Eliminating Fear Through Study

Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.

Karl Augustus Menninger

A school in New Jersey has found an excellent way to get kids to eat their vegetables: simply by learning about them.

The Method

You can find the full article here, http://goo.gl/Ay2MzZ, but the basic story is that each month the school focuses on a fruit or vegetable, and the children learn all about it. This education isn’t limited to what nutrients the food might have, but rather all of the subjects in school make note of the food. This ranges from learning where it was first grown for history, and where it is now most produced for geography. Throughout the month the children are also given the chance to try the fruit or vegetable in different recipes.

The Effect

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much feedback as to the program’s effectiveness quite yet, but I think it’ll work. I believe this purely because of one thing. It removes fear.

Food can be scary for a picky eater. We’re always wondering whether something is going to taste horrible because so many other things do. Eventually, so many things have turn our stomachs that we don’t even want to eat things of a certain color or texture, just because everything else like it turned out badly.

But learning about the food in an environment like this can take the edge off of that fear. Rather than hearing “squash, the yucky stuff that my mom tries to get me to eat at Thanksgiving”, you hear “squash was first grown in Mexico and Central America but is now grown all over the world.”

Once something is familiar, it’s not as scary or intimidating. After a month of interacting with the fruit or vegetable, attitudes can change completely.

My Challenge

So while your child’s school is most likely not participating in this program, there are a number of different things you can do. You can of course try something similar to this, where you teach your children all about asparagus or cauliflower, but it doesn’t even need to be that involved. A simple, frequent interaction with different foods can be enough.

What is probably most important, however, is that the experiences be positive. It’s going to be hard to get your child to eat corn if his only memory of corn is when Uncle Albert told him that it was spider-eggs on the cob. Something even as simple as “introducing” your child to the food can be good. Show them the food before it’s cut or cooked and they then have a reference for it, rather than just “the yellow bits in there”.

So if you want to get rid of the fear, get rid of the unknown and show your kids what the food actually is.

Bridging the Gap: A Review of Melissa D’Arabian

One of the articles that I recently enjoyed was All in the family: Smart Strategries for Kid- and Parent-Friendly Cooking, written by Melissa D’Arabian, and can be found by clicking here: http://goo.gl/XH8yzF.

D’Arabian is the host of the Food Network’s show, Ten Dollar Dinners, and is the author of a book by the same name.  After having read her article, I think she gives good advice not just for those with tight budgets, but also those with selective palates. Her article, All in the Family, gives a number of good tips and reminders. There are three in particular that I’d like to highlight and give my opinion on. Those three are:  incorporating kids’ favorites into mealtime, using a toppings bar, and bridging the gap to their world.

Incorporating Favorites

If dinnertime at your place is all about presenting to children a table of undesired food, you’re doing it wrong.  I’m not saying that every dinner needs to consist of only food that your children like, but there should always be something for them.  One of the most important things you can do for a picky-eater is to make mealtime a pleasant experience for them, which is hard to achieve if the table is full of things that they don’t like.

D’Arabian mentions in her article that she’ll put something like tiny quesadilla triangles as a side to the main course. By doing this, it creates a welcoming environment so that the child can feel included in the meal, even if all he or she eats is a handful of crackers that you’ve brought specifically for them. Will this give immediate, or even noticeable results? Probably not. But in the long run if your child can look back with fond memories on dinnertime, you’ll have succeeded.

Toppings Bar

D’Arabian mentioned this specifically when trying to transform “kid’s classic” foods into something more healthy. There are a number of advantages to this, but my favorite is that there is no pressure.  Many children don’t react well when pressured into something, I was/am one of them. If you were to force me to put peas on my plate, I wouldn’t touch them and they’d get thrown away. But, by having peas available and accessible I would be more inclined to try them. It doesn’t guarantee that I’d start eating peas, but it’s more likely than force.

The whole concept of not forcing children to eat is something that I plan on writing a full article about, if not a complete dissertation. For now suffice it to say that force won’t work in the long run, but giving them a pressure-free option can work wonders.

Bridge to their World

Finally, my favorite part of All in the Family was a story she shared at the very beginning of the article. D’Arabian’s daughter brought her a super-sugary cupcake to eat, and D’Arabian declined. Her daughter then asked “Mommy, why do you ask us to try foods you like, but you won’t try what we like?”

As a responsible parent you are working hard to get your children to eat the fruits, vegetables, and whole grains that will help them grow big and strong. You’ll beg, plead, bribe, and possibly threaten no dessert, all to get them to eat what’s good for them. Just remember, there’s stuff you don’t like either. Despite being fully grown and responsible, you’ll turn your nose up at certain things that you’ve never even seen before, just because they look funny or it has a funny name.  The point is that in many ways adults aren't much better than children when it comes to strange food.

My advice to you as a recovering picky eater is this. Go out every once in a while and try a new dish. You very well might only eat it once and then never get it again. Maybe you’ll only be able to eat a few bites before tossing the rest in the trash or feeding it to the dog, and that’s OK. You may even find a new favorite! Not only that, but imagine if your children see that you’re trying new foods. Think of the example that you set by trying something that you’re not even sure you’ll like!  I guarantee that'll it will leave an impact on them.

The Biggest Challenge: The Mental Block

Picky eating isn’t always a choice. I know there’s probably a lot of people who would disagree with this statement, but I really feel this, especially due to an experience I recently.

The Spirit is Willing, but the Body is Weak

My wife had just made dinner--tonight it was spaghetti squash. Squash is always one of those things that my inner five-year old says “yuck!” to, but I wasn’t quite sure if I had actually tried it before. But, while I didn’t really want to eat it, I decided I was going to. I’m an adult, I thought to myself. Time to toughen up and eat like one. So I sat down to eat.

I stared at my helping of squash, my hands not seeming to listen to my brain telling them to move. I finally convinced my hands to pick up the fork and scoop up some squash. Getting that scoop from the plate to my mouth was even harder than picking up the fork. Apparently five-year old me was more in control than I wanted to admit. But still, being the adult I am, I shoved the forkful in my mouth and chewed and swallowed.

The squash had a slightly strange texture, but that was really the only thing I could consider unpleasant. It tasted all right, the smell wasn’t bad, and it seemed to be the right tenderness. But, do you know what the most shocking thing to me was?

I wanted to get that squash as far away from me as I could.

I was baffled. I recognized that the taste wasn’t bad at all. While it didn’t compare to a nice, juicy steak or anything like that, it was fine. There should have been no reason for me to stop eating the squash, but I couldn’t do it. Something inside me rejected that squash like a badly matched kidney transplant, and I don’t even know what it was!

I ate a few more bites to try and convince myself that this food was safe and edible, but my mouth didn’t listen. In the end I apologized to my wife because I just couldn’t eat it. Not that I didn’t want to, or that I had been unwilling, but I felt sure that if I forced one more bite down then my body would forcibly eject it.

Don’t Worry, There’s Still Hope

I don’t know what it is that causes this automatic rejection. I wish I did so that I could turn it off. But this wasn’t the first time that I had experienced it.

(Bear with me for a minute if you’ve read my first post, this is the same story, just a bit more detailed.)

For my entire childhood I refused to eat my potatoes in a form that wasn’t fries or chips. When I got to high school I decided to eat some potatoes in an effort to diversify my diet. When I got those mashed potatoes from school I was set on eating them, but my hands and mouth disagreed. I couldn’t get the fork halfway to my mouth without a thousand warning bells sounding off in my head. I eventually tossed the potatoes because I just couldn’t eat them.

A few years later I was heading down to live in Argentina for a couple years as part of a proselyting mission for my church. I was worried about different foods that I might be offered and how I might offend someone if I didn’t eat what I was given. I remember that one of the first foods I was offered was mashed or boiled potatoes mixed with some other things. I stared those potatoes down and took a bite.

And they were delicious!

I don’t know what switch had been flipped but suddenly I could eat potatoes. I started eating them mashed and boiled and baked and whatever form I could eat them in. At the end of my time in Argentina my parents took me out to eat at a restaurant and I had mashed potatoes. My dad just couldn’t believe it. Now I look back and can’t remember why I disliked potatoes before, but I remember that experience of not being able to eat them.

Unfortunately the advice I have for you this time is the same as what I’ve said before. Be patient. Also, please don’t assume that the child isn’t trying. Being a picky eater can be difficult at times, for more reasons than one. But, I’ll save that story for another time. For now, just remember that it’s not necessarily a choice to be picky, it just happens.

Reviewing Ellyn Satter

So my wife, being a dietitian, told me that the expert on picky eaters is Ellyn Satter. I was interested because, as I've said in one of my earlier posts, there is a plethora of tips and tricks about picky eaters on the internet, so it's interesting to read from someone who is fairly widely acknowledged to be the expert.

I've been clicking around her website, http://ellynsatterinstitute.org/, and from what I've read so far, there are a lot of good tips. Possibly my favorite is the article about avoiding pressure, found at this link: http://ellynsatterinstitute.org/htf/avoidpressure.php.

I think most parents believe that in order to be a good parent, they need to push their kids into eating the healthy food. This is not the case. Your best bet is to set up an environment where they feel they can safely try foods. As Satter says in her article "Pressure on children's eating always backfires."

It's very true, and I think that sometimes it's hard for mature adults to understand. As human beings we oftentimes have a tendency to resist being told what to do, so by telling your child that they need to eat all their carrots, you're actually accomplishing the opposite.

You may be thinking "That's silly, why would someone, even a child, refuse food just because they were pressured?" Well, I am here to tell you that not only have I done it, I still do it. It was less than a year ago, so I was a mature (somewhat, mostly, sort of...) 23 year old who should have been past most, if not all, of these childish behaviors. I was at church dinner, and one of my lifelong friends told me I should try the salad with a certain type of ranch. I declined, since I don't like salad, nor the ranch or other sauce that tends to accompany them. He pushed a little, telling me it was great and that I just had to try it. At that point, I immediately the idea of trying it. He, and a few of my other friends, continued trying to convince me that I should try it, but it wasn't happening. There was no way in the world at that point that I would try the salad or the sauce.

A much better plan would have been to tell me that it was good and maybe I should try it, and if I declined, then to drop it. I might have thought about it a little more, and then decided to try just a little bit, had I been left to my own devices. But by pushing me into doing something I didn't want to do, I shut down.

So, hear me parents everywhere: if you want your children to eat their carrots, do not push them into it! Just give them an open environment where they aren't pressured.

The worst mistake you can make.

     Now it may be presumptuous of me to say this is the worst mistake you can make. I suppose a worse mistake would be to get the picky eater to eat by flinging peas into his mouth using a spoon as a trebuchet. But only just behind that is the all too common proclamation made in an attempt to get the child to eat, which in reality doesn't convince. To tell a picky eater "You can't even taste it" is a grave error made all too often.

     First of all, you have no idea whether I can taste it or not. You probably like the taste of whatever it is already, so having a slight bit of that flavor means nothing to you. However, for the picky eaters like me, it's an obvious change to what the meal could have been. We all have different tastes and tolerances, so maybe you truly can't taste those carrots in the soup, but to me they stick out worse than a clown at Sunday service.

      Second, it feels like an attack. It isn't going to be the same for everyone, but when I get told "You can't taste it" what I hear is "What is wrong with you? Why can't you eat like a normal person?" Not only is that depressing, but it also completely puts me off to whatever is now being put in front of me. I will dislike this food even if I can't taste whatever ingredient was originally putting me off.

    Rather than try to convince the eater that the ingredient has no taste, acknowledge that it's in there, and ask them to give it a shot. Highlight what is in the recipe that they like (hopefully it contains something  that they like, because otherwise there is next to no chance of this working out) and, if possible, make the pieces of the ingredient small so that the flavor has the best chance of actually "disappearing".

From a grown up picky eater

One would think that a boy who hated vegetables and loved greasy foods would never fall for a dietician. Well, it happened.

My name is Grant, and while I've progressed a lot from my childhood fits caused by the mere presence of greens, I still regard the majority of vegetables as "icky". Then my wife entered the picture. She had grown up eating fairly healthy and then got her degree in dietetics, so needless to say vegetables are now taking a greater place in my diet, whether I want them to be or not.

While I have grown and matured from where I used to be in my eating preferences, it's still rough sometimes to find things I like to eat.

What I've noticed is that there are a near infinite amount of blogs, books, and articles addressing the issue of picky eaters.  Ranging from fun recipes to near mind control they all claim to be the great fix for the picky eater. But what I find to be lacking were these very things written by picky eaters.  The writers of these books and articles talk about living with and cooking for the child with the selective palette, but what happened to the voice Of the picky child?

My hope with this blog is to shed a little more light on what happens in the mind of the picky eater. I want to show why is it that the tricks work, and why things may not work out as well as they did for the author.

So to close my first blog post, I would like to offer what is in my opinion the most important thing to apply when working with a picky eater. Be patient. Now, when I say that I don't even necessarily be patient as you work through different recipes and techniques. You might do everything right and still end up with a child that refuses to eat his broccoli, but that's ok. A child who doesn't like carrots is not a sign of a bad parent nor a bad child. Let them grow up and eventually on their own they may develop a love for the foods they once despised.

I mean, when I was younger I refused to eat potatoes in anything other than fry or chip form. No matter what recipe was tried I wanted nothing to do with them.  But then I grew up. I went off on my own and actually lived in Argentina for 2 years, where I learned to not only eat potatoes, but wholeheartedly enjoy them. Now I eat mashed, boiled, and baked potatoes whenever I get a chance!

So really, don't stress too much about it. Just let them learn to love different foods on their own time.