I met a fellow mom for coffee and told the story of taking my 3-year-old to Whole Foods — a place he now reveres as a produce mecca — and how I spent $3.84 on what I went to get and nearly $20 on fruit for him.
“You’re so lucky,” she said. “Mine won’t eat anything other than hot dogs and Goldfish crackers.”
I am lucky. Somehow I got a child whose ideal meal is meat plus a fruit or veggie, a kid who, probably not coincidentally, is the skinniest kid we know. But until I read In Defense of Food, I don’t think I really appreciated how well he ate.
That’s not to say that he doesn’t like chicken fingers or packaged mac & cheese. He does, believe me. But he also eats and enjoys real, unprocessed foods. Last night, after picking up my husband at SFO, we stopped at Red Robin for dinner. The first thing he ate? The two cantaloupe slices.
His ideal breakfast is oatmeal, “mommy style:” rolled oats with cinnamon and a touch of brown sugar, served in an oversized coffee mug. His favorite school lunch is leftover meat from last night’s dinner (pork, steak, chicken… could be anything), along with a side of cherry tomatoes or grapes. At dinner, he’ll forego the potatoes in favor of a clementine. And I marvel at it all.
My mother was fanatical about what I ate as a child, intentionally restricting my diet to healthy foods. The side effect of that — one that still lingers today — is that I will absolutely gorge myself on junky, “forbidden” food, as though I’m afraid that someone is going to take it away. He has no such fears. He eats what he wants to eat.
But at the same time, there is a caveat to that statement: he eats what he wants to eat of what he’s been exposed to. I have been careful not to expose him to much food marketing. With the exception of televised sports, we don’t really watch TV. He doesn’t yet know about McDonalds. He doesn’t ask for Lunchables or Dora the Explorer cereal because he doesn’t know that it exists. We do most of our shopping at the blissfully marketing-free Trader Joe’s, which undoubtedly helps.
It’s not easy to raise a kid outside the sphere of packaged, processed foods. There will soon come a day where he’s clamoring for something packed with high fructose corn syrup and trans fats. But until that day comes, I’m happy that he prefers my homemade bread to store bought, oatmeal to Froot Loops, and fruit to fries.