Enjoying Vegetables 101

Exhibit A:  Creative presentation of the minimum RDA of green beans

Getting nine year olds to eat vegetables should be acclaimed as a skill akin to brokering accords between Middle East nations or getting the first HeLa human cells to reproduce outside the body.  It is so difficult I have started to wonder if I’m fighting against some invisible force of nature, some deeply ingrained evolutionary response.  Perhaps vegetables aren’t really necessary at the age of nine.  Perhaps a teaspoon of healthy soup or two green beans smothered in ketchup is the RDA of vegetables for a nine-year-old boy.  Perhaps I am forcing something into him that his body is rejecting because it is poisonous or harmful to him in some way.  What other reason could there be for making the taste of cooked cabbage so repugnant?  To his credit, he gobbles up raw veggies, so I usually set aside a portion of whatever I’m cooking for him to eat raw.  The minute it touches heat, however, it is an instant candidate for the compost pile as far as he’s concerned.  Only certain raw vegetables pass muster as well, nothing mixed together in a salad or grated or in a sauce or dressing.  Cole slaw is out. Potato salad is out.  Mixed green salad is out.  Anything with vinegar, oil, mayo, lemon juice, mustard, or ranch dressing is out.  Meanwhile, I attempt to ratchet up the creative presentation of vegetables, the sneaking in of vegetables, the humor and tactile enjoyment of vegetables.

They say that to learn a new vocabulary item you must be exposed to it in context seven to nine times before you retain it.  I’ve taken this principle and applied it to teaching Enjoying Vegetables 101.  I figure that after my child has fully rejected a certain food nine times, he is entitled to say he doesn’t like it, and ban it forever from his plate.  Until that time, however, he must continue to try eating it in new ways.  And, generally speaking, very few foods have gone the way of sauerkraut (which passed nine times very quickly during my German craze).  And occasionally I have some success in making him accept a new food without too much fuss.

This weekend was a success in that department.  I bought all the ingredients for a falafel sandwich:  grape tomatoes and mixed greens to chop; lemon juice, Greek yogurt, garlic, fresh dill, and cucumbers for the raita/tzaziki/cacik (cucumber dip); falafel mix (from a box, sorry); and, finally, pitas.  This time of year the only local ingredients were the mixed greens, the dill, and the pitas.  My usual store was out of pitas, so I went to Strawberry Fields, a local grocery and health food market.  They have a fantastic bakery there, and I often buy bread and rolls there.  Lucky for me, they had whole-wheat pitas, which felt fresh to the touch through the bag.  I passed up the other bakery items, happy they were out of seeded bread, which tempts me beyond all others.

I baked my falafel, which was in retrospect why my family liked them and I was “meh.”  You see, as much as a health nut as I am, I still love fried food.  Falafel, like anything else, should have a crunchy outside, but a tender, steamy inside, insulated by a lovely layer of olive oil.  Nevertheless, I baked the falafel, then lightly toasted the perfect pitas, then showed my son how to stuff them with all the ingredients.  Food in a “pocket” that you have to “construct?”  Ding-ding!  I win!  He ate all the baked-but-should-have-been-fried chickpea “cake” with all the veggies, including the cucumber sauce!!  He didn’t even ask what was in it!!  AND (be still, my heart), while we were eating it, he chatted with me about….FOOD!  He was comparing the quality of the pitas to ones we had bought before, he was asking about what falafel was, exactly, and how he had first thought we were having giant cookies for dinner before he tasted it.  I had a brief moment of hope, of what the future could look like, of when he’s older and we’ll go to fancy vegetarian restaurants together and critique their hummus and rave over their black bean roasted vegetable burritos and slurp up their carrot soup and gobble up their salads…

And then he started talking about Minecraft.  And all was normal in the world again.  And I will go back to my Battle of the Vegetables.

Tomorrow night, shepherd’s pie.  Thank goodness he likes mashed potatoes.