Has there ever been a mother who didn’t worry about what her children ate?
Has there ever been a mother working and writing in the sustainable food movement who didn’t battle the tendency to define her self-worth in terms of what her toddler would and would not eat?
Has there ever been a mother who won a battle of wills with her three-year-old?
No, no, and no, I would venture.
Feeding children is such a minefield. One day they gobble up mushrooms as fast as you can chop them, and you’re on top of the world. The next day they won’t eat anything but plain rice and declare that carrots—carrots!—are “too spicy.” But the worst of it comes from the other parents. Do you make your own baby food? Grow your own baby food? Source your baby food locally from farms that use regenerative agricultural practices? Avoid all added sugars? Are the chicken nuggets organic?!
What’s the way out? My approach, as so often, is to turn back to MFK Fisher.
1. Balance the day, not the meal.
“One of the stupidest things in an earnest but stupid school of culinary thought is that each of the three daily meals should be ‘balanced.’… Instead of combining a lot of dull and sometimes actively hostile foods into one routine meal after another, three times a day and every day, year after year, in the earnest hope that you are being a good provider, try this simple plan: Balance the day, not each meal in the day.” (“How to Be Sage without Hemlock,” How To Cook a Wolf).
Sometimes my son eats nothing but cheesy noodles or sliced pear. Other times he stands on a stool at the counter and gobbles down beet after beet, or eats a whole bell pepper still warm from the garden, or pries open a dozen steamed clams he dug from the beach that morning. Sometimes we balance the week rather than the day.
2. Savor tangerines.
“In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them… Separate each plump little pregnant crescent.” (“Borderland,” Serve It Forth).
Fisher places her tangerine segments on the radiator for hours to swell and then plunges them into snow. B. waits to eat his until he has arranged all the scraps of peel by size on the table. “This is a big one, Mama! This one looks like a boat.” We all have our own ways of savoring food, our own idiosyncratic pleasures at the table. These peculiarities are the stuff of life, not a roadblock on the way to healthy eating.
3. Cultivate intelligent appetite.
“It is not enough to make a child hungry; if he is moderately healthy he will have all the requisites of a normal pig or puppy or plant-aphis, and will eat when he is allowed to, without thought. The important thing, to make him not a pig or a puppy, nor even a delicate green insect, is to let him eat from the beginning with thought. Let him choose his foods, not for what he likes as such, but for what goes with something else, in taste and in texture and in general gastronomic excitement.” (“How to Be a Wise Man,” How to Cook a Wolf)
The goal, I try to remind myself, is not that my sons ingest three broccoli florets each on the evening of February 21, 2019. It is that they grow up to be capable of nourishing themselves adequately and that our shared mealtimes are reasonably pleasant until then.
What does this look like? Not like a cup and a half of vegetables ingested at regular intervals of every day, in full view of all the other parents in the neighborhood.
Instead: My son bites into his first pain au chocolat and says rapturously, “Mama, it’s like chocolate spanakopita!” He picks snap peas in our garden and opens the pods to count the orbs inside. His day care teacher tells us that he is usually the last child to leave the table, and that he often wonders aloud what his parents are eating for lunch. I hope this pleasure, in food and in the companionship it brings, will guide him as it guides me, on this day and on all his future days. Show us the way, Mary Frances.