It is a well-established fact that when you want a child to eat, they will not.<\/p>\n
I did not always know this. Before I became a parent, I labored under the misconception that the rules would not apply to me. That a child\u2019s refusal of perfectly good, perfectly healthy food reflects some deficit in child-rearing, and naturally would not be a problem for me, a professional food writer, whose love of food is in fact genetic. No, I reasoned with woefully unearned confidence, my child\u2019s palate would be as expansive as the Great Plains. As vibrant as a Van Gogh. As thoughtful as a sonnet.<\/p>\n
Well.<\/p>\n
When my daughter was three, she unexpectedly became a viral internet sensation<\/a> after a noted social media personality spotted her ham-fisting a pickle at the farmers market, devouring it in the manner of an ice cream cone. The comments cooed what a good eater she was, that \u201cPickle Girl\u201d was their \u201cspirit animal,\u201d and so forth. Lies! I screamed in my head. All lies!<\/p>\n In reality, Pickle Girl had precipitously tumbled off her growth curve just months earlier. Getting her to eat anything (pickles aside) was a daily struggle, and one doctor even suggested that I stop feeding her anything but red meat in an attempt to get her weight up. I smiled to that woman\u2019s face and privately refused, instead dosing everything my daughter allowed past her lips with copious amounts of butter and oil.<\/p>\n Getting her to eat anything (pickles aside) was a daily struggle, and one doctor even suggested that I stop feeding her anything but red meat in an attempt to get her weight up.<\/p>\n Nearly four years later, her eating habits have mercifully improved. But there was no lightning bolt that changed everything, no moment that she thought to herself, You know, I actually don\u2019t want my mother to contemplate hurling herself into oncoming traffic every time I reject another homemade dinner. Rather, the shift came gradually, one small success at a time. We never stopped offering her bites of scary-to-her foods, often accompanied by varying forms of bribery. We started planning family meals around things we knew she liked, slowly expanding her repertoire. We also started cooking with her.<\/p>\n We\u2019d been plodding along like this for a while when the Bon Appetit team presented me with a complimentary meal code from Blue Apron<\/a> and asked if I might like to try it with my family. Was it a good idea?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the thing: Cooking with a child who is afraid of most ingredients presents serious logistical challenges. There\u2019s plenty of \u201cEw, yucky!\u201d and \u201cGet it off me! Get it off me!\u201d and, naturally, so many tears. I developed a tactic of choosing recipes strategically (usually a variation on a Safe Food); limiting the amount of raw meat (a nonstarter if there ever was one); and portioning out the ingredients, which (1) makes it easier for her to dump things into a big bowl and (2) proves to her that we aren\u2019t hiding anything.<\/p>\n