On Feeding Children
Like most things with food we take this way too seriously but somehow not seriously enough.
Welcome to Tomato House. Here, I explore my love of food, the meals I cook, and how food touches all our lives. I am a home cook, taught by my parents, friends, and many failed meals. I invite you to share my meals and my thoughts, even if you can’t share my table. This is a free publication, but please subscribe to receive the latest essay in your inbox. I’d love to hear your thoughts too, so please leave a comment.
With gratitude.
When I was pregnant with my daughter, a dear friend lovingly offered me some advice, knowing that food and feeding people are my love languages.
She texted me, “I have this great book that will help you figure out how to feed your kid. I’ll send it to you.”
I curtly answer, “Thanks, but I got this.”
Of all my worries and insecurities about raising a little human, feeding them was the only area in which I felt confident. I explained my theory to my friend: “The kid eats what we eat… but always keeps a bag of chicken nuggets in the freezer.”
I laugh when I recall this exchange now. My tendency toward bristly overconfidence is one of those traits my friends find endearing, while most others find off-putting. Although my brisk arrogance has certainly been tempered since then, it has not been completely humbled.
I’m a 21st-century mom who sometimes likes to use the soul-sucking envy-machine called Instagram, so I’m aware of the “Resources” available to help new parents figure out what to feed their kids. First, most of them are bullshit. A few are very good. (I like Solid Starts, which mainly helps parents ensure their kid doesn’t choke.) But a disturbing number of these self-appointed “child-feeding experts” are just people bragging about their kids eating sushi. They don’t have any particular insight, nor are they helpful. They either got lucky with a non-picky kid or are good at video editing.
I don’t care how many bites of broccoli you catch on camera. Kids don’t have a fully developed palate. They are growing so fast and have such huge energy needs that I’m not surprised they just want to eat carbs all day. The obvious exception to this is berries. Those little munchkins know berries. They know when they’re not ripe, when they are out of season, and which ones are more expensive. Yet, they demand berries constantly. Children will gladly exchange their college fund for a case of Driscolls.
Here’s the thing: my kid has also eaten sushi. My kid has eaten all sorts of things. But never consistently. Frequently, she will refuse to eat anything, choosing to exist on air and stray cheerios found in her car seat.
With regards to the dinner table, generally speaking, my child gets a portion of whatever I cook for me and my husband. But mostly she eats a bake-at-home frozen bread called Brazi Bites. (Brazi-Bites are delicious so I don’t blame her.) My husband and I are just glad she is consuming food at that point. But whenever my child decides she likes substantive food, my husband and I jump for joy thinking we FINALLY cracked the code! Such joy is short lived, however. The little one typically likes any given item for 18 hours until she decides never to eat it again. Unless, of course, she forgets her loathing of that food. Or if she wants to be like Daddy, so then she’ll eat it, or if she wants to eat off Mama’s plate. The appeal of being mischievous is sometimes greater than her opposition to eating.
This is what I didn’t know in my early arrogance. Kids are psychos. They don’t know what they want. My child is a little over two years old. So, I’m in the thick of some mealtime drama. (I don’t know if that makes my opinion more or less informed.) I’ve learned that toddlers will be finicky eaters, no matter how much you think, “I got this,” prior to their arrival.
The world of toddlers is too chaotic and too big for them to be concerned with the finer points of Toro vs. Hamachi. They’re taking in the wonder of existence for the first time - just mainlining reality with no prior context. It’s a big job. Each morning, children wake up unsure of what will happen in the next five minutes, let alone by lunchtime. They could be lifted into the air and either shoved in a car seat or slammed into the mattress for a fun wrestling session or unceremoniously have their ass wiped, all with equal probability. Kids are busy. They’ve got colors, jumping off furniture, and learning to speak. You forget to eat lunch if you have too many Zoom calls. I’m sorry, but a turkey roll-up with kale chips is just low on their priority list. Food is one corner of the world where they can exert some autonomy, and they will do so in the most annoying way ever. Toddlers’ pickiness is less of an indication of their palate than a hunger strike in order to exert their power. You, the parent, may control bath time, but I, the toddler, will control dinner!!!!!!!
I am so happy for you if you can get your kid to sit still and eat your homemade flaxseed-chia seed-poke bowls. But your kid probably also eats dirt, so are you really winning anything? Also, fancy food is expensive. My kid will eat gruel until she has a job. I’m joking, of course, but seriously, if you raise a foodie kid, you’re gonna need the extra income. And we’re all already forbearing retirement a couple of years so that we can afford raspberries by the pound.
Toddler pickiness is normal. Like, painfully normal. My child’s normalness when it comes to food is almost cliche. Like, c’mon, baby girl. Didn’t you know you were being raised by a cool mom, not a regular mom? Where’s your punk rock spirit, bucking convection? What’s that? You need more Brazi Bites. Ok, hold on, I’ll be right there.
One poor bloke struggling with his child’s pickiness recently made the mistake of asking for advice on Twitter.
He was inundated with advice- mostly bad. The terrible advice fell into two categories: The first was to let the kid starve. People encouraged him to engage in the power struggle and only present the child with food the child doesn’t like until he/she is so hungry that the child submits. (Yeah, because hungry children are famously better behaved and more compliant.) The second was the opinion that giving the child any food other than their favorite foods was tantamount to child abuse. There were a lot of obvious projections of various Daddy/Mommy/neurodivergent problems in that camp. The insanity of the answers is largely a result of sampling bias. Twitter is one of the worst corners of the internet. However, the whole episode just showed how stupid people are when it comes to feeding kids. Remember, children are insane. They still shit their pants. Why do we think they would suddenly become peaceful angels who can sit still during mealtime? I do not care what is said in some books you read. I bet French kids are picky, too.
All this pickiness can lead parents to become short-order cooks. Cranking out several different meals for each member of the family based on each’s individual preferences and desires for the day. Or exhausted parents just succumb and feed their children highly palatable junk food far more frequently than they would like or is good for children. I’m highly sympathetic to parents who find themselves in these positions. It’s also not lost on me that women often do this work. At some point, you want your kid to consume calories. You love them. You care for their well-being and know that a shitty calorie is better than no calories. Also, you just don’t fucking want the fight. You want to enjoy your child, not be locked into a power struggle over peas.
Yet food isn’t just crude fuel. Our job as parents is to guide children on how to take care of themselves, which means making sure they at least know what a carrot is. Personally, I’m a huge advocate for making mealtime fun, ensuring there is at least one item the child will probably eat, and always putting vegetables on the plate, even if I know they won’t get eaten. I do this with my daughter. Honestly, the vegetable is hit or miss. Maybe she’ll eat them tomorrow, or the day after, or maybe once she graduates high school. Who knows? However, the process of showing a child what a balanced meal looks like is part of the lesson being taught, too.
Getting all high and mighty about your child’s sophisticated palate is more similar to feeding them junk than you might realize. They are two sides of the same coin. Whether parents are succumbing to their reasonable but base desires for something to be easy by feeding their child junk food or over obsessing about high-minded ideas about raising foodie kids, ultimately, these impulses are about the parent’s needs, not the child's. They turn food from the nourishment of body and soul into consumerism. We as parents begin to feed our narrow self-perceptions rather than our children’s stomachs.
So, while my pre-parenting instincts might have been in the right direction - serve balanced meals with reliable favorites- they, of course, were going to be incomplete. (Also, I overvalued the chicken nugget versus that of berries and Brazi Bites.) I think what I’ve learned most is that none of this is about me. My child’s palate isn’t a reflection of my moral character nor entirely independent of my actions. It’s not “I’ve got this,” but my child does. My child will evolve through different stages and needs regardless of what I wish she would do. I’m 100% certain my self-image isn’t included in my daughter’s thought process. She doesn’t give a shit that her obsession with plain rice is hurting my foodie-mom image. The fact that I worry about her getting enough vitamins in her diet isn’t part of the calculus. So we walk this road together. I prepare balanced meals, and she chooses what to eat. There doesn’t seem to be another way.