It is a well-established fact that when you want a child to eat, they will not.
I did not always know this. Before I became a parent, I labored under the misconception that the rules would not apply to me. That a child’s refusal of perfectly good, perfectly healthy food reflects some deficit in child-rearing, and naturally would not be a problem for me, a professional food writer, whose love of food is in fact genetic. No, I reasoned with woefully unearned confidence, my child’s palate would be as expansive as the Great Plains. As vibrant as a Van Gogh. As thoughtful as a sonnet.
Well.
When my daughter was three, she unexpectedly became a viral internet sensation after a noted social media personality spotted her ham-fisting a pickle at the farmers market, devouring it in the manner of an ice cream cone. The comments cooed what a good eater she was, that “Pickle Girl” was their “spirit animal,” and so forth. Lies! I screamed in my head. All lies!
In reality, Pickle Girl had precipitously tumbled off her growth curve just months earlier. Getting her to eat anything (pickles aside) was a daily struggle, and one doctor even suggested that I stop feeding her anything but red meat in an attempt to get her weight up. I smiled to that woman’s face and privately refused, instead dosing everything my daughter allowed past her lips with copious amounts of butter and oil.
Nearly four years later, her eating habits have mercifully improved. But there was no lightning bolt that changed everything, no moment that she thought to herself, You know, I actually don’t want my mother to contemplate hurling herself into oncoming traffic every time I reject another homemade dinner. Rather, the shift came gradually, one small success at a time. We never stopped offering her bites of scary-to-her foods, often accompanied by varying forms of bribery. We started planning family meals around things we knew she liked, slowly expanding her repertoire. We also started cooking with her.
We’d been plodding along like this for a while when the Bon Appetit team presented me with a complimentary meal code from Blue Apron and asked if I might like to try it with my family. Was it a good idea?
Here’s the thing: Cooking with a child who is afraid of most ingredients presents serious logistical challenges. There’s plenty of “Ew, yucky!” and “Get it off me! Get it off me!” and, naturally, so many tears. I developed a tactic of choosing recipes strategically (usually a variation on a Safe Food); limiting the amount of raw meat (a nonstarter if there ever was one); and portioning out the ingredients, which (1) makes it easier for her to dump things into a big bowl and (2) proves to her that we aren’t hiding anything.
