The Problem With The Term Picky Eater & Dispatches from My Quarantine Kitchen: Fanny Singer
Cooking Apart, Together
I used to think that picky eaters were only raised by picky parents. As I mentioned in my last post, I really thought that feeding a young child would be easy. And fun.
I’ve learned a lot about eating behaviors in the past three years. Mostly from my son. I’ve learned a lot helping clients make dietary changes for their symptoms. I’ve learned a lot about my own food preferences and where they come from. It’s true that how we eat is determined by how we learn to eat.
Some children are much more compliant or adventurous eaters than others. But having this ‘learning to eat’ framework for feeding a young child, was a huge game-changing relief for me. Le sigh! I didn’t need to expect my son to eat all his vegetables on first bites, but with time and exposure and repetition, he could learn to eat a wide variety of vegetables. I couldn’t force him to eat certain foods, but I could teach him, sometimes just as simply as eating them myself if he wouldn’t.
image from The New York Times, Here’s How to Avoid Doing Battle With Your Picky Eater, July 2019
The Problem With The Term Picky Eater
Google “picky eater” and you’ll find a wide array of articles under such name, and likely some useful information. It’s commonly used to describe children who are not exactly “good” or “obedient” eaters, it’s used by parents in conversation at the playground, your pediatrician may even inquire “Is your son a picky eater?” as if asking “Does your son have brown hair?”
Realistically, nearly all children are picky, or selective. Especially at certain times in their eating explorations and growth development. The problem with the term being so readily applied to young children, is that it conveys some permanence of behavior. If you believe your child doesn’t like green vegetables at age 2 and therefore won’t like green vegetables at ages 4, 14, 24 and 40, that’s problematic (and bleak!). Just like children learn to walk, learn to talk, learn to sleep through the night, children learn to eat. If your child refuses certain foods, and you stop offering those foods, then of course they won’t learn to like them.
As parents, we all want our children to eat well and be healthy. We also want children to eat the meals we prepare, or dine at a restaurant peacefully without it escalating to flying food. Learning to be patient and flexible, especially with food fights, can be hard.
I’ve learned, painstakingly, that if my son is selective or moody or flat out refusing to sit at the dinner table, it’s ok, I know it’s not who he is, but how he is that day (for mysterious unknown reasons, often).
Now, at a bright age of three, my son is a very adventurous eater and enjoys food nearly as much as I do. He’ll try almost anything, sometimes with a nudge, and he’s continuing to learn himself what tastes good to him and what he likes to eat.
But how? Seriously, how?
I definitely don’t have all the answers. I’m still learning too. Nutrition guidelines and “healthy eating” is all very nuanced and changes often. Simply getting your child to eat a wide variety of foods and vegetables is a very good start.
Here’s a few of my favorite reminders and approaches for feeding young children:
Early eaters. First foods, in the first year, is about exploration and learning to chew, swallow, becoming a real eater. Offer a wide variety of foods, flavors, and textures. Introduce babies to your kitchen world too. Playing with pots and pans and salad spinners and whisks. Observing mealtimes, sitting around the table together, the enjoyment of food and food seasons, trying tastes from your plate. Play foods and play kitchens. Books about vegetables and adventurous noodle stories and cooking and how food is grown.
Repetition. Truly, introducing foods over and over again. Finding variation and new dishes with single ingredients, especially vegetables, until they are familiar and enjoyable.
Food vocabulary. Giving language to food can be very helpful to help young palates determine what they’re tasting. Lemon juice or citrus might “taste sour.” Radishes, “taste bitter.” Maple syrup, “tastes sweet.” Peanut butter might be “nutty and salty.”
Offer options for specific foods. This can be especially helpful for toddlers who like to assert their right of choice. Simply offering a few options at the beginning of the meal might empower them to eat what’s on their plate because they chose it that way. “Do you want it cut it half?” “Do you want olive oil on this?” “Do you want your chicken mixed with rice, or rice on the side?” etc.
Introduce new foods with beloved foods.
Expect “No.” I’m learning this right now, with a 3 year old, that sometimes they’re just programmed to say “No” in response to being given something. Also, offering him new foods that I expect him not to eat has quickly become habit - and kinda fun? Eventually he tires of “No” - but it also never ceases to amaze me when he suddenly complies to a typically “dreaded food” and eats it, no problem. I just have to hide my excitement.
Words of encouragement. If my son starts saying “No” to certain foods on his plate, I’m amazed at how quickly he responds to a little encouragement. “You like this.” “We had this with pasta last week and you liked it.” “Remember this tastes like…” “Try one bite, please.”
Focus on foods and meals you like, enjoyment is contagious.
Allow for rejection. If my son really doesn’t want to eat something, saying OK in that moment can lead to him willingly eating that same food another day. It builds trust and allowance for preferences.
If they won’t eat it, you can. There are going to be many foods and many days that they’ll refuse whatever you’re serving. At last resort, I always offer to eat the food myself and eat it in front of him. Because, waste. And I started to do this even when he was a baby, throwing food off his plate. I would pick it up and eat it myself. If you simply discard the food to the garbage, doesn’t it send the message that the food is garbage? It also ensures that what your feeding you child is something you would actually eat yourself.
I hope this finds you quarantining well this week.
Bon Appetit! Bonne Chance!
Always Home: A Daughter’s Recipes & Stories, by Fanny Singer.
Always Home, published last month, is my friend Fanny’s new book, a cookbook and culinary memoir, about growing up as the only child of esteemed chef, restauranteur, and activist, Alice Waters.
It’s beautifully and thoughtfully written, rich with insight from her childhood years and childhood home kitchen. A testament to how truly influential her mother’s love of food shaped her own ideas and tastes and rituals around food.
I especially love this passage from an early chapter:
“Speaking of the eighties, I have to say that I don’t really remember a time before taste, which is really to say that I don’t recall there being a world that wasn’t permeated by flavor. Flavor was the prism through which most things were seen or dissected or understood, even criticized. And it must have been like that from the beginning, because my mother never fed me anything she wouldn’t have eaten herself, and, in fact, for the most part, what I consumed very early on was just her food, passed through a mouli. But she would also ask me - once I was old enough to give words to my experience - what I thought about the thing she had just deposited on my plate. I was invited to tell her that something was too salty or too bitter, and to cultivate a sense of autonomy in my likes and dislikes. I think being asked to dissect my feelings about a given food into its constituent parts paradoxically had the effect of making me like almost everything.”
Also, this (lol):
“In retrospect, this may have had something to do with the fact that my parents were separating around then, but, from a child’s perspective, it just seemed like my mom had gotten really into making lunch. My father moved fairly swiftly into a new romantic partnership; my mother committed herself fanatically to my lunchbox.”
It also includes a rich collection of family recipes, highlighting her own love of place, bold flavors, steeped colors and smells. Whether you need some inspiration for your quarantine cooking, or simply an engrossing read to escape your children, I highly recommend. And Fanny graciously offered to share a few notes from her quarantine kitchen this week. Enjoy!
Dispatches from My Quarantine Kitchen: Fanny Singer
Every shopping trip involves buying more: garlic
Favorite go-to ingredient: olive oil
Keep running out of: eggs
Stress-eating: bread
A very versatile nut: walnut
Last minute impulse buy I’m loving: yuzu hot sauce
Endless flavor from: Japanese pickled plums
Snacking on: handfuls of greens yanked out of my mom’s garden (also, cookies, let’s be real)
Surprising Quarantine ingredient I’m loving: capers. Please add them to everything now.
Sick of: squash
Not sick of: ‘Coming Home Pasta’ (last recipe in Always Home)
Favorite stovetop project: Zero Waste Veggie Stock aka Compost Broth: keep every shred of edible vegetable you might normally discard or compost (onion skins, tops of leeks, carrot peels, garlic bits) in a freezer bag and when you have enough scraps to fill a pot, make a delicious veggie stock to sip in the mornings with grated ginger, or to use as a soup or risotto base
Favorite baking project: Niloufer Ichaporia King’s cardamom cake
Forever in the fridge: an open jar of Spanish oil-packed anchovies
Quarantine Sandwich: Herby Chicken Paillard Sandwich from ‘Always Home’ (best use I’ve come across for a frozen skinless chicken breast!)
Stale bread becomes: cardamom & orange zest scented Pain Perdu (aka French Toast)
Eating almost every day: bread, for the love of god, so much bread
New tricks: candying orange peel
How I'm getting greens in: salad, with every meal. Thankfully our veg box comes full of it, and we’re growing some leaves in our Victory Garden too!
Restaurant food/meal I crave the most: a long, languid meal in the upstairs café at Chez Panisse
Favorite food I won’t attempt to make at home: Gyoza from Rintaro. Some things are best left to the professionals
Take-out this week: for my mom’s birthday a friend offered to bring us a meal from Benu (!!!) For the most part, otherwise, we’ve been making every meal ourselves (with a couple liters of soup here and there from the wonderful local spot, Fava)
Favorite childhood snack: jicama and mango sticks with lime
Favorite childhood meal: my dad’s risotto with pancetta and wilted radicchio
Favorite thing someone else has made for you in quarantine: all the wonderful loaves of bread from friends learning how to bake (and doing it well!)
If you could be quarantined (for a meal) in anyone's kitchen, whose would it be: Charles Phan (of the Slanted Door) though I think I’ve already sort of won the lottery with Alice Waters
What would you want them to make for you: green papaya salad, deep fried imperial rolls, crab vermicelli noodles, spring rolls, ANYTHING WITH HERBS!
20 years from now, the one food or ingredient or meal that will forever remind you of this quarantine: chocolate chip cookies. I never had a sweet tooth and now I depend on a sugar infusion once a day for sanity. When this is over, I plan to never bake again!
I’ll regularly be posting recipe tips and pictures on Instagram. Please follow along!
If you’re cooking this week: Please be sure to tag @thewholekohlrabi, or share the newsletter with old friends, new friends, colleagues, family, etc.