multiple choices for starch, protein, and vegetables. None are mutually exclusive, and gluten free vegetarian can have corn quesadillas with beans and cheese, and the carnivore can have flour soft tacos with only chicken, etc. That is what I do for game night, but it is obviously not a good option for more than a meal (+leftover nights) every few weeks.
Another reasonable choice, except on the carb aspect, is home made pizza, or French bread pizza. Frozen pizza dough, maybe cauliflower dough to avoid carbs, and a pile of stuff to build your own. The kids will need help baking it, but depending on age may be able to do the topping layout themselves.
It will not be as good (or as easy) as store bought pizza.
My wife and I are in a similar scenario to the OP, except she’s been vegetarian for years now. Since we don’t have kids though, it’s generally just us each cooking our own dinners, since that’s the meal we have together based on our schedules.
A couple of times a month though, we’ll plan to make something we both enjoy that fits her preferences, such as our variant on Southwestern Eggrolls, or Breakfast-for-dinner, or something else.
Or a dish that is the “build your own” as mentioned upthread, where I’ll add a meat based topping and she’ll do all veggies or tofu.
It’s not a lot of trouble, as we each do our own primary shopping (and we each get things for the other that are difficult elsewhere), but it does result in a lot of extra dishes, pots, and pans!
My mother had three kids and was pregnant with a fouth when my father died. Growing up, the four of us were acutely aware that food was scarce and Mom was poor and tired, so we actually did our best not to complain, even towards the end of the month. At dinner, any variations in preferences had to be resolved with what was on the table.
Packing lunches was a rotating job among the kids, and each of us had a very specific list of what would and would not like in our lunch bags. That was as close to “different meals” as we ever got.
I have to admit that I am part of the problem. I really don’t like low-carb veggie food. I need my pasta and sausage!
But on a more fundamental level (and this may get me in trouble to say this), I have an issue with people who have voluntary dietary restrictions (not based on religion or medical issues) who are so rigid as to affect others.
That aside, one idea I have been considering is to make a family meal plan each week where each of us gets to choose one or two meals for the whole family, and the others are expected to eat it. It won’t be an easy conversation for the reasons in my OP, but at least it will be transparent and democratic.
And I want to add that reading the responses I feel slightly better knowing that my family is not unique in this situation. We may not be efficient, but we are not that abnormal…
If you’re going to be expecting people to eat things they find seriously repulsive, for whatever reason – if I were you I’d rethink that one. Fast.
If the idea is for everyone to get practice producing meals that everybody else can comfortably eat – this is indeed a good idea; but it may not get you the meals you appear to want. At least, not at family supper. Maybe you can load up on other things at breakfast and/or lunch? or are you expecting all meals to be on the family meal plan?
My older kid makes dinner once a week and my younger kid (the picky one) makes dinner… it’s supposed to be once a week but it’s probably more like once every two weeks.
What has actually happened is that Younger Kid generally does not eat Older Kid’s meals (almost always fried rice which is too heavily spiced for Younger Kid) and Older Kid does not eat Younger Kid’s meals (usually mac n cheese). And I am also getting a bit tired of fried rice and mac n cheese, but hey, at least I can feel assured that my kids have at least one dish they can produce…
This doesn’t sound like a great idea to me. Your wife isn’t going to want your pasta and sausage, making her eat that twice a week is uncool. Making your kids eat your award winning 5 alarm chili is a non-starter as well. Having each of you eating a dinner you dislike 4 days a week is fair, but is a bad solution.
You ALL have dietary restrictions of one sort or another, and you ALL need to be accommodated in a reasonable way. Wife wants low carb veggie. You want carbs and meat. Kids want simple food.
The family meal plan is a good idea, I would suggest you use advance planning to streamline the dinner process. Instead of 3 freshly cooked complex meals each night, maybe you do 1 fresh complex meal, 1 leftover, and 1 simplified meal. Like: She has a salad, you have a portion of her salad, topped with cold poached chicken and a side baked potato, while the kids have leftovers of something they like. Everyone has something that meets their needs, but the prep work is reduced. It takes planning, though.
I dunno. My mom was always pretty good about keeping her liver and onions with bacon to herself, once we ten kids had ascertained to our satisfaction that calve’s liver is NOT made of food. I still won’t touch the stuff.
Be careful about adding a salad to the table, or Olive Garden is gonna be all up in your grille.
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