Eden

August 29, 2024

You think your kids are picky eaters. Imagine being my friend Tony's mom.

Tony grew up in the 1970s in Cuba, where feeding a family adequately was tough. Tony's mother would spend hours each week standing in line with ration cards for rice, beans, and other staples; she'd buy meat illegally on the black market when she could. But when she'd bring it home and put it on the table, Tony would turn up his nose. So life was a day-in-and-day-out struggle for his mom: first to find something to feed her family, and then to get her son to eat it.

Tony and his wife Tatiana waited until they made their way to North America before having their son, Dario, who promptly executed what was likely his grandmother's best revenge by turning pickiness into an art form. (For several years his only approved vegetable was ketchup.) But as Tony likes to say: "Hey, we're here. We have no problems." My girls have heard their stories so often that Tony and Tatiana's history is now theirs, to some extent. When they were young, Madison and Ella were also fussy eaters even if they didn't achieve Dario's level of mastery, but I know that what Tony said helped them see it as a temporary feature of being a kid, one they'd soon outgrow.

I found that the strategy that worked best to get them to try new food is one that's abundantly available at this time of year: Participate in the harvest! If possible, help the kids in your orbit get their hands on their next meal while it's still growing. Most communities have a variety of pick-your-own options at local farms. We're at the tail end of summer fruit season, but there's more fresh deliciousness on the horizon: pick-your-own apple orchards are starting. If you don't have a farm handy, a farmer's market is a useful stand-in. The point is to shorten the distance and strengthen the connection between your kids and what they eat so they can make deliberate choices about it all as they grow. If your family has special recipes, cook them together; if you have food stories that say "this is us," tell them over and over.

And if, when you're telling those stories, you find yourself in a position to say, "Hey, we're here. We have no problems," that, too, will help everyone grow. Even you.

—Deb