We've Tried it All!
Helping make stuffing!
I was having an indoor picnic with my kiddos the other day, and my daughter sat decidedly across the blanket from my son and me. The reason? We were eating watermelon and she did not like the smell of it!
From the time she started solids foods she has been quite selective in the foods she will eat and has only gotten more selective with age. Bananas were a reliable fruit she would eat until around age 3 when she decided she didn’t like them anymore. It isn’t so much the quantity that is the problem now that she’s older, she eats a decent amount of the foods she likes, it’s more the variety that I worry about. Her diet is essentially beige, unless you count artificial colouring, which I try to limit.
I have had to be creative to get any sort of variety in her diet. Here is a list of things I’ve tried:
Grow a garden together: She does this with my husband. The first year we had a garden she said she would try the broccoli when it was ready. So we duly cooked it when ready, she licked it and declared she didn’t like broccoli. She loves to be involved in planting the garden and tending it, but this has yet to translate to her actually eating vegetables or fruit.
Continuing to offer: A common recommendation from nutrition experts is to continue offering foods even if kids don’t like them right away. For years I have put a vegetable on her plate at dinner and fruit in her lunch for school and she never touches it. In fact, if the plate doesn’t have separate compartments, she removes the offending fruit/vegetable completely from the plate.
Heading to school: I’m a stay at home mom, so she never went to day care. I had hoped when she started school and saw that other kids ate fruits and veggies with no ill effect she would become more interested. Nope!
Hiding veggies/fruit in other foods: This has by far been the most successful strategy. It is the only way I can get any variety into her diet, and I’m glad for this at least. She has smoothies several times a week in which I am able to hide some kale (and strawberries and bananas) thanks to our powerful Vitamix blender. I also hide bananas and applesauce in pancakes and cauliflower in ground meat recipes. I just have to be sure everything is blended or chopped to a pure because if you just mash a banana with a fork, she will find a chunk!
Nutritionist: Yup! We even met with a nutritionist around the time she was four and were assured we were doing everything we should be doing and just keep offering, she’ll come round! It’s the parent’s job to offer and the kids’ job to put the food in their mouth. (A great rule of thumb generally, it just hasn’t translated to anything in the case of my daughter.) Nearly three years later, the only vegetables she eats in whole form are potatoes and corn, and no fruits.
Yup! That's Pumpkin hiding under the table from the lobsters! She would come up for a fry or chicken finger and then duck back under!
Conversely, her little brother, who I can’t think that I did anything drastically different with, eats a wide variety of foods. He will choose to eat his carrots first! He even saw me eating a kale salad once, asked for one and ate it! At age 3!
The Bubbas enjoying some steamed veggies!
All that to say we have tried a lot of different things to get her eating a wider variety, so I really don’t think I’m going to stumble upon any sort of miracle strategy that will suddenly see her eating a kale salad!
That said about a month ago I had an idea to find a cookbook with a wide variety of recipes and cook through it with her. I used to involve her in cooking a lot before her brother came along, but once there were two, it became more of a gong show. This idea was in my head when we went on a recent vacation to Montreal, and while perusing a French book store, I came across this cookbook:
It has a range of recipes and since my daughter is in a French Immersion school, I thought this would also give us a chance to work on our French together. With any luck, maybe it will even get her trying a few different foods. The deal we have arrived at is that, as long as she tries a couple of bites (chew and swallow, not just lick!), she will get to pick a dessert for us to make together. I am not a fan of bribery or forcing my kid eats something. As the nutritionist told us, it’s her job to put the food in her body, but after years of
a beige diet, this is what I’ve been reduced to! She and I will be cooking through this book, making a meal each Friday and then a dessert of her choosing on Saturday, provided she’s tried some of the foods we made on Friday. Join us for the adventure!
Pumpkin sat back on the chair during pumpkin carving because of the smell. A good illustration of both of my kiddos relationship to new foods!
