Can somebody explain the "won't eat vegetables" thing? The only place I've heard about this being in issue is in America.
We only offer what we're eating and, unsurprisingly, he has learned that as normal. That doesn't mean he eats everything — bitter flavors really are a learned taste — but he'll eat enough of it to get proper nutrition and understands that rejecting dinner means getting a second pass later rather than something else. We're also not monsters so there's always some high-probability staple in the meal so it might be that e.g. he eats the fish and sweet potatoes/kale chips but not the squash, which is acceptable. There are also some amusing outcomes: I haven't had asparagus tips in a year or two because he eats those happily but not the base.
Having grown up in an immigrant household where the children’s plate is just a smaller version of the adult plate, is this a thing in American households? The kids eat an entirely separate meal-course from the adults?
I know baby food is processed but once a kid gets teeth, they’re just given what the adults eat.
My grandmother would have banish from the table if I had ever even dared to ask to eat something separate.
Well, except for eating out, I guess. And even then an adult sharing with a child is not that rare.
My wife grew up in an immigrant family, I grew up in a half-immigrant (but largely Americanized) family. This was an element of culture shock for her. In American culture the norm is that everybody eats whatever they want to eat, and it's considered rude (sometimes even abusive) to try and control someone's food. We have obesity & diabetes rates to match. In most immigrant cultures food is considered a communal experience, where set dishes are put out on the table and it's considered rude to decline or ask for something different. You see this in restaurant customs as well, where servers at American restaurants will come around and ask each person (even the kids) what they want and then bring out individual plates, while in say Chinese restaurants the servers will go to the oldest male at the table, ask for the order, and then bring dishes out family style for everyone to eat.
It's extremely difficult to raise kids against the culture they're immersed in. Our infant will eat anything - even broccoli, celery, carrots, etc. Our 3-year-old will only eat dino nuggets, or on rare occasions, noodles or rice. When our 3-year-old was an infant, he ate everything too. But he gets snacks, occasionally lunch, and occasionally parties outside the home, and in the course of that, discovers that he really likes spaghetti, dino nuggets, and PB&J sandwiches. Hence, that is now his meal, and he knows that it is possible to have them, and he won't eat anything else when placed in front of him, even things he previously enjoyed.
(I suppose we could just not buy dino nuggets and he'd be fine; he's been fine whenever we run out and I explain that we just don't have any. But it's just not that important to me. Like I said, in American culture, the norm is that if you have the means to make yourself or your family happy, you should do it, and it's not that hard to get a 5 lb bag of dino nuggets from Costco when we go.)
I remember several restaurant visits. I was old enough (12-17) to order from the adult menu without comment in most cases, although in a fancy place I did have all the waitresses coming to look at me eat snails.
Elsewhere, waiters sometimes said "are you sure he/she will eat that?" when my younger siblings made their choices, or "I see you guys really are from Europe, American kids don't eat XYZ".
(I have eaten chicken/turkey nuggets perhaps 3 or 4 times in my life. From 2005, many schools in Britain were banned or limited from serving them [1]. Sodas are also banned.)
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-food-stand...
That's kind of a bullshit cop-out. Way too vague and general to be a "norm". I make my family happy by helping lower their risk of diabetes and heart failure, so I guess I do subscribe to it. (I'm not directly knocking your choice to feed dino nuggets) but I think your general point is a bit shitty. I have many friends and close extended family that have successfully raised their children vegetarian or vegan - I don't care to do that but I am pretty strict about food choices in young children - it usually sets them up better even in the teen year as I have seen 1st and 2nd hand. It can be challenging - but extremely difficult is hyperbole. Young children get the vast vast majority of their food from home, one birthday party isn't going to force themselves to go on a hunger strike and starve to death. A daycare should be respecting dietary restrictions especially if you're providing the food.
That is a perfect example explaining the huge problems with (child and adult) obesity and all the health-related problems originating from it, which are also very much "the norm" in American culture.
"Let's optimize for short-term happiness! The only reason why you maybe shouldn't do that in a particular occasion is because you lack the money!"
With the same reasoning you should also probably buy and take crystal meth if you can afford it. It's definitely a powerful boost for happiness, you can make the whole family happy as never before with just one small lump of the stuff!
In my home, we are trying to instill a little bit of that. Veggies, meat and carbs first. Then fruits and on occasion dessert. My kid knows if he wants fruits (he loves fruit) / dessert, he needs to finish his veggies. Meat and carbs we don't insist too much. My kid eats a no-spice version of what the adults eat. This is mostly cause his day care provides bland food and his taste buds are too sensitive.
That said, kiddo doesn't like shrimp (yet!), and I love shrimp, so on shrimp nights he gets something else.
My ex and I did not even think of doing this with our kid.
Turns out that they prefer the sweet tastes of biscuits and even bananas etc to broccoli and carrots.
They'll whinge and whine about being hungry, so you offer them some peas or avocado or something and they will literally push it out of the way, look you straight in the eye, and tell you about how hungry they are (...but not hungry enough to eat the veggies in front of them!). Offer them crisps or biscuits or even just fruity-yoghurt and they'll scoff it down super-fast because presumably it tastes nicer.
Can't blame them really.
Maybe my family just bought bad carrots, but they all seemed to like them. I don't know.
While "sugar addiction" has it merits, the main problem here is the parents who are toyed around by a little egoist... and they are happy to oblige.
Side-note: I learned the most grotesque aberration that shows how the U.S. is orders of magnitude into complete dysfunction: there's something called "diet peanut butter" (learned about this because of a warning I saw online not to give it to dogs). WTF is "diet peanut butter"???? Peanut butter is this rich, delicious oily food. It doesn't need a damn thing to be a great treat. But in the U.S., it's not only typically salted, they add a large amount of sugar. That's already insanely stupid. You want to cut out the sugar? Just enjoy the plain amazing peanut butter on its own!! Nope, they made "diet" by swapping the sugar for xylitol or something. INSANE.
P.S. I live in and grew up in the U.S., I'm judging my own country.
I'm not American but I hate both. They're bland foods.
We solve this by having a tiered eating system that starts with some salad or veggies, if they don’t eat, they clearly aren’t deathly hungry; dessert is available at the end of the meal if they finish.
Note this may require a family eating culture that includes salad et al. With every dinner, which is not the norm in America.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/baby/weaning-and-feeding/foods...
I don’t buy the saturated fats thing either, except to the extent that they are a source of calories. If you have links to some studies that indicate negative outcomes vs the same caloric intake from other sources I am willing to read them.
My parents always steamed them to hell and put almost no salt on
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/20/french-childre...
Arnisia ameletita doesn't even have any non-Greek results at all. https://www.womenonly.gr/kreas/arthro/ameletita_aganaktismen...
"The composition of the recipe for negligentness is the product of deep study by the entire staff of pandespani, which dedicated its energy both to the symbolic significance of the proposal and to the gastronomic one.
In order to enrich our indignant recipe with meanings and symbolism, members of our team, due to three days, rigged to Mani in order to find the most angry instruments from the well-known butcher shop of the Kourakos Brothers in Areopolis, but also to the popular one in Argos for potatoes, because of the slow salaries that the "castrated" taxpayers cover.
With these and with them, yesterday we found all the pantespanic contributors and we pinched our neatness in two different ways"...
It is. It's a recipe site, but this particular article was written during the period of austerity measures and protests, and has some humoristic references to the era.
Note that amelitita means "unmentionables", and those are basically the testicles of the animal.
This recipe however is for bovine "unmentionables", not arnisia (lamb) ones.
I has a typo in my spelling. Spinantero is basically a composite word for "splina" kai "entero", the Greek words that are the ancient etymology of english "spleen" and "enteric". And the recipe is exactly that, speen and other meet wrapped in intestines, and grilled with spices etc.
>Arnisia ameletita doesn't even have any non-Greek results at all.
Ameletita is literarlly unmentionables (basically "testicles"), and arnisia is means "from lamb". So this recipe is easy too (though the recipe site gives one for bull ameletita).
We actually had some customers tell us later that they wouldn't have kept buying our milk due to the unpleasant flavor, except that they knew it was temporary.
B) Many with experience with milk-generating livestock will cite that the feed has a meaningful effect on the flavor of the milk.
Why would human breast milk be the exception to both of those premises?
The real danger of alcohol for breastfeeding is that it can impair the mother’s ability to properly hold the child, among other things.
Obviously I don’t advocate drinking and nursing, but if mom does have a couple glasses of wine with dinner she shouldn’t be wracked with guilt if she has to nurse.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1709087/?page=1
On the cruciferous vegetable thing, I can say that it is a real phenomenon at least for some babies in certain circumstances. One of our babies was particularly prone to gas, and we had a few horrible nights. Finally, after the worst night of crying we'd ever had, it dawned on us that my wife had eaten a salad with raw brussels sprouts and also eaten cooked brussels sprouts that night. Once she cut out the brussels sprouts and went easy on the broccoli, the problem mostly went away.
Whatever the chemical in brussels sprouts that causes gas is, evidently it is active at pretty low concentrations at least for certain babies.
This lead to a lot of truly regrettable food — when my grandmother did home economics classes the focus was always on things like having enough calories for manual laborers on a budget, cooking thoroughly to avoid the chance of disease, etc. which really emphasized meat and carbs, and techniques like pressure cooking (which allowed you to eat cheaper cuts of meat). Enjoying your food was not a priority. Her children were quite happy when she got into California cuisine back when that was new.
My daughter ate olives, Brussels sprouts, lettuce, cabbage, whatever really, from age 2 to 3.
Now she's older and there's a bit of "asserting my independence" thing but she still loves Brussels sprouts.
The one thing I cannot deal with is Beets. Which is the only food my father hated.
And yet I've seen it on TV shows in both the U.K., and Australia.