Father and Daughter Visit the Farmers' Market
Yesterday, we awed at Anthony Bourdain's daughter's food loves. Today, Robert Pincus, a blogger at Gourmet, reflects on his toddler's preferred tastes at the farmers' market: crusty bread, pâtés, and goat cheese. He observes:
She’s being pickier, tossing that lovely bread on the ground, so I open the bag of Dungeness crab claw meat I bought as a surprise for my wife. I give Squishy a bite. She laughs out loud, then starts grabbing. Six claws, about $8 worth at $34 a pound, are gone in less than five minutes. Don’t get used to it, little girl.
After a previous visit to the Santa Monica Farmers' Market, he also feeds her green garlic risotto and fresh mozzarella. While I'm sure Pincus' daughter will eventually start loving grilled cheese and PB&J, for now she continues the trend we're noticing: very young children happily consuming high quality ingredients, by eating what their parents eat. However, these kids will probably not be gastronomes for the rest of their lives, as SE reader condiment notes: "at 18 months, a child will eat almost anything, including the contents of the catbox if you're not vigilant."
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8 Comments:
Too true! I secretly gloated that my daughter would eat anything, but it was premature...a fact I'm reminded of daily. Today, she ate buttered bread for lunch, and plain noodles for dinner. She ate one piece of beef from the stroganoff, but kept an onion in her mouth for TWO HOURS before finally swallowing so she could brush her teeth.
myrnie_twin at 11:27PM on 09/03/08
My daughter ate anything until the age of 15 months. At that point, to my eyes, it appeared she STOPPED eating. She was a thin child (having been adopted at 8 months in a pretty ill state), and I freaked. I ended up catering to her until she was 5 - and her repetoire was VERY limited.
She is still a fussy eater at 9, but a lot better than she used to be. I blame myself of course - she would not have starved herself had I simply continued to serve her what her father and I were eating. To this day, lunch-friendly proteins are my biggest challenge as she attends a peanut free school and has no access to a microwave. I just bought a new thermos and have my fingers crossed!
Maureen at 7:34AM on 09/04/08
I don't have children, but my friend does, and I often catch her doing McDonald's runs for her oldest, a 13-year-old--his favorite breakfast is McDonald's pancakes and sausage, and finds non-chain pizza crust 'too thin.' When he was a toddler, his favorite food was lobster. Once, a man was observing him tuck in and said to her 'he'll never be ordering chicken nuggets from the kid's menu.' How little that man knew!
HeartofGlass at 7:36AM on 09/04/08
My mom loves to tell of the incident when I was little where she was slicing up a bunch of garlic for a recipe and accidentally left me too close to it; I ate it all when she turned her back on me. I still love garlic, but I can't imagine easting several cloves worth of it raw.
On the other hand, my mom never catered to our whims and didn't dumb down food for us and it was only very rarely that we were allowed fast food and my brothers and I all grew up to be pretty un-picky eaters. If you didn't want the squid, frog legs, escargot, saurbraten or whatever was being served for dinner...you didn't get any dinner. I hated bell peppers (and still don't like them much) but my mom wasn't about to stop cooking with them. If I didn't want to eat them, I had to pick them out myself.
peachfish at 9:40AM on 09/04/08
I randomly caught a small segment of yesterday's Oprah. She was interviewing a Mom of eight (all toddlers) & asked how she managed dealing with food pickyness. The Mom straight up said, "They don't have a choice." Loved that.
My nephew lives in Singapore and it delights me that he's into all kinds of foods. He even loves salmon roe as much as I do! It probably helps that my brother is passionate about food too.
gastronomeg at 11:11AM on 09/04/08
Actually, according to my family, I was a pretty picky (and severely underweight) child. I don't remember this but apparently my mom would do McDonald's runs for me. But I remember eating snake, shark's fin, squid, tons of seafood that most kids won't eat, vegetables - I loved vegetables - and all sorts of stuff growing up. I guess I grew out of the McDonald's thing pretty quickly or something. And now, I eat just about everything (there are things I don't like, but I will try nearly anything at least a few times to make sure I'm giving it a fair shake).
My nephew loves his veggies because his parents eat them and don't make a fuss about him eating them or not. Sometimes I think that's what it is - and I'm terrified for the day I have children because my boyfriend hates vegetables and I'm sure his attitude will spill over and the children will pick up on it, and then... sigh.
feistyfoodie at 11:14AM on 09/04/08
Ugh. I hate these kinds of stories. They're totally stuffwhitepeoplelike.com fodder. if you grew up in a non-white, non-white-bread (dare I say "ethnic") family, so-called "foodie" foods are the norm--whether it's stinky cheeses for French families, or abalone for Chinese families, or humus for Middle Eastern families. People shouldn't be patting themselves on the back for raising such "sophisticated" and "cosmopolitan" (the favorite word of the GOP lately) children...eating food that is not Cheez-Whiz does not make you better than everyone else. It makes you like the rest of the world.
NYminknit at 11:54AM on 09/04/08
Well, I'm not American, and my mum still had trouble getting me to eat quite a few things when I was a child. However, she kept insisting, and I kept getting left out of family dinner, and by the time I was a teenager I loved everything. When I visit home now, she always reminds me that many of the things I'm dying for her to make for me, I used to refuse when I was 7.
Anyway, wherever you're from, branching out food-wise can be harder when you try to do it later in life. Whenever I meet people with a number of very specfic and strict food preferences, and I ask about their background, inevitably they've had a limited amount of experience with different foods in the past. Sometimes a new taste is difficult. It took my Israeli boyfriend quite a few tries to get accustomed to my favorite Caribbean foods, and there are still a few things that he just can't get down with. And, although I have managed to get gefilte fish down the hatch, I'll never attack it with the same gusto he does. It's what we've been exposed to.
islandchild at 3:58PM on 09/04/08