While Jessica Seinfeld single-handedly ups the Vitamin A and antioxidants intake of our nations’ children with her stealth veggie offerings, some damn celery-crunchers are exposing a darker side to the chocolate-zucchini muffin.
By tucking peas in here, spinach in there and watching her children unwittingly lap it up, experts warn that the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld is betraying her picky kids' trust.
To both the experts and Seinfeld, I say: Oh, come on!
Our kids are fine when we lie to them about harmless things -- Santa, the tooth fairy, "grown-up naked wrestling." I don’t think Seinfeld's kids are going to grow up doubting their mother when they find out she's been stirring spinach into cake batter. On the other hand, so what if kids don't eat many vegetables now? All this blender-work is just delaying their inevitable encounters with anything green and inadvertently raising what will be very picky adults. Who, by the way, are nothing but trouble.
Here’s how I think her sneaky approach goes wrong:
First, she’s stirring squash in to macaroni and cheese and adding cauliflower and broccoli to chicken nuggets. I haven’t read her book, but I’m seeing a lot of “kid-palate” pandering. When does she propose they make the transition to a main course and two sides kinds of meals? When will they take the plunge and eat a stir fry? Do she and Jerry eat the nuggets or separate, grown-up meals? I think regular meals that are different from the parents' keep kids from sucking it up and choking down a green bean even more than odd textures and grassy taste.
Most importantly, I think parents have to learn to prepare vegetables in a tasty way. Very few vegetables are super-nummy raw. In-season tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, red or yellow peppers … am I missing anything? … all good fresh off the truck. Most others, though, you’ve got to do something to them – at the very least salt and more often than not, a little cooking and herbs.
Another thing: why all this emphasis squash? Unless nicely adulterated with salt, garlic, herbs and cooking, squash is bland, bland, mealy and bland. Of course Seinfeld has to boil it, puree it and stir it into something before her kids will eat it! A sophisticated palate wouldn’t enjoy a pile of squash, cooked or otherwise, that didn’t have anything added for flavor.
With veggies like broccoli and cauliflower, sure, you can eat them raw. But they carry that faint taste of garbage. A little blanching and they’re so much mellower (and, hey, give a little with the ranch dressing if it gets your kid to try a real floret. With ranch, no betrayal necessary!).
If you’re really getting desperate, throw it all in a spicy/sweet curry, or a stir-fry that includes pineapple, or melt it all under cheese on a pizza, or roll it up in rice and nori for sushi. Kids will get a few bites, at least, before picking off what they don’t like but the vegetables are still there on the plate, part of dinner, to be expected, until the end of time. Tolerance with this pays off. Just last week, my six-year-old made it through a slice of pesto pizza without first pulling off every bit of spinach. That’s progress!
I love vegetables and I also like to cook so we sit down to pretty tasty veggie-heavy meals regularly. The approach in my house, though, is to serve every veggie dish on a no-pandering platter (with a fresh dollop of “no other options” on the side). Draconian? Sure, but for this I’ll get skinny kids that might one day actually eat a fresh blueberry or take more than two bites of a salad.
Remember, it’s 2007 and the Clean Plate Club disbanded at least a decade ago. Two bites and it's over until tomorrow. So what if your kid doesn’t eat five servings of fruits and vegetables everyday? You didn’t either and, except for those thighs, you turned out juuuuuuust fine.
Update: For family photo of the veggie chowing family, look here.
