If I think back to when I was a teenager, what I disliked most about my mothers cuisine was that I couldn’t tell beforehand what was in it.
She was proud of her creativity in cooking. Just following classic recipies? BO-ring. Leave well enough alone, and serve a steak or a vegetable well cooked, with just butter and a bit of salt? Any fool could do that!
No, my mom used whatever ingredients sounded right together, and threw 'm together in paella-like mixes. Or she would hide the result under thick sauce.
I never knew beforehand if there would be, in that non-descript meals, an ingredient I hated, spoiling the entire dish. The worst example of this was baked shrimp. my mom loved baked shrimp; I hated it. “Mom! You said there weren’t any shrimp in this dish!” “Okay, so I used just a few. Big deal, they’re good”.
And if the dish WAS spoiled, what could I do? Stay at the table, slowly getting nauseous at the smell and sight of baked shrimp? Or try to leave the table, thus making a fuss and insulting my mom? Both unpleasant alternatives.
It DID teach me to start cooking meals starting at fifteen, though.
I think the attraction to teenagers to a few trusted foods, and to simple tastes and simple means of preparation, or fastfood, is the predictablity of the taste. You know what you get and you know you won’t have be unpleasant to the cook or the company you’re with.
All people go through a “phase” like that. Look on the bright side - if they prefer crap, then you get a bigger share of the good stuff. I love seafood, always have. Even as a kid, given a choice beween shrimp/oysters/clams/scallops/etc/etc/etc and burgers/pizza, I went for the seafood.
Psssst. He’s 10, sweetheart.
The PB&J thing has worked fairly well, although sometimes he’ll eat the PB&J plus the other components of dinner that he enjoys. This leads to interesting dinner combinations such as PB&J and broccoli with lemon butter sauce or PB&J and rice with soy sauce. He’s alive, though, and not underweight. So… :: shrug ::
I’m 27, well old enough to have ‘matured’ tastebuds, and I wouldn’t eat that.
I despise scallops and asparagus, and I’d resent it like hell if someone tried to make me eat it. I’ll happily cook my own food, or order my own, and eat what I like. I don’t buy that ‘acquired taste’ thing either.
Why on earth would someone force themselves to keep eating something they really dislike until they can tolerate it?
For the same reason you like your paella and asparagus: because you enjoy the taste.
At home, my mom was always cooking whatever nice stuff for her and dad. They’d leave a bit of pasta without the nasty sauce, or whatever, for me. (Also, I tended to just get my own dinner from the freezer, as I’m a vegetarian, they’re not).
FWIW - I’m 18 and currently exist pretty much on popcorn, ramen, Mountain Dew, and Pop-Tarts (with occasional chinese or pizza take-out sprinkled in). View it as preparing them for a realistic college experience.
Did you feed them the same way all the way through their childhood? If so, I dunno. I was never that big on the junk restaurant food (though I’ve always liked candy and desserts – I’m so crazy!), and I always liked (well, usually liked) my parents’ home cooking, which is like yours – wholesome meals with fresh ingredients.
I’m 18 and might give that a try. My family mostly subsists on basic steak and potatoes kind of meals, because we’re farmers and we don’t eat fancy. The fanciest way we eat is stir fry from the frozen food aisle. But I have gotten into the horrible habit of snacking on crap and not making meals more substantial than a ham sandwich if left to my own accord.
Did anyone who is defending Ralph’s parental right to demand his children have the same taste in food as he notice that one of the children is his stepson, 17 years of age, i.e., one year from legal adulthood?
No, I don’t encourage that children have a diet of junk food. But I believe that they’re entitled, within reason, to have their own tastes, which may not necessarily match their parents’ – and especially their stepparent’s.
It’s interesting that nobody yet has linked to the Food Nazi thread in the Pit.
I think that there’s a line, with substantial gray area, between small children having tantrums about food put before them, and near-adults having food preferences that don’t match their parents’.
For the record, I would eat Ralph’s paella if offered it, but it’s not something I’d ever choose from a menu – I developed a dislike for scallops and for most shrimp dishes a decade or so ago. So I would be polite as a guest in his home, and eat the food he’s made an effort to prepare – but it wouldn’t match my preferential tastes.
Though, in my defense, I’ve known him for 7 years (he’s my stepson)…just had a malfunction there for a sec.
I agree with Polycarp, though in my house, it has always been less an issue of appreciating good food than ‘we’ve fixed this, we’re not cooking you anything special, nor are we going to let our money be used to buy you something else.’
If the kid has a job, and wants to spend his money on pizza every single night, as long as he’s healthy otherwise, I’d not care too much about it, though I figure he’s cheating himself out of a lot of other stuff to buy food every other night. Of course, when college comes around, you’ll be the cool parent when he brings friends home, and they’ll think he’s a weirdo for turning down good home cooked food.
-stonebow, who has been there, and even now craves some curry chicken like mom used to make
Like I say, the kids DON’T LIKE good food! Last week I made roast beef with mushroom gravy, with baked potatoes and steamed broccoli…with agreen salad with vinegret . What did they do? They made ramen with potato chips! And washed this down with gator aid (bleechh)!
But the Domino’s"pizza" is something I don’t understand-it tastes like moldy cardboard with metallic tomato sauce, topped with polystyrene cheese.
My kids are teens and I can’t always make them eat what I prepare, but I’m sure not going to be a junk food enabler. I just try to get a reasonable amount of nutrients in them and try not to stock too much junk in the kitchen. If they must, they can use their own money to buy pizzas and pepsi, but I’m not going to provide it.
Last night my son didn’t like the dinner I prepared, so I didn’t make him eat it, but I did make him eat a serving of brocolli and drink a glass of milk. I insist that they at least try the food, but if they really don’t like it I can’t make them eat it.
I read somewhere that there is a biological basis for this. Basically, until maturity, kids only want a limited range of “comfort” foods. Also, there is a biological basis for them not wanting to get up early, as well, hence the argument over too-early school starts.
Eh, he’s seventeen. Let him cook for himself (or buy himself pizza out of his own money). Either that will make everybody happy, or he’ll get tired of looking after himself and start to expand his culinary horizons.
?! My brother and I ate everything we were served with a few exceptions…
once the cook had the usual day off, and our mother was in hospital with pneumonia so Dad cooked, and he made the stewed tomatoes with either sugar or salt[whichever was the opposite that we were accustomed to] and to our 3 and 5 year old tastebuds, they were the most disgusting food ever…and it was years before either of us would eat stewed tomatoes again…
remember the good housekeeping recipes back in the 60s…there was one for a ground ‘cooked ham’ meatloaf that was sort of hawaiian or polynesian … it was disgusting. my mom confessed to me a few years ago when we were discussing food that even she and dad thought it was disgusting and she threw away the leftovers and the only reason they ate theirs was to enforce us eating ours, and both my brother and I did the regulation 3 bites before refusal…
for some bizarre reason clam chowder was never on the menu at home, so we werent exposed to it until I was 7 years old and we were visiting Boston. I refused to eat any of mine, not even the 3 bites…I said it smelled nasty. They tried it again, and reinforced the 3 bite rule, but on the second bite I projectile vomited…and every time they tried me on bivalves [clams, mussels, oysters, coquina] in soup, they got the projectile vomiting…then the next winter when I was getting the big allergy scratch test it turns out that I am allergic to bivalves…
But my brother and I grew up eating and likeing artichokes, asparagus, spinach, brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower…pretty much anything you can think of that can get served. I can remember at the age of 9 stunning a waiter in NY because I ordered steak tartare and eating it without him having to take it back in and cooking it into a hamburger [we ate it at home so I was accustomed to it=)]
