The Gravy Baby shoveling edamame, one of his favorite foods
I’m not an expert in childhood development or nutrition, but what I can state with certainty is this: Ge Ge eats a scary amount of food, and adventurously. He picks apart edamame pods with aplomb, loves a wobbly spoonful of roasted bone marrow, and never turns up his nose at a fall-off-the-bone braised meat.
Our mission to mold him into the little foodie he is today began before he was born. The hubby and I vowed that we’d try as hard as we could to avoid having a picky eater in our house. We both love to eat, cook and talk about food way too much to have our child push away a plate of slow-roasted osso bucco or steamed whole fish. We read what we could find about encouraging adventurous eating in children, but were dismayed when we found a whole lot of sentiment out there about disguising food for young children. We ended up consulting our friends who have raised hearty eaters themselves, and here, over the course of two years, is a list of seven rules we’ve combined from them that we try to abide by:
1. For the first two years, avoid refined sugar or foods that are excessively high in sodium. The hubby and I view the palate as a spectrum, with extremely salty on one side of the spectrum and extremely sweet on the other. For the first two years, we tried to stay in the healthy middle. We didn’t feed Ge Ge ice cream, baked goods of any kind, and even pre-flavored yogurt (check an ingredient label the next time you dig into strawberry yogurt — there’s an astonishing amount of refined sugar added!). That also meant that we didn’t consume these things in front of him or make them readily available to us, either. The same held true with salty foods — we avoided salty snacks like chips and pretzels, and I always carefully scrutinized the sodium content of any snacks we chose for him. Of course, this meant that Ge Ge’s second birthday was a sugar explosion. Since then, we’ve eased up on this rule and let him indulge along with us every once in awhile — after all, some of the best food out there is ridiculously sweet and decadent.
I love this. Now, if only you could train 30-something guys the same way, it would help my dating prospects. 🙂