On Sunday, Mrs. Coulter sent me an e-mail asking if I had read the food column in the Sunday Times. I had already cut it out and put it next to my computer. After blogging for two years, I fear that I’m growing totally predictable. However, it is nice to have people help me locate good stuff on the web and the newspapers.
The Times interviewed chefs with children to find out what they fed their kids. The chefs fed their kids Pad Thai and stayed away from Goldfish and chicken fingers. The article provides tips on how to get your kids to eat well, including making dinner time sacred, feeding them what you eat, and abstaining from snacks.
Mrs. Coulter felt that this article was yet another example of the Times looking down on parents and their goldfish snacks. To a certain extent, she’s totally right. I thought about making their chicken stew recipe last night for dinner, but I was too lazy to run out for fresh herbs and didn’t have the two hours to spend in the kitchen. Instead, we had grilled chicken marinated in salad dressing and lemons, jasmine rice, steamed carrots, and a salad. Easy and everything was in the fridge.
The article had frowned on feeding the kids snacks. But, you know, snacks are essential if you have to cart your kid around on chores and don’t have a maid to do that for you. Real parents need to bribe kids with snacks.
I am a fundamentally lazy person when it comes to food, but I am also a S-N-O-B. I was raised to take food very seriously. I mean I’m Italian. Also, I was shipped off to my grandfather’s a lot when I was a kid, and my grandfather had been the Maitre D’ at the Waldorf, at some snooty place in Banff, and the Savoy and the Ritz in London. He served Churchill. Papa deserves a post of his own sometime.
By the time that Papa was babysitting me, he was retired and living in the Bronx. We would walk silently down to the local grocery store. I remember going through the produce aisle and squeezing every orange and smelling the peppers. He would pick off two grapes for inspection, one for each of us, and only if it met proper standards would it be purchased.
After food shopping, we would hit the local old man bar for a drink. I was four and drinking Shirley Temples with two cherries at a corner bar in the Bronx.
When he wasn’t stewing himself in whiskey and chaining smoking Marlboro Reds, Papa taught me how to play solitaire and how to eat. He made me English Grilled Cheese sandwiches with Worchestire sauce and black pepper, stuffed artichokes, and sautéed spinach. He would peel grapes for me. Sunday dinners were always elaborate and extensive, with him barking serving orders to my poor grandmother.
I like food and, lucky for me, my husband likes food. We like cooking together, though we don’t have much time for that right now. We like going to restaurants. We like trying different foods when we travel. It is very much in our interest that our kids like food, too. As they get older, we want to travel and eat with them. So, we’re training them now.
Everybody has to eat dinner together. No getting up until everyone is finished. Everything must be tasted. If after several tastes and there is still unhappiness, then they get a bowl of cereal or yogurt.
I try to cook good stuff with variety, spice, and freshness, but during the week, I only have an hour at the most. So, I don’t do anything too fancy. Lots of time, it does involve frozen stuff from Trader Joe’s or ShopRite. I will throw some frozen peas into the water boiling the mac n cheese. We tend to eat better stuff on the weekends, when I have more time.
I also refuse to cook more than one meal per evening. I have some friends who will cook four meals every night, one for every member of the family. Uh, no. I’m not spending all that time in the kitchen. Husband has to warm up his own leftovers when he comes in. If it isn’t spicy enough for him, well that’s why God invented Tobasco sauce.
And, like the chefs in the article, we have a pantry stuffed with Annie’s Mac N Cheese.
So, Mrs. Coulter, I do like that article partially because being a hard ass about food makes my life easier and partially because I am training the kids to continue our food snoberoo family tradition.
Apt. 11d 
I’m a bit of a food snob myself. As I wrote in my own comments:
It’s not that I think it’s a bad thing to raise children who care about the difference between imported and domestic parmesan (only imported Parmesan reggiano on Lyra’s homemade tomato-basil pasta). It’s the sneery you-care-enough-to-do-yoga-with-your-kids-but-still-feed-them-crackers tone that bothered me. That and the chicken stew recipe with 18 ingredients.
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I love to cook, although don’t always have time to do it, and try to introduce my kids to interesting food. And I have one who will eat anything, and one who won’t eat plain pasta (swear to god). So I no longer buy the notion that this is within parental control.
The most encouraging article on this I’ve read was a profile of a 17-year-old who was apprenticing in a professional kitchen, and it said that he was a picky eater as a little kid.
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Maybe I don’t get this because I’m childless, but if your kid is happy with cheap crap why would you pressure him or her to eat something expensive? I say give the kid his McNuggets and save the duck confit for me and dad.
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My daughter is basically reprising my own food history. I was deeply, instinctively picky when I was a kid–I had all sorts of obsessive rules about food, about what I would eat, and how it had to be presented. So is she. Sigh. So some of what we serve to her is what she’s prepared to eat. And I’m sorry, but screw those people who say, “Make her eat what you want her to eat” and so on. I’m prepared to go to war with a 5-year old on certain matters of control and nurture, but not on food, where I think it’s completely legitimate that individuals form tastes, likes and dislikes, and so on.
The point about snacks is also spot-on. Scheduled meal times don’t always work when you’ve got to take your child with you on errands. Hell, they don’t always work in the context of the work day. Quite reasonably, she’s hungry at 5pm, but I can’t have dinner ready at 5pm if that’s when I get *home*. 6pm is stretching it many nights, especially if I’m going to make something nice.
A tremendous amount of lifestyle advice, not just in the NY Times but from Martha Stewart and the rest of that whole industry, is written by people with domestic help for people with domestic help, only it makes the existence of domestic help invisible and implies somehow that one achieves such things through pluck and energy. Or by having one parent be wholly domestic, but they don’t want to say that, either.
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Yeah, being an overachiever in the food department is strictly optional when parenting. I decided that attempting to train my kids to be good eaters was something I was going to go for. So, I set up some rules and try to get them to try different stuff, etc.. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Not something to lose sleep over.
I have a good friend from high school who is a single mother and a doctor. With her schedule and her inability to hire help, she is forced to feed the kids fast food every single night. One day Burger King, one day Boston Chicken. Then they come home and eat a salad. Another friend had a husband very high up in the Clinton administration. With him always in the West wing, she had a very hard time getting to the grocery store, so her three kids ate cereal for dinner all the time. What are you going to do? Modern life makes a four square meal thing hard to achieve.
re: the picky eaters. There is some training that can happen, but there is a huge in born thing. One of my kids prefers meat and potatoes, the other grilled fish and salad. The future heart attack kid will eat pads of butter and begs for chunks of cheese. Food preferences are in born.
And some kids are just really, really impossible to feed. It’s actually a component of Sensory Integration Dysfunction, My son has a variety of that which doesn’t affect his taste, but his ears and sense of balance. He’s very sensitive to sound and background noises. A lot of background banging sounds make him cry. We’re try to slowly desensitize him to those sounds, but just as we wouldn’t force a kid to eat turnips, we couldn’t force him to sit next to a loud kitchen in a small restaurant.
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I’m the cereal-for-dinner mother. My 9-year-old son is a “white food” kid. All carbs, all the time, and mostly breakfast foods (no pasta or rice, for instance–but plenty of Eggo waffles and french toast). I’ve even had him in counseling for it, which helped somewhat—at least he will eat hamburgers and roasted chicken now.
But I am sick to death of people implying that I am a rotten mother because I don’t force him to eat what we eat. I tried it—the tears and the vomiting were not worth it.
I’m with you, Laura—food preferences are inborn. His little sister eats a much wider variety of things.
And kids do outgrow their pickiness. I wouldn’t eat a single vegetable when I was growing up, and last night for dinner I ate a plate full of broccoli and lima beans. I’m hoping the same thing will happen for my son.
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Outgrow, well maybe. The word on Trent Lott is: he likes the foods on his plate in separate piles, not touching. And he eats one food, finishes it, then turns his plate and eats another.
There’s your model!
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Well, I’m an academic with a husband who is a chef! Guess who cooks for the kiddo? ME, me and me. The chef is out feeding OTHER people during meal times. While I haven’t read the article, I honestly believe that the chef isn’t REALLY feeding the child during meal times uless he/she is doing so at the retaurant.
That being said, we try and eat healthy. Last night it was grilled salmon, buttered egg noodles (ok, not THAT healthy) and steamed broccoli. The kiddo eats natural high fiber cereal (but that’s more for his occational problem with regularity), and drinks hormone free milk. The milk is local and tastes so much better than the gallan jugs so if I can afford it that week we go for it. Other than that, we have the stash of Annie’s Mac and Cheese in the cupboard. Guess what the kiddo usually eats at the restaurant? Grilled cheese and chicken fingers!
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My older child tends towards the “white food” spectrum, yet she does try a lot of foods. She won’t take a sandwich to school for lunch, we don’t have a lunch program, so we have to be inventive. She only likes sandwiches on foccacia bread. She goes out to dinner and is offered a quesadilla and she prefers potato crusted halibut. She’ll eat raw mushrooms, not cooked, etc.
My youngest eats everything. We feed them what we’re eating, and offer a variety of fruits and vegetables with each dinner for them to choose from.
My mom gets hung up on them not eating well, but I look at their diet as a weekly thing, not on a per meal basis. Yes, they might only have plain pasta one meal, but the next will have broccoli and shrimp and soba noodles.
We have NO fast food restaurants within 25 miles. And that helps!
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What so many “food” “writers” don’t take into account, for working parents, is the TIME it takes to 1) shop frequently for fresh fruits and vegetables; and 2) prepare fresh vegetables.
I have a box of potatoes from last fall sprouting in my basement, because it’s too much work to sort through them, wash them, peel them, and cook them, versus throwing frozen hash browns into the oven.
When you make a commitment to serving more foods that are unprocessed, you are committing to spend a lot more time procuring and preparing them.
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This is one of those things that either you make it a priority or you don’t. We have dinner at 6:00 or as close as we can to that every night. It is has to be pretty major for somebody to miss dinner. We try to avoid prepared foods if we can. When we can’t, we look for those that are least processed. The thing is, on most nights we can have dinner ready in 30 minutes or less. The keys:
1st the Cookbook Desperation dinners, not so much for the recipes but the philosophy behind it. Lots of helpful tips about planning for speed like making twice as much rice and then reusing it the next night.
2nd: The mircro-halogen oven aka the speedcooker. We can bake a chicken in twenty minutes and have the skin be crispy. We have the GE Advantium model.
3rd: Knowing when not to freak. My wife is going to miss dinner again tonight for the second night in a row. This doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen. Last night, the kids and I cleaned out the fridge. Tonight, the kids and I will hit the diner. We will bring some of our own food (fresh fruit and cheese) with us. My daughter will have either grilled cheese, a hot dog, or scambled egg and cheese. We will substitute a vegetable for fries. Is this ideal? No, do we let it bother us? No. We figure it is still better than Micky Ds. How often do we do this? Well once a week (usually on the night that I then go out to grade so nobody has to do dishes). We get pizza about once every other week.
Snacks – raisins, graham crackers, blueberries, dried cranberries, apples, bananas, wheat thins, cheerios, chex, etc.
Dessert- a couple of times a week.
Beverages -water and milk – juice less than once a week. Boxed juices are the crack of the kiddie set.
4th The crock pot -essential in winter time. Home cooked meal when you get home with minimal prep. Best if you have some cookbooks to go with it.
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I don’t know who is to blame for the huge number of children picky eaters.Maybe it’s becuase parents let their kids eat too much junk food and once they get used to it it’s hard to make them eat something different.
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