Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

You know what else is wrong? Starting wars that nobody wants to fight, America's Next Top Model, tank tops on men, fanny packs, and the entire mySpace community.

On the grand scale of crimes against humanity, this registers barely a blip.

Methinks there's a backlash against Mrs. Seinfeld because she's Jerry wife (not that there's anything wrong with that). Are we going to reserve similar venom for the Middle East's pulverization of the chickpea into hummus? Is spanakopita just a trojan horse for spinach? Are we getting the vah-pours and clutching our pearls because V-8 Splash has carrot juice?

Face it, kids are picky little bastards. In a perfect world, you'd want your kid to enjoy braised cardoons and beet carpaccio all the while reading Proust and expanding the tenets of string theory, but sometimes you just want the petulant knave to eat something and go to bed so you can drink some strong Belgian ale and play your Wii in peace. Sheesh.

Ditto all of the comments above. Much ado about nothing!

I didn't register Mimi Sheraton's comments as venemous. She is an active, long-standing professional writer experienced in writing cultural criticism focusing on the food world.

Her essay to me seemed intelligent, well-written, and persuasive. But then I do tend to agree with the points she made in the first place. :)

Guilty Carnivore, my brother was exactly the Proust-reading child you mention, and everyone on the block wanted to kill him.

As the the moral rightness of vegetable-smuggling, who said you should only present the veggies one way? "Don't want your green beans, darling? Okay. Have this nice brownie instead. Tee hee!" Then explain the joke to the kid some time before she has to raise kids of her own.

Ms. Sheridan is the Dowager Empress of New York food writing. She also last fed a picky child in the late 1960's. Mrs. Seinfeld has much more recent on-the-job training.

Actually, I thought Sheraton was right on, particularly since, as she noted, the amount of spinach that actually gets consumed in the Deceptive Brownie is something like 1 teaspoon of puree. And I doubt the relationship of children and spinach has changed a lot since the 1960s.

I don't have a kid, so I'm full of hot air. But Laurie Colwin's approach -- make the vegetables taste good -- has always seemed very sensible to me. She points out, for example, that just about everyone likes fried things, and that kids will be more likely to eat carrot sticks or cucumber sticks if they have something delicious to dip them into.

Upon re-reading what I wrote the realization hit me that in my quest to try to prove that the road to hell is paved with good intentions it may have sounded like I'm anti-vegetable.

Must add that I'm not.

Embrace the vegetable. Love it.
Ohhmmmmm.

As with anything, I think a bit of common sense would prevail here. So, if your kids won't eat anything vegetable related, I think one could continue to expose them to various types and presentations of veggies to encourage them to expand their little palates, all the while improving their health and well-being by "sneaking" in some extra plant life into their diets with these creative methods. Haven't parents been putting cheese sauce on broccoli for years for the same reason?

Like other commenters, I don't have kids of my own, so I suppose I don't have a leg to stand on, but I have children with whom I'm very close in my family, and I have treated children and adults with food aversions in my work, so I think I might have a clue.

I have 3 children, ages 9 - 14, and let me tell you.....I've been doing the right thing since they started eating solid foods. Each evening, I put vegetables on their plates, and each evening the dog ends up eating at least one child's veggies! I've read over and over that if you put veggies on a kid's plate, after a while they will eat them. It seems the experts have not met my kids.

So, I bought the Seinfeld cookbook and guess what! The kids are eating and enjoying the food nightly. We play a game called "Guess What the Secret Ingredients Are" and have fun with it. They even want to help me cook! The good news is that they are now asking for my homemade chicken nuggets (made with sweet potato and broccoli purees and flaxmeal) instead of begging for McDonald's!

I'm still putting veggies on their plates, and the kids are even eating a few of them now.

Kudos to Jessica! With her help, my kids are eating better than ever before.

I have trouble believing that slipping vegetable into baked goods would work... I don't know that my brother and I were any more sensitive to texture and taste nuances than any other monstrously picky kids, but we would have been onto veg-laced baked goods in a flash. And wouldn't have eaten them.
I'd imagine that if a kid is open-minded enough to eat broccoli brownies (or whatever they may be), there has got to be SOME fruit or vegetable that they'll also eat in its recognisable form.

My boyfriend and his brother dislike vegetables. Their mother is a diligent gardener, and did her best to make certain that, growing up, the two boys had lots of healthy vegetables and fruit. Unfortunately, this being Denmark, the most exquisite and carefully grown produce is... boiled. Boiled until it is squishy, for a good half hour, generally (the process: dump veg in a pot of boiling water, and cook the rest of the food; when the rest of the food is done, remove vegetables from their watery grave). Fruit that is not eaten fresh is given a similar treatment, and put up in jars.

I grew up in Italy, and had a very different vegetable upbringing; my mum usually speedily sauteed vegetables until their colour was just heightened, and served them; sometimes they were roasted. I didn't eat everything my mother cooked, but on the whole, I like vegetables.

I'm not a food missionary, but I've always believed that each time you find something you really appreciate, the universe expands a bit for you. Life gets bigger. So I decided to carefully introduce some of the more pleasurable vegetable to my boyfriend (I know this sounds like I'm way off-topic, but I don't think that there is that much difference between the vegetable-rejecting adult or child). I didn't want to make an issue of it, because I like to relax at mealtimes. I knew that raw carrots, bell-peppers, peas, green beans, things of that sort, were already 'in'. I'd also seen my boyfriend eat beech leaf-buds in early spring; they taste like new peas. So I decided to make baby asparagus (the tips resemble beech leaf-buds) my first effort. I casually passed him the tip of one of the raw ones, and it went down well; I offered to serve them raw, or briefly stir-fried, and stir-fried they were. And they were a hit. I know some things will probably never be eaten, so I don't bother. But there are a lot of cooked vegetables that are now greeted with enthusiasm.

With kids, there is a window of opportunity, when they are about a year old and cheerily putting everything in their mouths, and during which its possible to establish later flexible eating patterns. It makes sense to take advantage of this, since it means that later on, there will be far fewer things that are 'ew, weird' to the kid (if the bairn doesn't take to broccoli and the like during this period, it's going to be more or less of a wash until adulthood). It also makes sense to prepare the the food so it tastes good; I don't mean complicated, time-consuming prep., just briefly cooked so that the appearance, texture, and taste are attractive (i.e. not grey/khaki/squishy/stringy/bitter). And I'd not waste my energy on trying to introduce ANY vegetable-avoiding individual to any of the crucifers.

If someone wants to doctor cake and cookies so that they contain vegetables, I suppose that's fine (although I do wonder how much of their nutritional value survives the baking process), but it seems that taking these same vegetables and stir-frying, roasting, or just washing, slicing, and serving them raw would be a better long-term strategy for getting produce into a kid's (or adults's) diet.