Now I understand how obnoxious it is when people who don't have kids talk about how they'll raise their hypothetical kids. I had all kinds of opinions before Milo and Nora came along, and one by one they're being blown out of the water.
Take food. A few years back we went to Seattle for a visit and stayed with a lovely friend who had a two-year old daughter who ate things like curry, sushi, and fresh vegetables. I thought that was outstanding. They could take this delightful girl out to any restaurant and she was well behaved and ate whatever her parents ordered. No special kid meals for her. In contrast to all of the other little kids I saw who would only eat plain noodles or fried processed chicken fingers or other "kid food" (why is kid food on the menus so unhealthy?), she seemed like a breath of fresh air. It was simple, I thought. Just feed your kid whatever you eat, and she will learn to eat a wide range of healthy foods. Don't even bring chicken fingers into the house. Continue eating palak paneer and dish out a little for the kids at dinner time. After all, kids in India eat this stuff, so why can't kids in the U.S. eat it? No problem.
Aaaaaand then comes the inevitable downfall, right? Because any time you develop a self-congratulatory attitude towards anything kid related, the downfall is just around the corner.
Pre-kids, our eating was pretty good. We followed Pollan's advice, generally: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." I got my vegetables fresh from a local farm through the summer, and cooked based on whatever plants were in the box that week. I developed a strong interest in cooking and made elaborate dinners with delicious, fresh ingredients. Jake became interested in cooking as well and he has prepared a lot of terrific meals in the last couple of years. We mostly avoided meat, and when we did eat meat it was mainly chicken and fish. This all took time. I spent a fair amount of time at different grocery stores and at the farmer's market, and we usually ate dinner at around 7:30 after an hour or two of cooking.
I know that those habits will slowly return to our lives once we figure out the whole eating schedule thing with the babies. We're cooking again, albeit less often than before, and I might devote 30 minutes to a meal instead of a couple of hours. When the babies started eating solid food, I wanted to give them organic food that I had personally prepared. I wanted to lead by example and show Nora and Milo how important it is to eat well by giving them wholesome foods for their own meals and modeling the consumption of wholesome foods for our meals. Their first solid food was avocado, which they more or less tolerated but didn't really like, but when I mixed avocados with pears they really enjoyed it.
I can now sort of see into the future, though, and imagine how it might not be as easy as I had predicted.
Neither baby will eat avocados now. They also won't eat pears that I prepare for them, but they will eat pears from a jar. WTF, babies? They also didn't like the homemade organic chicken that I spent a day poaching, grinding, pureeing, and freezing for them. In fact, I should take a video of Nora tasting that chicken, because the disgusted face she makes, complete with whole-body shudder, is priceless. But offer them "chicken dinner" from a jar and they think it's fantastic, probably because it tastes like apricots. Homemade papaya, mango, apples, or green beans? No thank you. Suddenly I'm giving the kids jars of food right and left because they will actually eat the jarred food. And that's the thing. I want them to eat. Even if it's just fruit (and these babies go hog wild over prunes), as long as they're eating something I'm happy.
So this is probably how it starts. In desperation I turn to a jar of "spinach and potatoes" and the next thing I know, they'll be 3 and eating nothing but macaroni and cheese. And some childless woman the next table over will look at the kids with disdain and think "it wouldn't be that hard to teach those children to eat normal, healthy foods; what a waste."
1 comment:
Of course, you came to Seattle while that little girl was in a particularly food-tolerant phase. Now it's her brother who will eat anything.
I still think that you can make some difference when they're tots by feeding them wild stuff. But they shut down as a survival instinct not much later, which is good because it coincides with them being able to find stuff for themselves.
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