It's a combination of several factors: American kids foods tend to be heavily processed and run to sweet, which will set the baseline if you let it, and there's this widespread belief that children won't eat grownup food so you should offer something else.
We only offer what we're eating and, unsurprisingly, he has learned that as normal. That doesn't mean he eats everything — bitter flavors really are a learned taste — but he'll eat enough of it to get proper nutrition and understands that rejecting dinner means getting a second pass later rather than something else. We're also not monsters so there's always some high-probability staple in the meal so it might be that e.g. he eats the fish and sweet potatoes/kale chips but not the squash, which is acceptable. There are also some amusing outcomes: I haven't had asparagus tips in a year or two because he eats those happily but not the base.
> children won't eat grownup food so you should offer something else.
Having grown up in an immigrant household where the children’s plate is just a smaller version of the adult plate, is this a thing in American households? The kids eat an entirely separate meal-course from the adults?
I know baby food is processed but once a kid gets teeth, they’re just given what the adults eat.
My grandmother would have banish from the table if I had ever even dared to ask to eat something separate.
That's what kids' menus are at restaurants. Spaghetti & meatballs, chicken fingers, mac 'n cheese, pizza, sometimes fish & chips. The same staple foods that basically all kids will eat, as a separate meal course.
My wife grew up in an immigrant family, I grew up in a half-immigrant (but largely Americanized) family. This was an element of culture shock for her. In American culture the norm is that everybody eats whatever they want to eat, and it's considered rude (sometimes even abusive) to try and control someone's food. We have obesity & diabetes rates to match. In most immigrant cultures food is considered a communal experience, where set dishes are put out on the table and it's considered rude to decline or ask for something different. You see this in restaurant customs as well, where servers at American restaurants will come around and ask each person (even the kids) what they want and then bring out individual plates, while in say Chinese restaurants the servers will go to the oldest male at the table, ask for the order, and then bring dishes out family style for everyone to eat.
It's extremely difficult to raise kids against the culture they're immersed in. Our infant will eat anything - even broccoli, celery, carrots, etc. Our 3-year-old will only eat dino nuggets, or on rare occasions, noodles or rice. When our 3-year-old was an infant, he ate everything too. But he gets snacks, occasionally lunch, and occasionally parties outside the home, and in the course of that, discovers that he really likes spaghetti, dino nuggets, and PB&J sandwiches. Hence, that is now his meal, and he knows that it is possible to have them, and he won't eat anything else when placed in front of him, even things he previously enjoyed.
(I suppose we could just not buy dino nuggets and he'd be fine; he's been fine whenever we run out and I explain that we just don't have any. But it's just not that important to me. Like I said, in American culture, the norm is that if you have the means to make yourself or your family happy, you should do it, and it's not that hard to get a 5 lb bag of dino nuggets from Costco when we go.)
I spent about 4 months in total in the US as a child, visiting relatives and doing road trips.
I remember several restaurant visits. I was old enough (12-17) to order from the adult menu without comment in most cases, although in a fancy place I did have all the waitresses coming to look at me eat snails.
Elsewhere, waiters sometimes said "are you sure he/she will eat that?" when my younger siblings made their choices, or "I see you guys really are from Europe, American kids don't eat XYZ".
(I have eaten chicken/turkey nuggets perhaps 3 or 4 times in my life. From 2005, many schools in Britain were banned or limited from serving them [1]. Sodas are also banned.)
> Like I said, in American culture, the norm is that if you have the means to make yourself or your family happy, you should do it, and it's not that hard to get a 5 lb bag of dino nuggets from Costco when we go.
That is a perfect example explaining the huge problems with (child and adult) obesity and all the health-related problems originating from it, which are also very much "the norm" in American culture.
"Let's optimize for short-term happiness! The only reason why you maybe shouldn't do that in a particular occasion is because you lack the money!"
With the same reasoning you should also probably buy and take crystal meth if you can afford it. It's definitely a powerful boost for happiness, you can make the whole family happy as never before with just one small lump of the stuff!
> Like I said, in American culture, the norm is that if you have the means to make yourself or your family happy, you should do it.
That's kind of a bullshit cop-out. Way too vague and general to be a "norm". I make my family happy by helping lower their risk of diabetes and heart failure, so I guess I do subscribe to it. (I'm not directly knocking your choice to feed dino nuggets) but I think your general point is a bit shitty. I have many friends and close extended family that have successfully raised their children vegetarian or vegan - I don't care to do that but I am pretty strict about food choices in young children - it usually sets them up better even in the teen year as I have seen 1st and 2nd hand. It can be challenging - but extremely difficult is hyperbole. Young children get the vast vast majority of their food from home, one birthday party isn't going to force themselves to go on a hunger strike and starve to death. A daycare should be respecting dietary restrictions especially if you're providing the food.
I am genuinely confused by this phrasing. Are you saying that there are many situations where children and adults are receiving menus for food but are not “eating out”?
There are alot of people who basically eat out every meal. That's why every time there is a snowstorm, the bread is always gone. Those people only know how to make sandwiches.
As a first generation immigrant to the US, this is something which bemused me. When I was a kid if I refused to eat veggies, I know my Mom would kick me off the dining table.
In my home, we are trying to instill a little bit of that. Veggies, meat and carbs first. Then fruits and on occasion dessert. My kid knows if he wants fruits (he loves fruit) / dessert, he needs to finish his veggies. Meat and carbs we don't insist too much. My kid eats a no-spice version of what the adults eat. This is mostly cause his day care provides bland food and his taste buds are too sensitive.
Very much yes: like you'll have a meal with normal food and someone will make a batch of Kraft mac-and-cheese without even offering them what everyone else is eating. I can understand the appeal of not fighting about it but that problem only gets worse the longer it runs.
My observation of my friends (mostly SF bay area) is it's about 50/50. I'd like to think that it's my brilliant parenting that we have a one-meal family, but our 4yo has always been very food-motivated. Without getting too much into the nature/nurture debate, I'm willing to accept there's plenty of both, and I try not to judge my friends who make separate meals for their kids.
That said, kiddo doesn't like shrimp (yet!), and I love shrimp, so on shrimp nights he gets something else.
Ours also doesn’t like shrimp. We always put one on the plate for him to look at, inspect, discard. As a shrimp loving dad all I can think of is: more for me!
I have an American gf and can confirm she does this. Sometimes three separate meals, one for adults and one for each kid. Apparently this is the norm in households around here.
My ex and I did not even think of doing this with our kid.
My kid (~2 years) prefers to eat food they like the taste of most.
Turns out that they prefer the sweet tastes of biscuits and even bananas etc to broccoli and carrots.
They'll whinge and whine about being hungry, so you offer them some peas or avocado or something and they will literally push it out of the way, look you straight in the eye, and tell you about how hungry they are (...but not hungry enough to eat the veggies in front of them!). Offer them crisps or biscuits or even just fruity-yoghurt and they'll scoff it down super-fast because presumably it tastes nicer.
I can understand peas, but avocado is fatty indulgent wonderful food. Not liking avocado is absurd. It's like not liking peanut-butter.
Side-note: I learned the most grotesque aberration that shows how the U.S. is orders of magnitude into complete dysfunction: there's something called "diet peanut butter" (learned about this because of a warning I saw online not to give it to dogs). WTF is "diet peanut butter"???? Peanut butter is this rich, delicious oily food. It doesn't need a damn thing to be a great treat. But in the U.S., it's not only typically salted, they add a large amount of sugar. That's already insanely stupid. You want to cut out the sugar? Just enjoy the plain amazing peanut butter on its own!! Nope, they made "diet" by swapping the sugar for xylitol or something. INSANE.
P.S. I live in and grew up in the U.S., I'm judging my own country.
Widely eaten in the Netherlands (though not on its own - usually on bread, and never with jelly). Many people swear by the main brand Calvé, although peanut-only single-ingredient peanut butter has gained serious traction in the past few years.
I don't think ive ever eaten it by itself, but I can confirm that I've had it on sandwiches in Australia, in Satay, (Golden tofu/chicken) and a peanut stew (African iirc).
My parents avoided this issue by just not offering me crisps biscuits etc almost ever (perhaps one on the weekend if I were lucky - certainly not every day). Within healthy food groups they would make an effort to provide foods I liked though.
Classic symptoms of sugar addiction. I've found it takes around three weeks without sugar to reset this, then the sugar cravings hacking the system disappear.
I hated carrots growing up. I definitely would not describe them as "sweet": they taste dry and sour, take a long time to chew, and the juice makes my throat hurt.
Maybe my family just bought bad carrots, but they all seemed to like them. I don't know.
We solve this by having a tiered eating system that starts with some salad or veggies, if they don’t eat, they clearly aren’t deathly hungry; dessert is available at the end of the meal if they finish.
Note this may require a family eating culture that includes salad et al. With every dinner, which is not the norm in America.
My experience with little kids is that steamed vegetables are the most appealing, they just need to be offered before sweets. Things fried in grease or with salt added seem to be something that becomes much more appealing later.
I was well into my 40s before I learned that cauliflower actually tastes amazing when roasted. My mom always boiled it and I swear it always smells like something died in the kitchen when she did that.
Regarding salt, From the link, “babies” is different than kids. I doubt salt is going to hurt anyone older except in specific cases like heart disease or something.
I don’t buy the saturated fats thing either, except to the extent that they are a source of calories. If you have links to some studies that indicate negative outcomes vs the same caloric intake from other sources I am willing to read them.
I figured out the flash fry thing just last year. Game changer, for me as well as the kids. So yummy. Be careful with that hot oil though! The most dangerous thing in the kitchen afaikt.
The danger with this pattern is that it encourages overeating - stuff in the vegies so you get dessert as well, and wind up eating way more food than you need.
If everything is saturated with salt/sugar/artificial ehnahced flavors/refined everything/fried/etc with "instant hook"-overcranked-at-11 taste, and it's all targeting the lowest common denominator palette, good luck then trying to teach a person to appreciate tomoatoes, brocolli, asparagus, mushrooms, cheeses, and so on...
This is a very good summary of my culinary experience visiting the US. This is not to say that good restaurants don't exist, it's just that cheap/everyday restaurants had everything cranked up to 11. The Cheesecake Factory menu was basically butter and sugar in different ratios.
Edge's translation of the Arnisia ameletita page is hilarious. I don't know Greek, so I have no idea how much of this is in the original—
"The composition of the recipe for negligentness is the product of deep study by the entire staff of pandespani, which dedicated its energy both to the symbolic significance of the proposal and to the gastronomic one.
In order to enrich our indignant recipe with meanings and symbolism, members of our team, due to three days, rigged to Mani in order to find the most angry instruments from the well-known butcher shop of the Kourakos Brothers in Areopolis, but also to the popular one in Argos for potatoes, because of the slow salaries that the "castrated" taxpayers cover.
With these and with them, yesterday we found all the pantespanic contributors and we pinched our neatness in two different ways"...
>Edge's translation of the Arnisia ameletita page is hilarious. I don't know Greek, so I have no idea how much of this is in the original—
It is. It's a recipe site, but this particular article was written during the period of austerity measures and protests, and has some humoristic references to the era.
Note that amelitita means "unmentionables", and those are basically the testicles of the animal.
This recipe however is for bovine "unmentionables", not arnisia (lamb) ones.
>Splinantero so rare Google didn't even guess it from how you spelled it.
I has a typo in my spelling. Spinantero is basically a composite word for "splina" kai "entero", the Greek words that are the ancient etymology of english "spleen" and "enteric". And the recipe is exactly that, speen and other meet wrapped in intestines, and grilled with spices etc.
>Arnisia ameletita doesn't even have any non-Greek results at all.
Ameletita is literarlly unmentionables (basically "testicles"), and arnisia is means "from lamb". So this recipe is easy too (though the recipe site gives one for bull ameletita).
I've heard some speculation that this can be related to breast vs. formula feeding. If the mom eats a lot of vegetables, some of the tastes will come out in the milk and get the baby accustomed to those tastes.
This is highly unlikely, similarly to claims that eating cruciferous vegetables will lead to gassy breast-fed babies. Breast milk isn't the distilled contents of the parent's stomach. In contrast, alcohol (for example) is a problem because it affects the parent's bloodstream, not because it fills their stomach.
The percentage of alcohol that makes it into breast milk, which is the mother’s blood alcohol content, is less than the percentage in a typical slice of yeast leavened bread[1]. Coma level alcohol abuse is a BAC of 0.4%, which is the around the minimum found in bread. It’s very important to remember that this intake is going through baby’s gut and liver. On the other hand drinking while pregnant is essentially putting baby on an alcohol IV and is extremely harmful.
The real danger of alcohol for breastfeeding is that it can impair the mother’s ability to properly hold the child, among other things.
Obviously I don’t advocate drinking and nursing, but if mom does have a couple glasses of wine with dinner she shouldn’t be wracked with guilt if she has to nurse.
On the alcohol thing, I'm inclined to agree. Even if you drink enough to be legally drunk, the milk should only be 0.08% alcohol, which is considerably less than say, orange juice. This of course does not at all apply to a pregnant woman.
On the cruciferous vegetable thing, I can say that it is a real phenomenon at least for some babies in certain circumstances. One of our babies was particularly prone to gas, and we had a few horrible nights. Finally, after the worst night of crying we'd ever had, it dawned on us that my wife had eaten a salad with raw brussels sprouts and also eaten cooked brussels sprouts that night. Once she cut out the brussels sprouts and went easy on the broccoli, the problem mostly went away.
Whatever the chemical in brussels sprouts that causes gas is, evidently it is active at pretty low concentrations at least for certain babies.
I live on a dairy. Yes, when our cows grazed on our cover crop which included radishes, it affected the flavor of the milk. And the color, too.
We actually had some customers tell us later that they wouldn't have kept buying our milk due to the unpleasant flavor, except that they knew it was temporary.
I'll second this; my parents had milk goats while I was young, and their diet definitely affected the milk flavor. Garlic, onions, even some weeds would do it.
I think if Korean kids can love kimchi, Italian kids can love eggplant, and Mexican kids can love nopales you must be able to condition kids to like anything.
Historically, there was a big food safety / “scientific nutrition” movement which was heavily influenced by the various food-safety issues around the turn of the previous century and also things like Great Depression / WWII-era concerns about malnourishment (my grandfather remembered all of the concerns that American teenagers hadn't been fed enough to be able to go toe to toe with the Germans).
This lead to a lot of truly regrettable food — when my grandmother did home economics classes the focus was always on things like having enough calories for manual laborers on a budget, cooking thoroughly to avoid the chance of disease, etc. which really emphasized meat and carbs, and techniques like pressure cooking (which allowed you to eat cheaper cuts of meat). Enjoying your food was not a priority. Her children were quite happy when she got into California cuisine back when that was new.
Yes, pickiness is definitely passed on. The only children I know who insist on ridiculous "meals" of mac-n-cheese and chicken nuggets have at least one parent who also has no taste.
This is also known as the "Salad Dodger" bug. Many users in Scotland have been less than successful at getting a patch for this issue. Something to do with territorial licensing and the Pies and Bridies patent.
