I don’t know about you, but I was obliged to clean my plate when I was a kid. Peas, mushrooms, avocados—the most nauseating things you could possibly imagine—it didn’t matter; down the gullet they had to go. The only time my sisters and I got a break was when the folks ate liver, bacon, and onions and we were allowed to have just the bacon. That was actually kind of fun, like having breakfast for dinner. This plate-cleaning mandate was enforced by the classic combination of guilt and violence: reminders of the plight of starving Chinese orphans backed up by a large red paddle my stepdad kept close at hand in the drawer of the dining-room china cabinet.
Thus, when I became a parent, I took a solemn vow: never shall a child of mine be forced to eat anything she doesn’t like, or more than she truly wants. There would be no food-borne neurosis in my home, no siree. Besides, my then-husband and I were lovers of fine food, and good cooks ourselves; we would simply never subject our children to food worthy of rejection. I threw myself into establishing my daughters’ good taste in food early on. When they started eating solid food, I steamed fresh green beans, pureed them, and froze them in ice-cube trays, ready to be reheated over simmering water (we didn’t own a microwave). Similarly stockpiled were roast beef, lamb, zucchini from the garden, fresh peaches from our backyard tree. My children never set foot inside a Macdonald’s (until they started preschool, when the corrupting influence of their classmates became too overwhelming to fight). They had only homemade muffins, cookies, and birthday cakes (until I went back to work and the Vons bakery started looking pretty dang good).
So you’re probably thinking I have these wonderful, healthy, culinarily sophisticated kids now, right? Oh sure. All through college the older one lived on BRC burritos and Red Bull, and the younger one, well…let’s just say if you looked up “picky eater” in the dictionary, there would be her picture. Nothing green (with the possible exception of Gatorade) has passed this girl's lips since I ran out of those frozen green bean cubes 18 years ago. She won’t touch eggs, or meat beyond hamburger and the occasional hot dog. She doesn’t even like fruit. Somehow she has managed to survive—even thrive!—for almost 20 years on a diet of mostly white flour and sugar. We call her the Carb Queen.
Pretty funny, I can hear you saying; but that’s because you’re not thinking about the stress this puts on the rest of the family. For instance: she loves pizza, but for some reason lost in the mists of time, she loathes cheese. So, we can’t all go to a pizza joint, order a pie, and just scrape the cheese off her slices, or even order a half-cheese. No, she has to have her very own pizza (sauce and pepperoni only) in its own cheese-free box. Were it possible to order it cooked in an oven that had never been defiled by a cheese-bearing pizza, her life would be perfect. A pizza without cheese, as it turns out, is a challenging idea for many restaurants. I have lost count of the times my daughter has sat foodless—waiting for the kitchen to get her second pizza right—while the rest of us chow down.
Before she was paroled from her 12-year sentence of public education, a recurring stress was the Eating at School issue. She didn't like any of the food you could get in the cafeteria, I refused to subsidize meals of vending machine chips, and she wouldn't take the one kind of sandwich she did like (turkey breast with mustard on a kaiser roll) because it got “hot and yucky” in her backpack. So she didn't eat all day, came home grumpy as a grizzly bear in June, ate every snack in sight between 3 and 6 p.m., and then didn't want any dinner. Which pissed off Dad, who had usually shopped for and slaved over a very nice meal, and Mom, who usually ended up having to make her a separate meal when she finally got hungry (which was also usually right after the kitchen had finally gotten cleaned up).
After all these years of dealing with my kid’s dietary proclivities, I’d like to be able to tell you that I’ve finally accepted them; but I have to admit that level of enlightenment still eludes me. I still get upset sometimes. Here's an illustration from a few years back, but it could've happened yesterday. She and I had had a discussion about how bad she felt when she didn’t eat all day, and I got her to agree that she would try taking a sandwich to school if I sent it in an insulated bag with one of those little ice packs to keep it properly chilled. So there I was at 7 a.m., cutting the kaiser roll, slathering on the KC Masterpiece Dip and Top mustard she begged me for a couple of weeks ago, layering exactly four slices of Boar’s Head pastrami-seasoned turkey breast (the only kind she liked at that moment), sprinkling everything with chipotle Tabasco sauce (her favorite), wrapping it up in two layers of plastic wrap so it wouldn't get soggy from the condensation on the ice pack . . . when she walked into the kitchen and saw what I was up to. “What are you doing?” she shrieked. “That’s the wrong mustard!”
All I can say is, thank God for Prozac.
