Husbands and Knives: An Unfun Secret

 I haven’t posted in a week due to crafting in my head something I really want to talk about but not being sure how to go about it. It pertains to my younger daughter and her eating habits. And in starting my blog post over, and over, and over, and not being satisfied with it, I’ve come to realize that I feel a lot of shame about having a child who consumes an incredibly limited range of foods.  

Chronologially speaking, I don’t recall her being very picky as a baby. She ate bananas, avocadoes, grilled cheese, and tomato sauce. That may not seem like a lot of variety, but those are all foods that she now refuses to have.

As the number of foods she was willing to eat started to dwindle, I was given the much-used advice to just give her what the rest of the family was eating, and that she would eat when she got hungry enough. Unfortunately, her weight quickly dropped to less than the fifth percentile for her age. There was no way was I going to continue with THAT method.

These days, she will eat plain pasta, rice and black beans, macaroni (but only the boxed kind with a dry cheese mixture), and pizza, sometimes. For produce she will eat red bell peppers and apples. She doesn’t like chocolate and will only eat vanilla ice cream and yellow cake, but she does eat Nutella. Her school doesn’t serve lunch, and I usually send her with the same thing every day: peanut butter and honey on WonderBread, Ritz Bits, and vanilla (i.e., sweetened) milk.

I think it is this last part that makes me feel ashamed: the fact that others are starting to observe how limited her diet is. Somehow, even though I like almost all food and bring lots of different groceries into the house, I’m the parent who can’t get her kid to look at meal times as an adventure. Quite the opposite, in fact; I think she would actually go hungry rather than eat a food she has deemed “gross.”

And that’s what makes raising a picky eater also a scary experience. What if we ever run out of the things she likes? What if she stops liking those things and we can’t figure out what she is going to start eating instead?

In beginning my Husbands and Knives experiment, in which I’m cooking recipes from Jacques Pepin’s Essential Pepin, I guess I’m trying to get past the anxiety that comes with feeding a picky eater, and to make food fun again. Even if she won’t try a particular dish – and let’s be clear, she hasn’t touched anything yet except the Angel Food Cake – she’ll see it, smell it, maybe touch it. Maybe the fifth time I prepare the recipe she’ll let me put it on her tongue. Maybe the tenth time she’ll taste a little.

As I write this, I worry that the reality is, maybe none of those things will happen. But at least I will have tried.

 Kimberly M Adams writes the Skirt! Husbands and Knives blog, about cooking with her family using Jacques Pepin’sEssential Pepin. More of her essays and short stories are available on her author website, http://kimberlymadams.wordpress.com/