Spinach in the meatball

So I am flipping through one of these parenting magazines and I spy an article on how to get kids to eat their vegetables. This piqued my interest on multiple levels. One. I am always looking out for a good recipe. Two. Preparing kids meals should be the soul of brevity. Personally I don’t think that any meal that takes more than a half an hour to make is worth its salt. I have several years worth of half-hour long programming from the food network to prove my point that a half hour is more than enough time to prepare several delicious dishes. This goes doubly for children’s meals. Three. My kids hate to eat, or at least seem to do so. In fact, their propensity to eat is inversely proportional to my expectation that they will enjoy whatever it is I have made them. Sure they are going to like chicken nuggets? Come to find that today chicken nuggets are an anathema.

So, what was the sage advice that this parenting article offered? Disguise your food. Not with funny little masks or hats, but to transform the ordinarily disgusting vegetable into something that appears to be a delicious treat for the ages. Don’t like spinach? Chop it up and hide it in a yummy meatball. Don’t like Cauliflower? Fry it up to look like popcorn. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I can’t even begin to tell you the myriad reasons that this strategy will never work. First of all small children are able to detect despised vegetables the way bloodhounds detect scents, like a shark smells blood in the water, like an eagle spies, oh you get the point. You put one single leaf of minced up spinach in ten gallons of hamburger, they will know it is there, and don’t even get me started on why the cauliflower thing is just nonsense.

Believe it or not though, none of this compared to the incredulity I felt when I read the last item on the list. Don’t like Broccoli? Puree it up to look like guacamole and, and, (wait for it) serve it with pita chips. Now I know you are gasping with disbelief. But, for the uninitiated, I will spell it out. Never mind the complete dishonesty and misrepresentation that you are perpetrating on your child. Forget the years of psychotherapy the child will grow to require. Imagine for a minute the larger picture. What are they asking us to do to broccoli? I am on a bit of a rant here, so bare with me. Why would you take something perfectly good and wholesome, like a simple tree of broccoli, and puree it? The very adjective “tree” should tell you everything you need to know about broccoli. Broccoli already looks like something else. If this isn’t enough to convince a child to eat it, then surely nothing else will. Needless to say, I have yet to meet a child that would eat guacamole anyways, certainly not any that tasted like broccoli.

No, the truth is, this article simply did not make any sense. But it did remind me of something I learned a long time ago with my first child that I have come to forget. Disguising a food aside, there is something to the idea that foods can look like something else that can capture the imagination of a child in a way that spinach in a meatball has failed to grasp. That the very resemblance of a thing can and often does challenge the imagination of a child in a way that can make eating more enjoyable, dare I say fun. Why not have fun with it. Allow your broccoli to be a tree.

A few years ago, D. was looking through a cookbook for kids that suggested transforming the ordinary everyday hot dog in a bun into a crocodile simply by adding a few carefully placed kernels of corn to resemble teeth. She loved it. I shared this with my neighbor, who also has children, and she suggested that a few simple lengthwise cuts halfway along the length of a hot dog are all that is needed to ensure that the hot dog will resemble an octopus when it comes out of the boiling water. Kids want to be engaged. They want to see the world from new perspectives. This is the core of their cognitive development, and we, as parents, have only a small window of time in which to lay down simple differences, let alone allow them to see the world from completely new perspectives. Why not give it to them.

Now I realize that some of you will cry foul. I am a vegetarian (yes who likes fish) and I do like vegetables and, more importantly, I like food to look like the stuff it came from. (The exception being sushi, or, well fish in general. Fish should never look like fish) I suspect some of you are rethinking my dislike of beets and saying "a ha! So it isn't just the beets!" But, we are deceived so much of the time. In advertising, in spam and craigslist scams and on the used car lot. It seems to me that children will get enough of this “spinach in the meatball” kind of treatment all too soon. I wonder how I perpetuate this kind of thinking in my own life? I suppose I can think about it on my way to the grocery store. I guess we are having hot dogs (or smartdogs) for dinner.