when inspiration strikes--who will link sooner to the inexplicably overlooked NYT article???
Children's menus, blech. A children's wine list, on the other hand, would be a great idea.
Very few nice restaurants in NYC seem to bother with kids' menus, because most of the bourgeois kids here pride themselves on their love of sushi and duck confit. At least, Max's kids dared themselves to order stuff like frogs' legs. One of their friends would not eat anything but plain spaghetti with butter. He was mocked as often as possible.
Most and bourgeois in that sentence are defined quite narrowly -- we're bourgeois, but not in a class of people where the kids are conventionally eating duck confit. There's a lot of chicken nuggets eaten by the children of NY professionals.
Actually, it might be less of a class thing and more of a Park Slope thing. Park Slope is like 40% children, it often seems, but I can only think of one or two restaurants with kids' menus.
There's a lot of chicken nuggets eaten by the children of NY professionals.
The dark secret comes out.
Upper class is the new middle class.
The real danger to kids and parents eating well is baseball. Well, baseball, football, swim meets, soccer, track, etc.
When your kids are constantly at practice or games during dinner time, it is difficult to eat well.
Fries, burgers, hot dogs, sodas.
If only they served delicious sushi at a reasonable price at the ball field!!
Mine actually don't eat chicken nuggets all that frequently, but there's an awful lot of pizza.
It does seem like an enterprising soul with an authentic arepas or taquitos cart could make a killing trolling the ball fields in the park.
If only they served delicious sushi at a reasonable price at the ball field!!
Time to move to San Francisco, will.
Park Slope parents compete with each other in training their children to eat exotic foods. Organic-fed, free-range children.
Fewer feeding children threads! More eating children threads!
"Time to move to San Francisco, will."
Spending a lot of time at children's sporting events, ogged?
Oh, you said "ball field" like where the kids play, not "ball park" where the pros play. Nevermind. You can stay in Virginia.
Do they sell sushi at pro games? Or is sushi only available self-caught while waiting for Bonds' homers?
By Cerebrocrat in the other thread at 341:
I don't get picky-eaterism. The stakes are so low - you try something new/weird and if it's good, you have a new pleasure available for the rest of your life; if it's bad, you have one yucky mouthful to live through. The risk equation here would clearly seem to favor adventurism.
Any ideas about the neuro of taste and its development? My brother went through a couple of decades of nothing but hamburgers and other bland stuff and then morphed into someone who would be happy to try Klingon food were it on the menu and to seek it out if he heard a rumor of a place serving it.
I don't know about the neurology of taste perception. I do know that when I see the (indulged) kids of friends and acquaintances who refuse to eat lots of different foods, it looks a lot like they've been conditioned that way by their parents and then indulged. That is, it looks a lot like nurture.*
* Obviously that's not always the case. I know families where one sibling is an adventurous eater, and the other is not.
9: Time to move to Corona/Flushing.
I know families where one sibling is an adventurous eater, and the other is not
This is mostly the case with ours, and they're twins.
As an ex-picky eater, I'd say that I have the impression there's at least something physiological going on. I was exposed to reasonably varied foods as a kid, and not catered to (that is, my parents made dinner. I could eat whatever I liked of what was on the table, but my preferences weren't consulted in arriving at the menu), but I was pretty limited to unsauced meat, bread, potatoes, some but not many vegetables, and a very limited spectrum of seasonings.
I hit college, and moved into a semi-vegetarian co-op where the members took turns making dinner for thirty every night, which meant an eclectic cuisine with a lot of spicing, legumes, and so forth, and haven't looked back since -- I'll eat most things happily now (some things still set off childhood revulsion - good summer tomatoes are delicious now, but pink, mealy winter tomatoes nauseate me.)
I don't think my childhood pickiness was nurture -- I think I was just really sensitive to some textures and flavors, and grew out of it during adolescence. (Now, I was capable of being polite -- even as a kid, handed an entirely unfamiliar meal, I'd nibble at things until I found something bland enough to eat. I do think that a kid who refuses to attempt anything unfamiliar has been poorly raised.)
My experience with food tastes is exceedingly parallel to LB's. I think I grew out of the pickiness physiologically before I grew out of it psychologically though -- that is I held on to e.g. the "I hate mushrooms" idea longer than it was actually true. The shock of new surroundings and new social peers when I left home made me realize my tastes had changed.
pink, mealy winter tomatoes nauseate me
This is not evidence of being unduly influenced by bad childhood memories.
I agree that I probably lost a couple of years in high school rejecting food because I was used to not liking it -- if I'd been immersed in unfamiliar food a few years earlier, I probably would have gotten adventurous younger.
LB: pink, mealy winter tomatoes nauseate me
Clownæ: This is not evidence of being unduly influenced by bad childhood memories.
Yeah, but it's so blindingly true (blech!) that one can only pause and nod knowingly in agreement.
the nice thing about the NYT piece (and the thread) is the extent to which both play up the pleasure angle. I grew up eating a lot of nuggets and mac and cheese and am not an adult picky eater and haven't had weight or health issues; it's not necessarily generative of some crisis. a lot of nuggets may just amount to conditioning that results in missing some windows for diverse food pleasure.
that said, i think there is a pleasure stake in asserting and enforcing one's (childhood, adolescent) picky tastes. there's a sense of individuality tied up in it, however illusory.
eeew. the mealy inner bits are like a heap of degrading plastic granules in water.
re: 22
That's interesting. I can think of a small number of things that I really genuinely hated as a child which I like now, so I suppose I can imagine a broader process where someone moves from liking only a few things to liking lots of things.
i read the quote from cerebrocrat and think, yup, you don't get picky eaterism.
To be unable to understand the revulsion and loathing that both children and adults feel at putting certain substances into their mouths is just to deny the existence of a whole range of human experience.
And to suppose that it is learned also strikes me as silly. Sure, some of the details are learned (why I would blanch at blubber and eskimos would balk at brie). But every member of every culture has some things they think are just too gross to put in their mouths.
when I was a kid I ate relatively few foods. Now, I eat a lot more. I have come to love mushrooms, brocolli, even brussel sprouts--many things that I once viewed with utter abhorrence.
But I still find all forms of seafood disgusting. I will eat them when social circumstances absolutely require it; I even shoveled bouillabaise into my mouth once because a friend had prepared it. But i did it with roughly the same reluctance with which I would have shoveled fresh chicken turds into my mouth. It was utterly disgusting.
now about my up-bringing. I'm old enough to have been raised by survivors of the depression. We ate every miserable scrap of leathery liver, slimey sole, and rancid radish that was dished up for us. We tried to refuse sometimes, because the food was so disgusting, and my mother would hit us with wooden spoons if we would not do it. That was after sitting staring at the plate for several hours, in the "you'll eat that or you won't leave the table" gambit. So, yeah, they made a parenting effort.
Again, some of the things that repelled me then are hunky dory now. I do encourage my kids to try new foods (though I do not beat them when they won't). But an intense, visceral sense of loathing at the prospect of putting certain things into your mouth is simply part of the human make-up, and I myself still feel it in regard to all seafood.
I just don't get people who don't get picky eaterism.
Yeah, I think the issue with nuggets, etc, isn't so much that they're unchallenging as that they're unchallenging and they're crap. Most kids will eat a steak, and will enjoy a good steak -- the average adult menu has something even a picky eater will tolerate, and if it's good food they'll appreciate it more than another nasty fried lump of protein.
"Bourgeois" came up even earlier than I would have anticipated, but I am willing to take wagers at 8 to 3 that someone will use "transgressive" by comment #100, and at 5 to 2 that "normative" will occur by comment #80. Cash up front, please. Not that I don't trust you, but it's a matter of professional responsibility.
It does seem like an enterprising soul with an authentic arepas or taquitos cart could make a killing trolling the ball fields in the park.
"All is in tune
On a spring afternoon..."
My niece is a moderately picky eater -- much more because she can be a demanding little madam who has to get her own way than because she genuinely dislikes stuff -- but last time we went out to eat she ordered from the adult menu and had an ordinary adult meal brought. The waitress was genuinely shocked to see a kid eating something that wasn't nuggets. Which was kind of sad.
That is clearly much more about social convention and the 'kids eat nuggets' orthodoxy than it is about any genuine revulsion on the part of the kids.
I do understand the revulsion thing, though -- fava beans (broad beans) made me literally want to vomit.
But an intense, visceral sense of loathing at the prospect of putting certain things into your mouth
cf. Twisty's BJ thread.
The key might be to make adventurous or challenging foods seem transgressive; not transgressive like shark fin, so much, as transgressive like cake for breakfast. i just this afternoon convinced my daughter that mini-rice cakes (plain) are chips. the transgressiveness of the category alone whetted her appetite.
also, i think it is worth noting that there is a laziness to my parenting that makes nuggets tempting: they are pretty much mess free toddler foodstuff, assuming you ban ketchup. which i do ban, from my house, because i heave at the thought of it touching my mouth.
I too was a non-seafood eater for most of my life, and it seems like certain textures are associated with "rotten" or "sick-making" for some people. I got over it by trying seafood again at a very fancy place, where I figured that it was least likely to make me sick. Since I got over the trepidation that the smell and texture of fish meant illness, I've been able to enjoy it.
Yep. Pizza is dinner for the kids that you don't have to cook. I think everyone's lazy that way.
37: You're a flippanter ringer, aren't you, rachel?
did you ask the permission of the proprietors of the very fancy place before you tried that trick?
cause, I mean, it could have gone very wrong,
My brother was a very picky eater. We had apple trees, and in the summer he would start trying to live on apples before they were even quite ripe.
"picky" doesn't mean "indiscriminantly picks food from trees", John.
41: i just live and breathe trangression.
I was horrendously picky as a child & grew out of it. Couldn't say to what extent it was psychological or physiological; I think there must be some of both.
I've noticed that as I started to like more things as an adult there was often a "gateway" food or drink that got me willing to try more new things--even though I might actually find that gateway on the boring side now. For Chinese food it was General Tso's Chicken; for wine it was merlot (& a trip to Europe where we ordered the house wine a lot because it was cheap); for Indian, Chicken Tikka kebabs; for beer, Newcastle; for mexican, chicken fajitas; for sushi, eel (granted, I was pretty far away from only eating hot dogs, pb & j, & every variety of cheerio by the time I was willing to try even cooked eel). That leads me to think that sheer familiarity or unfamiliarity is a lot of it, but it doesn't necessarily mean that my parents would've won a battle of wills if they'd forced me to eat a wider variety.
For a lot of other foods, eating at a really good restaurant or food cooked by a really good cook was the key step. My (Park-Slope-dwelling) in laws were key facilitators in this....God bless my grandmother, but she dried the crap out of the meat at every holiday meal.
39: Yeah, one thing about nurture is that nauseatingness feeds on itself -- if you think of a foodstuff as nauseating, it gets worse the more you think about it. I think breaking the cycle with an absolutely delicious version of whatever the possibly distasteful food is works really well.
That's how I started eating raw fish -- it was too weird to think about until I went to Samoa. There, hardly dead raw tuna is bar food. (I don't know if you can call it sashimi, given that no one Japanese is involved. Just bite-size chunks of fish that was swimming under an hour ago.) After that, raw fish went from scary to luscious, and I could try it under less favorable circumstances without fighting my prior impression that it was disgusting.
27: This is a really interesting observation. I suspect at times that the adventurousness of my daughter's palate is as much an expression of her little wild child as it is of her actual culinary preferences. Oh, the reaction we get when we tell people we love a good bit of unagi, but won't touch PB&J!
God bless my grandmother, but she dried the crap out of the meat at every holiday meal.
Somehow, I married into a culinarily impaired family, and our first holiday meals were astonishingly unappetizing. If my mother-in-law -- god bless her -- wrote a cookbook, all the recipes would read like this: Assemble ingredients. Place dish in oven. Cook the living shit out of it.
children's tastebuds are more sensitive than we jaded old adults. so it's good not to push them too much.
it is mind-blowing to think that i once did not like fresh tomatoes though. (texture. until age 6 or 7).
Only somewhat related: at a party a few years back, I was manning the grill and had a request for a well-done steak. I kept trying to give it to the guy before it was--by my lights--ruined, and he finally said "Look, I don't want it until it bounces and says 'clink clink clink' when you throw it on the plate."
I'm surprised nobody seemed to want to be grown up when they were a kid. By the time I was 6 I was eating olives and chicken curries (not at the same time), and drinking black coffee, and I was learning to like them, because I would be damned if I wasn't as good as my parents, and that was the stuff grown up people did.
At the same time, my kindergarten inculcated a horror of sausages that lasted till I left home, simply by cooking them so badly. Kids are not consistent.
children's tastebuds are more sensitive than we jaded old adults. so it's good not to push them too much.
Nonsense. My children will eat only habaneros with a side of Cholula until the ripe old age of 18.
Everything about the natural basis of children having a more limited palate that's been said in the last dozen comments seems plausible, and makes me even more nonplussed about the aspersions on the parenting skills of people whose kids preferred familiar food that were being cast in the other thread.
"children's tastebuds are more sensitive than we jaded old adults. so it's good not to push them too much."
yea, i think this is wrong. it's good not to push them, but because their tendency to cathect control issues onto the one matter they can totally control - whether or not they ingest something - is staggeringly high, not because their tastebuds are precious.
40: The kids you do have to cook, of course, must have been fed even more fattening foods to make a nice veal.
55--
thank you, IDP. that's another of the points that should be made against those who refuse to countenance any natural basis for food-loathing.
(and, no, i don't normall go off on pinker-esque riffs about the evils of 'blank slate' ideologies. but after you have kids, and you try to expose them to a variety of foods, and they refuse, and you find yourself remembering your own childhood experience of being forced to eat crap, then you just think: better parenting is not going to overcome this deep-rooted abhorrence. better parenting here means leaving my kid the fuck alone and letting them grow into a wider food-choice when they grow up.)
55: You mean the thread about whether or not to force children to eat? Or was there another one I missed?
47: That's how I started eating raw fish
I started NOT eating raw fish and meat after taking a programming course (IBM Assembler, circa 1963) in a medical school. The hallway outside the amphitheater was filled with shelf after shelf of bottles holding the prized trophies of the parasitology boffins. I can still conjure up some mental images of those horrors.
That other one yesterday and today. And then there was this from this thread:
I do think that a kid who refuses to attempt anything unfamiliar has been poorly raised
18: Most of what I know about the neurology of taste perception doesn't help much with understanding food preferences. Some individual differences are clearly hard-wired, like differential expression of receptor types (e.g., asparagus-pee smellers, broccoli-funk tasters, capsicum-burn non-adapters) and, since I'm sure there are things like this that we haven't discovered yet, I'd bet some of the picky eaters I've bullied over the years could taste/smell unpleasant things that I couldn't.
I haven't read any research on it, but I'd bet good money that a big part of what goes on with tastes changing from childhood to adulthood has to do with all that prefrontal wiring that isn't finished until long after puberty. The things little kids take an easy liking to are simple exemplars of flavors associated with good calories - salty (protein) and sweet (carbs). Since their prefrontal cortex isn't really up to operating speed, they probably can't inhibit their emotional reactions to flavors - give 'em candy, and they feel undiluted joy; give 'em something bitter, and it feels like a crisis, because the unpleasantness of the flavor dominates their experience. Once prefrontal circuits start fully interacting with subcortical ones, I'd guess that one's emotional response to a food becomes much more tempered by complicated social/experiential associations. I'd bet if you put a picky-eating early teen in a situation where his social status among his peers depended on being an adventurous eater, you'd get an adventurous eater pretty quickly.
Similarly, I think kids tend to like uncomplicated textures, right? Maybe that comes from not yet having fully myelinated motor fibers, so they don't have the fine motor control in the tongue and fingers for dealing with seeds, bones, gristle, etc. I'm totally speculating though.
But it's delicious. What's an intestinal worm here and there among friends?
why I would blanch at blubber and eskimos would balk at brie
No insult to our friends the Eskimos, but I'm willing to suspend cultural relativism and declare the Inuit diet to be objectively vile. From Lawrence Millman's introduction to A Kayak Full of Ghosts (a really wonderful book, btw):
Eskimos have proved themselves capable of eating just about anything, including each other. Seal eyes and reindeer marrow they still consider the choicest of delicacies and the green fermented juices of a walrus's stomach the most piquant of seasonings. The slime from a walrus hide, garnished with human urine, was once thought to be princely fare. And then there was a time when a woman would take a mouthful of blubber, chew it, spit it out, take another mouthful, chew it and spit it out, until she had spat out a puddle deep enough to steep angelica stalks -- such was dessert in the old days. Even today the Eskimo displays very little gustatory qualm. Near Fort Chimo, Quebec, I was offered a snack of, I thought, crowberries. One taste told me the truth. They're weren't crowberries, but caribou droppings cooked in seal fat. I declined any more. The man who offered them to me shrugged and continued to pop them into his mouth like salted peanuts.
Have a nice lunch!
61: Well, yes. I still do. I sympathize with not liking a whole lot of foods, I was that kid. But being unwilling to try a bite of something new out of fear that you might dislike it is a separate issue, and reasonable manners (say, for a kid four or five and up) IMO requires that a kid learn to suck it up and make the attempt, and learn how to eat around their dislikes rather than demanding to be served familiar foods at all times. Parents who let their kids think that they can get through life on a diet of three or foor familiar things are doing their children a disservice.
re: 61
I don't know. Some of the kids I know have clearly been indulged in the sense that they are allowed to completely dictate what they want and where their every food whim is catered for.
There's a difference between at the one end, forcing your kids to always eat things they genuinely dislike and at the other end, simply allowing them always to only eat what they want.
I'd bet if you put a picky-eating early teen in a situation where his social status among his peers depended on being an adventurous eater, you'd get an adventurous eater pretty quickly.
I believe that is the premise of the book "How to eat Fried Worms."
Yeah, one thing about nurture is that nauseatingness feeds on itself -- if you think of a foodstuff as nauseating, it gets worse the more you think about it. I think breaking the cycle with an absolutely delicious version of whatever the possibly distasteful food is works really well.
OTOH... natto. Or Vegemite/Marmite.
I just don't get people who don't get picky eaterism.
Kid, I totally get food revulsions, and I have a few myself (brussells sprouts, gag). By picky-eaterism, and I'm talking about adults here, I mean a general attitude toward trying foods that does not tend to produce an expanding range of food pleasures over the course of your life. Forcing yourself to choke down stuff you don't like is crazy, but so is refusing to try things because they might be yucky, or because they resemble something you thought was yucky when you were five.
On the other hand, I think I recall hearing a guy who studies this exact subject say that all food revulsions are learned, even the ones you'd think would be hard wired like eating shit, rotten meat, etc. Reactions of disgust in all contexts I can think of are learned and socially mediated. That doesn't mean they're not powerful and would require a strong motivation to unlearn.
My blood kind of runs cold just thinking about brussells sprouts as I type, but since all of these good eaters I know really like them, I'll probably give them another try as soon as I can get someone to prepare me some fresh ones (and don't have to commit to an expensive plateful at a restaurant).
Marmite is one of those things I can make myself eat, but I genuinely don't understand why people would choose to eat it.
"Assemble ingredients. Place dish in oven. Cook the living shit out of it."
Sounds like my mom. She is scared silly of food-borne disease so she cooks everything WAY too long.
62: I've read somewhere that children's palates are much more sensitive to bitter tastes than adults' are.
Thus what may be pleasingly bitter to an adult (broccoli, coffee, beer) is likely to be overwhelmingly bitter to a child.
So you meant to be read:
I do think that a kid who refuses to [ever] attempt anything [at all] unfamiliar [and demands to be fed familiar food at all times] has been poorly raised
My kids, many kids get dragged fairly often to places where they don't really like anything, and make do with an appetizer for dinner rather than order something which will then go to waste when they try and can't stomach it. Doesn't mean we don't take them, when we really want something different, but who enjoys sharing a table with someone so unhappy? Doesn't mean we've stopping trying to please ourselves, and don't regularly overbear resistance; does mean we take them into consideration.
I'm overwhelming bitter to children, too. They're so senstitive, the ungrateful wretches.
A lot of the picky-eater adults I've know have had control-issues. Their picky-eaterism was largely about being the centre of attention, and being in control. Or at least that was a big part of it.
By picky-eaters here I mean something similar to cerebrocrat in 70. People who don't just dislike a couple of things, but people who dislike what sometimes seems like almost bloody everything.
This is been discussed before, I believe.
74: That sounds perfectly reasonable to me; I don't think we're actually disagreeing about anything much.
I'm like endives and medicine.
Mashed up aspirin, served with wheat grass.
Why do you all put up with this dribble, anyway?
oh yay, someone played along! Scratch 82!
"I'm overwhelming bitter to children, too. They're so senstitive, the ungrateful wretches."
Heebie-geebie, soccer coach extraordinaire:
"You SUCK!!"
That was me -- I don't know what happened to my name.
Every night is passover at the Geebie household.
70, 76--
yeah, okay, i certainly understand not liking grown-up prima donnas who insist that whatever way everyone else is eating cannot possibly be good enough for them.
i had an almost sister-in-law once--thank god she dumped my brother--who was a nightmare to dine out with. It wasn't just "have it your way, at Burger King", it was dictate to the hapless waiter every single detail of what she did and didn't want the chef to do. All dressings on the side, of course. And it comes with haricot verts? Well, she wanted string beans instead.
oy. sure, that picky-eaterism even *i* want to hit with a wooden spoon. but kids who think unfamiiliar stuff is yucky, them i want to cut some slack, esp. if they are willing to try a bit now and then.
ah, the horseradish. fond memories of my mom slicing disks off a fresh root and handing them around. good times.
on neurology: sure, i can see the just-so story about why we have receptors for sweet and salty. One is a carb-detector, and one a protein-detector.
but what is the object in the environment that we need to be able to sense that is bitter? What is the MDA for bitter stuff, and which particular bitter thing is the ideal supplier of it?
What are the bitter-taste buds tasting *for*, in other words, the way the sweet ones are going for sucrose and the salt ones going for NaCl?
Or is it entirely adversive, because of the high number of toxic plant alkalois?
speaking of which, I need more coffee.
Dig a hole. Stuff a seal carcass with bird eggs. Bury in hole. Dig up at the end of the summer when ripe. Mmmmmmmmm.
Icelanders have something like this too. Vietnamese rotten fish sauce is milder.
I don't really need special meals for the kids--just smaller portions. Preferably at a lower price.
I have one kid who will eat anything, one very picky kid, and one who's in the middle. Obviously the result of my parenting!
Oddly enough, the picky one, who always refused to drink her milk at breakfast until threatened, doesn't have diarrhea when she takes those lactaid pills. When I think of how many times she was almost late for school because she was running back to the bathroom, I don't understand why I didn't figure it out sooner (or get her orange juice). I wonder what else she has subconsciously picked up on that I haven't figured out yet.
64: Jesus, Jesus, that bit about caribou droppings really got to me. Even the slime from walrus hide mixed with urine didn't sound quite as revolting (though bad enough).
The rest of it sounds pretty gross to me, not something that I would ever want to try, but not something of which I would actively disapprove.
From the article: "It totally drives that early seating for us," he said. "The kids eat what they eat, and with our wine program, the parents can have fun."
This gets at an economic explanation for the kids' menu, especially least for those on tight budgets. Anecdote: I used to wait tables at a BBQ restaurant, and the kids' menu featured pricing with signifcantly lower margins than the adults'. On more than one occasion I saw a parent veto a child's aspiration to an adult-menu item purely on economic grounds: "Nope. Sorry. Too pricey. You can share some of Mommy's/Daddy's if you're still hungry."
72 -- See, I was counting on this when my daughter, just barely a toddler, reached for my coffee mug. "Ha, one sip and she'll hate it and never go near it again." Except she didn't. Took a sip, smiled broadly and was ready to gulp down the whole thing. She loved brocolli, too, which I was happier about. Has never tried beer, though, and likely won't for a good many more years because she is firmly committed to the idea that Alcohol is Bad.
I believe it's true that children's tastebuds are more sensitive, actually. I'm also not going to go along with the spoiled kid=picky eater thing, exactly: PK is pretty catered to in terms of food, in the sense that I treat him the way I would an adult. If he doesn't like something, that's cool, and I consult him when I fix meals about, say, does he like zucchini? If not, he can have sliced cucumbers instead.
And he pretty much eats like an adult too--he always wants to try new stuff and is far from picky. I'd love to take credit for this, and I think to some extent dragging him to restaurants and not fussing at him over food have helped, but I think really it's partly luck.
That said, my sister is really strict with her kids about food, with the forbidding of sweets and so on, and they're both picky junk food addicts.
I figure whether there's a cause/effect thing going on or not, it's easier and more pleasant not to be a spaz about food.
94: My kid is much pickier as a 10 year old than he was as a toddler. He's still a decent eater, but at 2 he'd eat pretty much anything.
I don't really need special meals for the kids--just smaller portions. Preferably at a lower price.
Yup, I'd go for that. I was a bit surprised in that article that the writer didn't seem to start being bothered about the chicken nuggests until her children were 11 and 8. My eldest two are 8 and 10 and they almost always eat from the adult menu these days (and the 10 year old is the pickiest of the four), and the 6 year old will too if he sees something he wants.
Most of the places we eat out at these days (apart from emergency stops at clearly trashy places) have good kids menus - either half-size portions of adult food or simpler, smaller portions. Or we go to the lovely Sardinian place in town and the smaller kids will just have starter-sized pasta dishes (or where the fantastic staff will make them something special, lol!).
87: I've an acquaintance who has allergies to all 57 major and minor food groups. It's funny how, after all the instructions issued to waiters and cooks at various restaurants and the careful examination of each item on the way to her mouth, she always manages to eat some of the deadly stuff and become the center of attention for about a half-hour.
On more than one occasion I saw a parent veto a child's aspiration to an adult-menu item purely on economic grounds:
Oh hell yes, when the entree is $20 and the kid'll eat an eight of it. One has to bite one's tongue and remind oneself that it's possible to box it and take it home. I usually read to PK off the appetizers menu, but not the entrees, jeez.
89: I vaguely remember reading that some plains tribe (Assiniboine?) did a similar thing with buffalo. Bury it until you can eat it with a spoon.
96: Definitely true. PK grew out of of liking some things for a while, though he's rediscovering a few of them again.
I usually read to PK off the appetizers menu
If you would teach him to read, he'd feel less opprosed by your matronizing ways.
98:
Lady, I do desire we should become less well acquainted!
Can't say I've ever done this, but good restaurants make substitutions all the time, and it seems perfectly reasonable to ask them if they can serve a half order of something on the adult menu. I imagine a good number of entrees could be halved without any diadvantage to the restaurant (not the steaks or lobster tails, perhaps, but the pasta dishes). I shall try this next time we go out to eat!
Or is it entirely adversive, because of the high number of toxic plant alkalois?
That's the "just-so story" I've heard.
100 to 99.
Eat your Buffalo, dear. The box isn't big enough.
re: 97
Out of curiosity, which Sardinian place in town?
105--
thanks, 'crat.
and feel free to correct my spellings when i confuse
"alkali" with "alkaloids"
you, see? after coffee, i have no trouble spelling them.
ptaw--and to think my test-buds would have kept me away from caffeine, theobromine, and others! the injustice of it.
makes me bitter.
In our house, when we are feeling grumpy and thwarted, we often say, "I am bitter, like an herb."
102 He can read, and now I tell him to read his own damn menu. But he can't manage cursive. So I can still get away with denying him access to osso buco.
112: I was the "this stuff has gone bad" specialist in the family. I'd swear the rest of them would have never noticed a switch to that Eskimo diet of fermented navel grease.
re: 100
should that be 'like a herb'?
114: Not in the US, you silly British person.
110: I like to call people grumposauruses. When they're being them. I also like to say knowingly, "Grumpy is being grumpy."
yea, i think this is wrong. it's good not to push them, but because their tendency to cathect control issues onto the one matter they can totally control - whether or not they ingest something - is staggeringly high, not because their tastebuds are precious.
uh, your willingness to go with common science over scientific studies of anatomy is precious, rachel, but the number (and sensitivity) of tastebuds in your mouth do in fact decrease over time. pace the yale dietary studies and others. children have different taste experiences from adults.
re: 115
Yeah, the US pronunciation of 'herb' really irritates me. The combination of the rhotacized schwa in the middle and the dropped 'h' is like fingernails on a blackboard. I have no idea why, I can't think of any other pronunciation difference that does. Most of them I just chalk up to difference and accept (no prescriptivist, I).
There's a British shampoo advert which prominently feature the word 'herbal' pronounced with a strong US style pronunciation. My wife knows she can tease me to the point of actual anger by just repeating that word (in the style of the advert).
Yes, in US English that would have to be "bitter like a Herb."
118 -- is the word "suburb" similarly unpleasant to your ears?
I like it when British people misspell curb as kerb.
eddy izzard on U.S. pronunciation of 'herb'
and what exactly does a dropped 'h' sound like? do you hear them often?
122 - no, because there's no fucking "h" in it!
124 - they're two entirely different words. You lot just have to simplify everything.
108 - Pepe Sale - I like it because we can turn up with hordes of children and they seem genuinely pleased to see us!
re: 122
No, not at all. It's something to do with the dropped h and the rhotacized vowel (although rhotacized schwas are a bit irritating in general). It's silly, of course, to get irritated by the pronunciation of a word.
Similarly, people who say (in English English) 'an hotel', they can fuck off as well.
re: 126
Ah, thanks. I'll remember that next time I'm in Reading.
What I don't understand about the Brits is why they can't spell "ass" correctly.
I think, although I'm not completely sure, we pronounced the "h" in herb and herbal in Canada when I was a kid, accent otherwise No. American.
But never in the US. I think I split the difference these days: I say "urb" for the noun and "Herb-al" for the adjective. In a French context, as in the spice combo "fin herbs," I say "airb."
What I don't understand about the Americans is why they can't pronounce "arse" correctly.
Arse.
Actually, people who say 'asshole' in English English, or talk about their 'ass' sound incredibly affected to me. Like they are putting it on. I'd imagine as the US usage gets more popular, that will fade.
118: If only people had known, the Revolutionary War might have been far less bloody -- with the minutemen gathering to shout "'erb! 'erb!", and the redcoats dropping their weapons and running away with their hands over their ears.
That bloody Renault advert annoys me with its ass-shaking. Not as much as the 'erbal essences, but nearly.
What annoys me is "zed". Why shouldn't the name for "Z" sound like the name for virtually every other consonant?
Why shouldn't the name for "Z" sound like the name for virtually every other consonant?
Because people would get mixed up?
Similarly, people who say (in English English) 'an hotel', they can fuck off as well.
Don't get too stroppy, nattarGcM, or we'll put you into one of those Clockwork Orange contraptions and have you watch My Fair Lady on endless loop.
Oh, zed is okay and makes sense: "zee" and "cee" are easily misheard.
"Arse," to me, always sounds like an infantalized euphemism.
re: 137
Arse is the venerable Chaucerian pronunciation.
Exactly. Those old guys were too quaint and god-fearing to be propertly vulgar.
I've actually wondered, are they etymologically the same word, with the spelling having drifted in the US to go with a change in pronunciation, or is there something more complicated going on?
" "Arse," to me, always sounds like an infantalized euphemism." - really? That's exactly what "ass" sounds like to me. How ... something.
139 - hmmm, doesn't sound like the Chaucer I've read!
I can't be arsed to look it up in the OED, but I've always sort of assumed that "ass" comes from donkey, and its resemblance to "arse" helped it get picked up, or at least conflated with the other word.
I've been interested in the American revival of the word "Ass," meaning silly-like-a-donkey in the last few years, a useage that never went away in Britain. When I was younger it was completely occluded in the US by that other word, with its imputation of a more intentional and despicable form of obliviousness or insensitivity.
Dark was the night as pitch or as the coal,
And at the window she put out her hole,
And Absolon him fell ne bet ne werse,
But with his mouth he kiss'd her naked erse
Full savourly. When he was ware of this,
Aback he start, and thought it was amiss;
For well he wist a woman hath no beard.
He felt a thing all rough, and long y-hair'd,
And saide; "Fy, alas! what have I do?"
"Te he!" quoth she, and clapt the window to;
Dark was the night as pitch or as the coal
I totally thought I was about to read the lyric of this song.
Teaching "The Miller's Tale" is one of the greatest ways to start a Brit Lit survey--nothing wakes freshmen up more.
Those old guys were too quaint and god-fearing to be propertly vulgar.
You're either misremembering, or haven't ever read those old guys. They knew from vulgar.
I guess a third option is that you're lying out your arse.
re: 147
or taking the piss.
re: 146
Yeah, I really enjoyed it as an undergraduate. Actually, I found English literature from that period (I was an English Language student so read a lot of Old and Middle English literature) generally really interesting.
147, see 146. Why do you people have no sense of humor?
To continue the thought in 146, what's really entertaining about teaching Chaucer (or Rochester, or Behn, or Donne) is that you actually have to walk through the thing and translate it, line by line, into modern English, because they adamantly refuse to believe what they're reading. I once spent nearly an entire class period asking students what they thought Behn's "To the Fair Clorinda" was about, and getting increasingly complicated and sophisticated answers ("the poet is a woman, but the poem is in a traditionally masculine genre, so the *narrator* is a man") before one student very shyly and hesitantly asked, "I'm sure this is wrong, because they didn't write about such things back then, but could the poem be about a, uhm, lesbian relationship?"
148a: Dear god, thank you, Ttam. These Americans.
It pisses me off when people from our overseas dependencies tell us what to do. At least the Poodle never did that. He knew his place, God bless his heart.
What eyleth yow to grucche thus and grone?
Is it for ye wolde have my queynte allone?
147, see 146. Why do you people have no sense of humor?
I dunno. Why don't you ever realize when you're being baited?
154: "American" isn't a race. Nice try, though.
153: Because you're no good at it. $100/hour is cheap at the price.
157: If someone who knew how to do it were offering, sure.
145 is mistaken; the lyric I was expecting to read was this one.
117: yikes. well, ok. i do strive for precious. do these numerous and prestigious anatomical studies suggest a reasoning for why children have more and more sensitive tastebuds? is there some vestige of a survivalism to it? and, so this is to say that children in fact ought to be fed bland foods, or their preference for them is to some degree inevitable? and finally, what is common science, exactly?
160:
if you don't like snark, don't be snarky to other people.
the yale dietary studies, among others, have shown that people lose tastebuds and replace them less rapidly over time as they age. tastebuds also become less sensitive. small children can even have tastebuds on the insides of their cheeks.
you're over the hill, rachel! (ad so are the rest of us). tastebuds decline with age.
if you want an on-line source, have a look at wikipedia.
oh, also: common SENSE.
i would think it means you should not forcefeed children more than a bite or so of food they don't like. mostly, it entails not being too sanctimonious about people with children who are picky eaters.
thanks to the grace of god i am not a parent, so i don't lay down the law on these things to other people!
cheers.
I wrote a note to my elementaryschool teacher - ostensibly from my mother. It read - in appropriately childish script:
"Tony must not eat cabbidge, nor brusel sprowts, no sirop puden"
For some reason the note was immediately declared a forgery.....
Yeah, my brother did that too, saying that he didn't have to drink milk (British schoolchildren used to get a small bottle of milk every day at break time - always warm as it would have sat in a corner of the classroom half the morning - until Thatcher Thatcher millksnatcher got rid of that) - think his spelling was ok, but it was the orange crayon that gave him away!
always warm as it would have sat in a corner of the classroom
Bah, that's nothing. When they used to do school milk in Australia the crates of milk were delivered and would usually sit outside, even on 30+ degree days (90+ F). By playlunch the milk was hot with a slick of cream and butter at the top, and the foil lids would be bulging frighteningly. The only way to open them was to poke a thumb through, and then your hand would get covered in hot greasy milk. Mmmm.
Making me gag just to think about it, thanks Nakku!
But isn't that roughly how you make clotted cream, only under controlled conditions? Cornish cream teas - Mmm.
When I was a boy you had squat with manure up to your ankles and milk the cow yourself, only hoping that this was not a tubercular cow.