picky eaters – The Inquisitive Eater

Non-Fiction April 10, 2013

Buttered Noodles

by Tolly Wright

When I was growing up, my mother loved to cook, my father loved restaurants, and I loved buttered noodles.

While single and in her 30s, my mother discovered the Joy of Cooking (both the sentiment and the book). A decade later, by the time I was cognizant, she had a bookshelf as tall at the ceiling filled with cookbooks. She found excitement in discovering new recipes and would jump at any bit of food writing in The New Yorker or Southern Living.

She particularly took care to prepare great dishes for the few nights a week when her stepdaughters (my half sisters) would join us for supper. She’d spend hours in the kitchen: marinating meats, chopping salads, and doing whatever it is cooks do on counter tops. I, meanwhile, stayed planted firmly in my place adjacent to the kitchen in front of the television. On a Tuesday night, had I not been so entranced by a rerun of Full House, I might have seen my mother preparing crab imperial served in the old-fashioned pale pink scallop shells her grandmother gave her. Two days later, on a Thursday I might have smelled the cooking meatloaf made from the veal, pork, and ground beef of the best butcher in Baltimore. I didn’t care what she was making; I knew regardless of her meal plan there was a special pot on the stove boiling my supper. On nights like this, my sisters would set the long wooden table and my father would change the channel to Jeopardy.

As my mother would finish the final touches to her masterpiece and my custom order, my father would quiz me on the state capitals and my sisters would run to the second fridge in the basement for sodas. My mother would deliver my dish on top of my placemat, a plastic map of the United States, just as my father would ask me the capital of one of the difficult middle states like Kentucky (the answer is Frankfurt). The plates in front of my family would be full and balanced; everything my mother cooked miraculously came out hot at the same time. After we said grace my mother would take a bit of whatever it was she cooked, chew it for a moment, and say something to the affect of “su-perb.” She would turn “superb” into two separate words for affect. We all knew our cue and would compliment the chef. I never had to put on an act; I was always pleased with the plate prepared special for me.

My mother is an excellent purveyor of buttered noodles.

When my father was in his mid-thirties and legally separated from his first wife, he discovered all that Baltimore restaurants had to offer. He would dine at crab shacks, French bistros, steak houses, the restaurants of Little Italy, and the most elegant and famous of restaurants in the Inner Harbor. When he married my mother he knew having a baby was part of the deal, but one child does not have to get in the way of dining out; One child has no one to kick under the table or hair to pull; One child is easy to bribe with promises of ice cream or chocolate cake. Besides, he had three other girls, already teenagers, whom could be paid to stay with the younger sibling while he and she could have a night out on the town.

A few times a month my mother would put me in a dress, place a large bow in my hair, and us three would go out to dinner. My parents would gush over the menus and tell stories about occasions when they had been to the restaurant with friends pre-marriage (and pre-me). Sometimes one or two of their friends would join us, compliment me on my dress, politely listen to me brag about how much smarter I was than the other kids in my class (I wasn’t), and then the reminiscing of old times would begin. My mother would occasionally stop to point out a famous Baltimorean at another table.

“Over there is Peter Angelos,” my mother would whisper excitedly, as if any young girl cares about the old rich attorney who owns the Baltimore Orioles.

At home or in a restaurant—I didn’t care—I ate buttered noodles.

Inevitably, my chosen diet was occasionally disparaged: my mother was humiliated when I refused to eat tomato sauce at an Italian restaurant and my father became angry every time I tried to sneak a bit of chicken to the dog hiding underneath our kitchen table. My parents would attempt to beg or bribe me into trying new foods. They would tease me and insult my pride, and tell me I was worse than a little baby. Exasperated, they would claim that I could not be their child because I lacked their culinary adventurism.

‘But I am adventurous!’ I thought woefully. After all, I ate many things: linguini, fettuccini, ravioli, macaroni, bow-tied pasta, cart-wheel pasta, and angel hair pasta with parmesan cheese. I was also multi-cultural: for an entire month I had eaten Chinese noodles (with butter). I ate broccoli, carrots, string beans, and the skin off apples. I always ate any sweet that was put in front of me, except, of course, if it had a fruit in it or too much icing. In a bind, I even ate couscous!

By the time I left for college my pallet had expanded considerably. I ate meatloaf, hamburgers, swordfish, flounder, chicken, turkey sandwiches, grilled cheeses, hot dogs, soup, and an apple in its entirety and its different forms. When I arrived in Chicago for college, I quickly realized that wasn’t enough. I was surrounded by completely new people, people unaware of my finicky eating habits. If I wanted to be the cool easy-going person I pretended to be, than I was going to have to force myself into the unknown.

And I did.

Now in my mid-twenties in New York, I have been feeding myself for the past five years. My timid exploration of new foods when I first left the nest gave way to a love of spices and foods with names I cannot pronounce. I went from looking at the menu for something safe to asking the waiters for something good. When I visit my parents for the weekend, the question always arises of what I want to eat for dinner. I tell my mother that she can surprise me or that she can cook whatever she wants; I eat everything. When I arrive, she always serves the same things: meatloaf, crab cake sandwiches, hamburgers, swordfish, and grilled cheese with bacon. She cooks them because they are my “favorites.” I don’t bother to argue. If my sisters and nieces aren’t over to eat, then my father will still quiz me, “What is the capital of Nevada?” (Carson City). When he tires of this, my mother will ask me what we should eat for dinner the next night. I reiterate that I eat everything; I have even eaten sweet breads.

“Gross,” they say.

Every time I visit, we eat at the French restaurant around the corner from my parent’s house. I sit in restaurant and, without fail, witness my mother order the Trout Almondine, her favorite, and my father order some dish with either ham or lamb in it. They tell me stories of their friends now: so-and-so recently had a stroke, this friend had a hip replacement, or that friend had heart surgery. I regale them with my stories of New York: the Thai restaurant I went to on a date, the Indian place we went after my friend’s show, the Mexican sushi fusion place I tried on my own. They say it sounds too spicy. I tell them they lack adventure.

When I return to New York after a visit home, I go straight to my kitchen. There, I take out a box from my designated cabinet. I put a pot on the stove and boil some water. I place a colander in the sink. I retrieve the butter out of the fridge. I prepare the dish that no one else knows is my favorite: buttered noodles.

Tolly Wright is a current undergraduate student in The New School for Public Engagement’s Riggio Honors Program for Writing and Democracy.

Books & Media October 17, 2012

Book Review: French Kids Eat Everything

by Mandy Beem-Miller

French Kids Eat Everything is a journey: part memoir, part research analysis, with a touch of “self help” mixed in, following author Karen Le Billion and her family as they relocate to France. The one-year experiment begins with a self-admitted romantic vision of French life and a legitimate desire to expose her young family to a new cultural experience. But, it quickly becomes apparent that fresh baguettes and butter -while enticing even to her young daughters, is not solely what the French experience is made of. Vacationing is not the same as living in her French husband’s quaint seaside home town. The reality sets in when the children are enrolled in school. Seven year old Sophie and three-year old Claire are faced with an entirely new set of standards in their French classrooms, the most challenging of which involve an unspoken list of food rules. Starting as early as pre-school, the French, both at home and in the classroom, spend a great deal of time and effort dedicated to ensuring young people develop healthy eating habits, in addition to proper manners surrounding meal times. As Le Billion tells us, “The French think about healthy eating habits the way North American parents think about toilet training or reading.” The result is, the author noted in her year abroad, a society in which even the youngest citizens recognize the importance of eating well. The underlying concept of the French food education model stems from an adamant respect for food. Respect not just for the ingredients, but for the mealtimes themselves.

As Le Billion tells us, “The French think about healthy eating habits the way North American parents think about toilet training or reading.”

Le Billion’s own two children are, much to the chagrin of her French husband and his family, particularly picky eaters. While this type of behavior is quite common among American children, their finicky eating habits are not well received in France. In addition to being expected to eat whatever is put in front of them, the girls are faced with new meal-time etiquette. At social dinners with their parents they are expected to sit through long meals. In school the many snack times often afforded American children, are unheard of in their new country, but for one late afternoon gouter, usually consisting of fresh fruit. This seemingly stringent new policy is not a welcome challenge, for either Le Billion to enforce or her daughters to follow. As the mother herself confesses, one way to ensure the girls were getting enough calories was to supplement their meals (and refusal of certain healthier foods) with mid morning, mid afternoon, late afternoon and bedtime snacks. Before coming to France there was lots of “short order cooking” to please her daughters, and very little, if any, of the “gentle authority” Le Billion observes in France, at getting the kids to eat the items they were refusing.

The distance from her comfort zone allows Le Billion a fresh perspective, and with new eyes she begins to re-examine the relationship her own family has with food. Ultimately she realizes that beyond being unacceptable for cultural reasons in France, the eating habits they have become accustomed to are detrimental to the health of her family. Snacking, in place of being expected to eat what was on their plates at meal times, was only giving the girls an opportunity to fill up on less healthy foods. Le Billion jokes that before their year in France, Gold Fish Crackers were considered a food group in her family. More broadly, she surmises, some of these behaviors are likely contributing factors to the obesity crisis we as a nation face in the US.

In concert with the inclusive French education model, the Le Billion and her husband are determined to “reeducate” their children, French style. Accordingly, the family embraces a set of “French food rules” constructed by Le Billion herself, attempting to qualify and quantify the many universally accepted French cultural norms. With much protest from Claire and Sophie, Le Billion attempts to adopt this new way of eating. She swears off short order cooking for her fussy eaters (the kids will eat what the adults eat), she puts a kibosh on the incessant snacking, and she attempts to enjoy first cooking, and then eating, the dinner meal, as a family, every night.

In the meantime, Le Billion comes to terms with her own particular eating habits and how these behaviors affect her children. Before her French experiment, she tells us, she too had many foods she refused to eat, she also snacked between meals and rewarded her children with sweets for good behavior. Likely in an effort to avoid a condescending tone when harping on all of the “bad American habits” she reminds the reader that she, too, is guilty on all accounts. The self-deprecation becomes tiring, even coming off somewhat fabricated, but ultimately does not detract from the underlying message: quit snacking so much, eating so fast, refusing to try new things, eating alone, and missing family dinners because we “just don’t have the time.” We can always make time, we just have to prioritize.

We learn from Le Billion’s book it is not common for the French to snack, or eat meals alone. They generally don’t eat in their cars or on the train, or drink coffees on the street. The families in the Le Billion’s adopted village eat long meals together, at both lunch and dinner, and their kids join them and eat everything on their plates. There are no specials meals for the youngsters or kids who will only eat pasta or cheese. But the French work hard at achieving this. As humans we all have a penchant for the salty, the sweet, the fatty. But in France, they start from a young age, instilling a few basic tools to help navigate the food world. The official food guide for the country warns against snaking, and snack food ads on French TV come along with banners warning against eating between meals. The French emphasize restraint. Simplicity. Enjoyment. The children are encouraged to try everything and given no alternative options. Additionally, they get support- from school, from home, from society- to enjoy meal times. To savor their food. To slow down and just eat. The average lunch period in American schools is 30 minutes. In France, it’s a full hour, sometimes more.

Though Le Billion is met with resistance from her children at every turn, the girls do eventually slowly become more open to vegetables and trying new foods. With some parental enforcement, the kids learn to sit through family dinners together, and even enjoy this new activity. The book is encouraging: here is a “regular” North American family able to alter their bad food habits: couldn’t we all learn from them?

Perhaps with an altered view of food, and consumption, we could steer ourselves away from the cliff, shrink our collectively expanding waistlines.

We hear about the obesity crisis a lot these days. But maybe we don’t need to create laws taxing sugary beverages or banning particularly unhealthy oils, as some health advocates are pushing for. Perhaps with an altered view of food, and consumption, we could steer ourselves away from the cliff, shrink our collectively expanding waistlines. Food behaviors, like other good and bad habits, are learned. We do have some modicum of control over what our kids do (and don’t do), will and won’t eat. Still, as the author herself admits, the French “rules” do not always translate well back home. Short of some type of cultural revolution, complete with education reform and the restructuring of the American work/school schedules to include time for longer French style lunch break, many of the French food rules become difficult to comply with. But Le Billion makes it clear: there is an art to raising healthy eaters, and you can never start too soon. Our nation’s children are becoming increasingly overweight and French children are not. In 2008, the CDC reported that more then one third of American children are obese, a number that has more then tripled in the last three decades. These troubling statistics are inspiring the re-introduction of scratch cooking in many school districts, a Farm to School movement, and legislation like the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act, which aims to improve the quality of the National School Lunch Program. Still, what Le Billion’s book reminds us is that the food education of our children needs to be comprehensive. It must start at home, around our own kitchen tables.

If, like myself, you too have fantasies of living abroad, French Kids Eat Everything may revitalize your own dreams of becoming an expat. Along with the author and her family, you may picture yourself eating fresh warm baguettes with butter and mussels caught that day and bathed in little more then a crisp white wine. At the same time it could make you think twice about this romantic notion , exposed to the possible isolation of a big move. Though the book is centered on kids and nutrition, the take away is something more. At the core it discusses is “mindful eating”- a practice that both the author, myself, and undeniably many other Americans do not always adhere to. While the book, in title and content, will undoubtedly appeal to parents of young children, the message is ultimately universal: it’s hard to deny that we could all benefit from snacking less and eating together more, essentially practicing the ingrained cultural idiom, long one of the stalwarts of French culture, of enjoying, savoring, and truly appreciating the food we eat. In this fast paced world sometimes a good meal is the best way to slow down. And I for one, am OK with that.

Mandy Beem-Miller is a recent graduate of The New School where she took classes in the Food Studies Program as well as several in the Writing Program.

Books & Media August 13, 2012

Book Review: Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate

by Larissa Zimberoff

Until I read Stephanie Lucianovic’s new book, Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate, I didn’t quite realize the range in picky eating. I had often referred to myself as a picky eater, the kind of person that only likes good food. Of course I qualified the word good by saying things like healthy, local, organic, or even just tasty. In Stephanie Lucianovic’s book she attempts to determine why kids, and “finicky eating” adults, decide not to eat foods based on looks, taste or feel. Why do we have strong aversions to certain foods and, while we’re at it, what is succotash?

Simpler than I imagined, succotash is a mixture of sautéed lima beans, tomatoes and corn. It actually sounded pretty good, but I’m not twelve. Lucianovic grew up as one of those “three more bites and you’re done” kind of kids. She tells us she complained about things touching on her plate, steered clear of any food with a skin and more, subsisting on a narrow list of approved items from the four food groups. Just the cherry from the fruit cup please. Lucianovic had ways to manage the bad foods on her plate; she had places to hide them (try the books in the living room) and physical techniques to swallow them (deep breaths and lots of water). She was a food vanishing magician.

In addition to sharing her own funny stories, like when she was forced to eat “squishy and maple-syruped and gross” squash before she could leave the table, Lucianovic interviews friends and colleagues who were also picky. Like her chef friend Julie, who wouldn’t eat anything that she thought was “’wet,’ like a condiment,” or her friend Jeff, who “has a complex relationship with tomatoes”:

Chunks of tomatoes, like in salsa, are fine, but a quarter of a tomato is too much. What about slices of tomatoes? “I won’t eat them sliced,” Jeff tells me. “In fact, I just pulled one out of my hamburger and threw it out the window on my way home this morning.”

As a compliment to the storytelling, Lucianovic does her best to give a nod to scientific research, both the at-home and in-lab kind. Purchasing a chemistry kit from an online lab supply store to determine if she’s a supertaster or an undertaster, Lucianovic finds out she’s neither. Disappointed with her results, she turns to Dr. Danielle Reed, from the Monell Chemical Senses Center, “the worlds only interdependent, non-profit scientific institute dedicated to research on the senses of taste and smell,” and procures an invite to spend time at their lab, or, as she calls it: DNA Camp. Once there, Lucianovic learns about TAS2r38, one of twenty-five bitter taste receptor genes we inherit, one from each of our parents. And this is where taste gets more complicated. And more interesting.

In addition to TAS2r38, Lucianovic learns about a newly discovered sixth taste. Not just five. Six. Until recently, we learn, our concept of taste was built on sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Adding to that list, scientists discovered a sixth taste, called calcium/mineral, which a scientist at the lab said tasted, to him, like fat-free milk. This sixth sense piqued my interest, but didn’t get me any closer to the why’s of picky.

The author does provide some very plausible reasons kids are picky: they reject on visual alone; they reject based on family tension at the dinner table; they can’t stand the texture of the food; they have some level of OCD; they have an over eager gag reflex. So here’s my dilemma: How does a non-scientist explain why people eat what they eat and is it at all possible to explain without being anecdotal?

Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate is a unique spin on a serious problem. Both on the kid level, how do you get them to eat their vegetables? And on the adult level, how do you manage telling people you have specific needs? The book is cute, but too light and flip for this picky eater, who wanted an Aha moment along with her small yield, heirloom lima beans from California.

To read an interview with the author, click here!

Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate
By Stephanie Lucianovic
Perigee Books, Published July 3, 2012

Larissa Zimberoff is a freelance writer living in Manhattan. She is currently working towards her MFA at The New School. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Untapped Cities and The Rumpus.