Whatever the reason, as long as the child appears healthy and the pediatrician is satisfied, DO NOT FORCE FOOD ON A CHILD. EVER.
Parents have created too many people with food issues.
A spoon? She can’t drink from a cup?
“tea” is a small meal, IIRC.
But hey, I’ve given my kid a spoon to “drink” milk. If it keeps peace at the dinner table, I’m all for it.
Oh, and also, not that it’s necessarily relevant to people’s answers, but I’m not a parent myself. I’m just asking this out of curiosity 
I find the pureed fruits to be quite delicious. I’ve been known to buy applesauce with apricots and eat it with my lunch. Why can’t growups get applesauce with apricots?
There were plenty of picky eaters, of all ages, in Cameroon. In fact, I think it may be even more common since the monotonous diet means that people are not used to trying new foods.
Sorry, yes… “tea” is evening meal (anytime from 5-8pm in our house)
When I was a kid my parents got around this by telling us we were allowed to reject one item on our plate. Of course, they always made sure that there were two vegetables. We invariably rejected one of the vegetables, thus still getting a balanced meal. Everybody wins!
IMO (from watching a lot of babies and little kids get fed/eat throughout my life - I don’t have kids yet) the best way to get around the pickiness and food refusal of the early years is to let them feed themselves as much as possible from a very young age. Only give them access to a variety of nutrient-rich REAL foods from the very start, so they get a chance to taste real flavors rather than just bland ‘baby food’. Personally I wouldn’t feed ‘empty calories’ (sweets, cookies, cereal), but I know most people would consider this extreme. Reward foods (dessert) tend to backfire.
The kids I’ve seen raised this way seemed to have the best relationships with food and meal times and retained this as they grew up. Not saying they weren’t at all selective and didn’t dislike certain foods, but they tended to be much more accepting of variety than the average.
ETA: FWIW my mother forced my two sisters and I to eat everything she set in front of us no matter how we cried, gagged, or if we had to sit in front of the plate for 5 hours. It was pretty traumatic for us and we all ended up with pickiness and longer-term eating issues (especially in my case - I ended up with failure to thrive and didn’t grow for three years at one point), and it was a constant battle of wills that stressed my parents out a lot. I don’t recommend ever forcing a child to eat anything, I think it’s cruel as well as potentially damaging.
I was born in 1961, and my mom bottle fed me [and my brother, who is 2 years older than I am] until whenever common practice at the time was to start solids. I remember asking her once when I was caring for a couple of my goddaughters for a long weekend what she fed me. I got the gerber fruits, but the rest of the foods were regular people foods. She said I started on cream of wheat and cream of rice cereal, along with the gerber fruits. When it came to real foods, I got pureed whatever she was eating so I was used to foods with real flavor. When I got teeth, I just got regular food cut really small. The only thing both my brother and I absolutely refused to eat was some strange recipe she got out of a magazine - picnic ham ground and turned into some type of meatloaf, with pineapple rings in some horribly wrong faux hawaiian meatloaf. Very Lilecks like. I believe she might still have the recipe stashed away somewhere, she was always cutting out and saving recipes.
I will say, she and my dad when he was around usually did the try a bite thing, but we grew up eating pretty much everything that they ate. The only time we got surprise food was if we were guesting somewhere. We grew up eating all the ‘evil veggies’ that everybody else hated - limas, brussels sprouts, spinach [though my mom grew it in the garden and we only had it as fresh, never the canned green slime.]
I do remember ‘helping’ the cook at my grandmothers in the summer by snapping beans and shelling peas, and being able to snitch veggies and fruits out of the gardens, so that may have helped us like fruits and veggies.
I think another issue is the portions. Very often I’ve seen toddlers who’d eat the first two items of their mid-afternoon snack (that’s the time when I’m more likely to be around toddlers right now, as a consequence of picking the kidlets from school) but then oh noes, refuse the third. Uh… and you’re feeding the 2yo a ham-and-butter sandwich, a pot of puréed vegetables, a banana, an apple and twelve cookies… why? I’ve seen grown-ups have smaller lunches! “Kid’s growing” doesn’t require the same portions when the kid is 15mo and when it’s 15yo, in my experience, but some parents seem to have a problem with regards to scaling down the portions to fit the size of the person being fed.