My parents would say “Try it, if you don’t like it then just leave it.” The only foods I usually tried and left were carrots and parsnips, definitely glad I got to try so many different things when young. Finding out what was in haggis didn’t put me off a bit.
Grew up in a culture where kids are whatever adults ate from toddlerhood on.
My mother-in-law was living with us for the first two and a half years of my daughter’s life and definitely believed in the same philosophy. So she’s was eating “adult” foods until she got to middle school and felt the peer pressure to describe seaweed and lotus root as “yucky” and like mac & cheese, chicken fingers and grilled cheese.
Coffee. My grandparents, who lived with us, couldn’t even imagine such a things as life without coffee, and my brothers and I drank coffee at breakfast every morning, sometimes two or three cups. I remember having coffee with my eggs and bacon as when I was as young as four or five.
Me also. Chopped liver and gefilte fish were special treats.
Me too. I grew up in Virginia, and it was kind of common to let kids drink coffee, or at least not unheard of.
Me, too. Only for me it was before age 5. More like age 2-4.
Liver, olives, spinach, Brussels sprouts, coffee, Bloody Marys 
… basically if I thought kids weren’t supposed to like something, I was predisposed to like it. I didn’t want to be a baby!
Liver, lobster, raw clams, lima beans.
Pickled beets. I’m certain I only liked them because my siblings hated them.
I liked pickled beets too, but only my Grandma Cassie’s. No one could pickle beets like her. I loved green olives as well. I’m glad my folks exposed me to a wide variety of food. I can remember going to a Diwali celebration as part of a school thing. You could have pizza or Indian food. Me and my brother were the only ones who wanted to try it. All the other kids. Including the Indian kids wanted the pizza.
Same here. In most respects I was an extremely picky kid who would only eat kid-friendly stuff; my palate didn’t expand until I was an older teenager. But my dad introduced me to sardines at a very young age, and I loved them. In mustard sauce, served on crackers or just eaten right out of the can.
I can totally get that. As a kid, I grew up with Polish food (here in the US). We literally never had a weeknight take-out pizza. Maybe one Sunday in a blue, blue moon, my parents would take us to Pizza Hut. So any excuse to get pizza was taken advantage of. I would be jealous of my friends who would have takeout like once a week. In retrospect, I’m thankful for my parents taking the time and care to cook us meals every day (minus some Sundays.) But as a kid, I just wanted that damned pizza!
coffee, CCB (SOS), rare steak, steamed shrimp, if any of that qualifies.
My parents were amused by the fact that, when I was 5 or 6, I didn’t like hamburgers, but I absolutely loved steak.
Care to translate CCB (SOS)?
I’m going to guess “creamed chipped beef (shit on a shingle)”
That makes sense:
I would only know that reference from MASH.
I can respect that. Dad worked as a pizza delivery driver for Rocky Rococo’s in Indianapolis. She would bring home orders that people had abandoned. I was SO. SICK. of pizza after awhile.
No such thing as children’s food when I was growing up in the UK. We ate what our parents ate. Mum never forced us to eat anything if we really didn’t like it, but there was no alternative. So it was, eat it or leave it, it’s up to you.
Having said that, I can eat almost anything to this day, as Mum was a pretty awful cook. I was adult before I realised that liver wasn’t supposed to be hard!
