Someone on the radio, the other day, was explaining how to teach children to like new foods.
It was British food writer, Bee Wilson, about her new book, “First Bite: How We Learn to Eat,” and her advice was simple: “Children need to try a new taste 12 or 14 days in a row before they acquire a taste for it.”
This advice was startlingly familiar — very much like something I ran into when my children were young. I remember thinking the same thing, then, that I did this week: “Good luck with that, and how do you get the mashed string beans out of your hair?”
I have to meet these researchers. Anyone who can get a child to taste something twelve times in a row — especially something they didn’t like the first time — has my intense admiration.
What, I wonder, are their methods? Is electricity involved? And what do they use for motivation?
I can tell you, love doesn’t work. “Try this for Mommy” made no impression. Neither did threats.
Not even science was any help. In an attempt to get my 12-year-old just to take a vitamin, I read him the effects of scurvy on sailors in the 1500s: “Swelling of the arms and legs; loss of teeth; foul breath; muscle pain…”
“That doesn’t happen any more,” he told me, his voice dripping with pity for my ignorance.
“”That’s right,” I replied. “Because now we have vitamins … like this one!’
“No, because now it only takes 12 hours to fly across the whole ocean!” he exclaimed, and left the table.
As for blackmail, I had already tried the old classic, “No dessert if you don’t eat your string beans.”
“But ice cream is my only calcium for the day,” he replied. He had turned my science weapons back on me!
I remember this “scientist’s” very first taste of ice cream. It was at his 1-tear birthday party.
I had managed to hold out for his whole first year, but his grandmothers had bought him an ice-cream cake, which they insisted he taste.
At first, he frowned; it was probably the coldest thing he had ever tasted. Then, his eyebrows went up, as he realized it was sweet. Then another frown: “But it’s cold!” And another smile: “But it’s sweet!”
Finally he grabbed the spoonful and polished it off. “That’s our boy!” said his father and I.
That’s one tasting that went well. But when all you’re armed with is repeated samples of spinach, zucchini, and okra — What can you do? How did those researchers live long enough to collect their results? And what, I wonder, was the state of their tasting facility, along about Day Number 12?
For some reason, these findings are always announced right before Christmas. Which may be why they soon turned into a song:
On the first day of Tasting, my children said to me:
We won’t eat it if it’s healthy!
On the second day of Tasting, my children said to me:
Too many nuts,
And we won’t eat it if it’s healthy!
On the third day of Tasting, my children said to me:
No string beans,
Too many nuts,
And we won’t eat it if it’s healthy!
On the fourth day of Tasting, my children said to me:
Skip the tomatoes,
No string beans,
Too many nuts,
And we won’t eat it if it’s healthy!
On the fifth day of Tasting my children said to me:
Why whole wheat bread?!
Skip tomato sauce,
No string beans,
Too many nuts
And we won’t eat it if it’s healthy!
Bee Wilson has one trick I hadn’t heard before: “It’s called Tiny Tastes. All you need is a sample the size of a pea — or even a grain of rice. It changes the whole dynamic.” Yes, it does. Plus it helps with the clean-up, if all they’re hurling at you is the size of one pea.
In the ironic fullness of time, the boy who only ate lettuce leaves drenched in salad dressing now has a lovely girlfriend who is a vegetarian; he now comes home from college and complains that the broccoli in the refrigerator isn’t fresh enough. I would take it all with a grain of salt, but that probably isn’t healthy, either.
On the twelfth day of Tasting, my children gave to me:
Twelve tofu turkeys
Eleven prune whip puddings
Ten chunks of liver
Nine packs of rice cakes
Eight fiber muffins
Seven soy-milk smoothies
Six egg-white omelettes
My whole wheat bread!
Four Brussels sprouts
Three whole beans
Too many nuts…
And I gave up on eating healthy!
