Raising an Adventurous Eater

My 2 year old son Oliver eats just about every­thing.  The other day, Janda and I had lunch at Aran here in Regens­burg, and Oliver had fresh Ger­man whole grain bread spread half with tomato-garlic spread and the other half with a tuna-artichoke mix.  He’s eaten caviar, blood sausage, raw onion, boiled beef with horse­rad­ish, spicy mus­tard, Thai curry, Indian curry, veal sweet­breads, and just about any­thing else we’ve offered.

We have friends whose daugh­ters will only eat spaghetti with Heinz ketchup.  They even have to pack the ketchup in their suit­case on trips to grandma’s house because she doesn’t have the right kind of ketchup.  My husband’s nephew only ate pota­toes and cheese pizza until he was 14.

What makes a kid a picky eater, and what makes them adventurous?

The New York Times says it’s genetic, that kids inherit their pick­i­ness from their par­ents.  I haven’t had time to read care­fully through the study cited, but given that it’s a twin study with twins raised together in the same home, I’m not sure how they can deter­mine what is cause by genet­ics and what is caused by envi­ron­ment (since the twins share both).

It’s pos­si­ble I’m just really lucky and have a kid genet­i­cally pre­dis­posed to be adven­tur­ous, or it may be that the way we feed Oliver has some­thing to do with it.  Actu­ally, I think it’s likely a com­bi­na­tion of the two.

Janda and I dis­cussed this topic over lunch and came up with some ideas.

• Breast­feed­ing — A for­mula fed baby is going to be fed the same thing sev­eral times a day for the first sev­eral months of life.  It wouldn’t sur­prise me that the child would grow up to be wary of new fla­vors.  But, we adults aren’t all adven­tur­ous eaters.  Most peo­ple stick to their favorites and don’t exper­i­ment a lot with new fla­vors.  So breast­fed babies may not even be exposed to that wide a vari­ety of fla­vors, although it would still be more than for­mula fed babies.  Per­son­ally, I’m fairly adven­tur­ous, and made a con­scious effort to eat a wide vari­ety of fla­vors through preg­nancy and the first year of breast­feed­ing, since I knew the fla­vors passed on to the baby, and a var­ied diet is a bet­ter source of vit­a­mins and min­er­als than sup­ple­ments (I still took sup­ple­ments though).  I tried not to buy the same fruits and veg­eta­bles from one week to the next.  I picked up things I’d never had before and ordered dishes I’d never thought to try at restau­rants.  I made some new favorites that way, and it was a great learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me.
• Eat­ing together — We got a Stokke Tripp Trapp high chair so Oliver could sit at the table with us for din­ner.  We never fed him sep­a­rately.  He was always together with us at the table enjoy­ing our com­pany (and we enjoy­ing his).  Oliver hates not eat­ing with us and protests very loudly if he’s put into a con­ven­tional high chair with a tray.
• Eat­ing the same thing - I’m too lazy to even con­sider mak­ing sep­a­rate meals for every­one.  Oliver had (organic) baby food from a jar unless he could eat what­ever we were hav­ing for din­ner.  (I did try mak­ing baby food once, but he wouldn’t touch it).  So soups came early, then pasta, veg­eta­bles, and finally meats.  We don’t force any­thing on him, we just stay relaxed, enjoy our food and let him choose what he wants to eat from what is on the table.  We’ve never had a prob­lem with this method, he eats a lot.
• Food is a treat — Food, to us, is some­thing spe­cial.  We stop our days and enjoy our meals together, eat­ing high qual­ity, tasty food. I learned this after work­ing a short time in Italy.  Every­one stopped what they were doing when they ate.  You never saw peo­ple walk­ing down the street with a sand­wich or cof­fee.  There were no calo­ries ingested with­out thought.  I do still some­times eat on the go, but I try to make meals a spe­cial occa­sion as often as pos­si­ble.  I think our child sees this enjoy­ment and emu­lates us.  If food is just sus­te­nance, there isn’t any rea­son to be adven­tur­ous.  This is a per­sonal thing.  Some peo­ple really enjoy food, some peo­ple are into other things.

I can’t promise that doing these things will make a child an adven­tur­ous eater.  Even food­ies have picky kids. But per­haps these ideas can be food for thought. And here’s one more story:

Oliver never ate cheese.  I’d offer it to him on bread or alone and he’d always hand it back.  I fig­ured he just didn’t like cheese.  But then last week, we went to France and came home with a cooler of the stinki­est, yum­mi­est, French cheeses we could get our hands on.  Oliver was all over them.  He tried all of the cheeses and asked for sec­onds and even thirds.  If he doesn’t like Ger­man cheese, I don’t know what he’s going to think of Amer­i­can cheese!

There is some­thing he won’t eat.  Jello.  If we eat jello, he looks at us like we’ve lost our minds.

Do you have picky or adven­tur­ous eaters?  How do you han­dle it?

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Tagged as: adventurous eaters, eating, Feeding, food, picky eaters