The Mouths of Babes

I have been blessed when it comes to my child and food. As far as three-year-olds go, she's not exactly a picky eater, unless you count the fact that she doesn't like white bread and can taste when grilled cheese has been prepared with processed cheese food as opposed to real cheese (She calls it "weird cheese" and then says it's gross and won't eat it. And, for the record, only her father heaps this cruelty upon her, because I think the stuff is repulsive, too). And she has a pretty advanced appreciation for things like vegetables and savory foods. In fact, in the grocery store today she pleaded with me to buy squash. We were already checking out, so the answer was not right now, but it was very hard to say no- when a preschooler asks for squash, the answer should always be yes, yes, ABSOLUTELY!

Over the years, several of my friends and acquaintance have commented on my daughter's eating habits- amazed when she wolfs down tomatoes and fennel and, yes, squash. (Don't get me wrong, she still loves candy and ice cream and such, she just likes the other stuff, too.) They want to know how I get her to eat these things and my answer is always the same: she's always eaten them. From the time she started eating solid foods, we've given her whatever it is we're eating. I'm convinced that has a lot to do with it, but I'm not sure it's the whole reason. In some ways, I'm pretty sure she just came that way. There are probably some kids who would refuse to eat at all if they were subjected to seafood and beans and oatmeal and mountains of produce from the very beginning. Hell, my 30-year-old brother would refuse to eat if I subjected him to that. But when it comes down to it, I think we parents really do shape and inform our children's palettes. If we start them out with lots of processed "kid" food, they're going to flip out when we put a pile of sauteed spinach on their plate. If we teach them to want salt and sugar and fat and grease, they're going to want that. (Not that there's no place for those things in a well-balanced diet. I really believe that there is, just in a limited way.) But if we teach them to eat well from the beginning, I really believe we have a much better chance of getting them to do just that.

What do you think? What have your experiences with kids and food been? When you were a kid, what did you eat and how does that affect you as an adult? When I do have another kid, am I destined to have one who will only eat things in chicken-nugget form? Because I'm leaning toward yes on that. WIll my daughter's teenage dietary rebellion involve daily trips to McDonald's and deep-fried Oreos? Discuss.

As a child, I never thought much about where my food came from. Clearly, it came from the store. Except for the stuff that came from our family garden. (Like the bazillion apricots and plums and almonds and pomegranates we had to clean up off the lawn all spring and summer long. Did I mention I grew up in Las Vegas? Where the summer lasts for about six months? Oh, how I hated cleaning that stuff up.) Even as an adult, I never put too much effort into thinking about the origins of my meal. I've always been most concerned with the final product, the flavors on my plate.

The last several months, however, I've thought about it more. A lot more.

When we lived in the mountains of Utah (see how I said "when'? Because we have had the great fortune of leaving Utah behind, hopefully forever.) and my husband was fishing for our dinner a few days a week and bringing home big, luscious rainbow trout and bass and happy little perch (okay, maybe they weren't so happy anymore), it was the first time I'd ever been so intimately aware of where exactly my entree came from, and the effort exerted to catch it and kill it, and what exactly was involved in the process of cleaning it and preparing it to be prepared. Sure, I'd thought about it in very vague terms before, but I'd never experienced it. I'd never sat on the edge of the river/lake/reservoir/pond hoping that my husband would catch a good one and looked around and been able to observe exactly the conditions and surroundings that contributed to my dinner.

Before this summer, I'd never shelled peas fresh from my uncle's (or anyone else's) garden. I'd never taken seeds directly from a flax plant. I'd never tasted a radish before it was all spicy and bitter and weeks away from its growing spot. Oh, and, radishes straight from the garden? Completely different than radishes from the store. Just wash, salt and eat. Gooood.

When we moved to the East Coast in the late summer, I was lucky enough to become fast friends with Ruth, who introduced me to the joys of going out to pick raspberries and apples, and who then schooled me in the art of making jam. Lots and lots of jam. Ruth also has tomato plants taller than her backyard fence and pots and pots of plants growing everything from strawberries to jalapenos. Needless to say, this girl with a black thumb is going to learn a lot from Ruth.

All of this oneness with my food and the harvest and whatnot has gotten me thinking more about not only where my food is coming from, but about my kid. And how I want her to understand that food doesn't come from a store. That someone cultivated and harvested those fruits and vegetables and those grains, and that the meat or fish on her plate had a face, it was a living animal, and we should respect that. I want her to understand that someone somewhere worked very hard so she could enjoy the bounty. I want to instill these things in her, create more of an appreciation for good food and the having thereof, but I don't want to make it a killjoy, either. Hopefully someday we'll have our own little plot of earth in which I can try to teach her these lessons very literally, but in the meantime, it seems there is much thinking to do. And eating. Because really, that is the whole point.