Recently, I was catering a dinner party on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The party was a birthday dinner with about 25 adults. The location was in a beautiful apartment with a rare huge kitchen. This was great for those of us who were preparing the food for the dinner. It gave us plenty of room to cook a delicious meal that featured roasted rack of lamb, blanched green beans and an aromatic rice pilaf all served after a few rounds of hors d’ouevres. Plus people at a party always love to hang out in the kitchen. The guests for the dinner were all adults except for one little boy, about 9 years old, who came with his mom because she couldn’t find anyone to care for him while she was at the party. The kid was curious and spent a lot of time watching us cook. He was rather shy and didn’t try to talk with us, he just watched. At one point when I was heating up the green beans and had taken the rice pilaf out of the oven, he asked his mom, “What’s he making?” I got excited about his curiosity and was about to offer tastes when she replied, “oh, it’s just green beans and rice, you don’t like that.” I was stunned and speechless.
Mom then removed some frozen processed chicken nuggets from the refrigerator which she had brought along to feed him. She put some of them on a plate and put them in the microwave oven to heat them up. I noticed that the processed nuggets had been made in the shape of miniature drumsticks and they had an unnatural orange color. When she took them out of the microwave the acrid smell of processed food competed with the aromas of the rice and the roasted lamb. She gave them to him for his dinner. “Mom”, he said, “I need ketchup!” She looked in the refrigerator and found a bottle and gave it to him. He proceeded to completely cover those lifeless little nuggets with the ketchup. (That took me back to when I was a kid and I poured ketchup over any food item that I didn’t like just so I could eat it.) She then turned to me and asked if we had any bread he could have. I quickly and eagerly offered one our wonderful whole wheat French rolls from one of the best bakeries in the city. He smelled it, tore a piece off and ate it. He obviously liked it. I was thankful that he was getting a little protein and some healthy nutrition from the roll which was made from whole grains, not processed flour.
For the past 7 years I have been cooking for about 500 kids per day. We cook food that is prepared from scratch using only the freshest ingredients. I have learned during these years how much kids love fresh green beans and rice pilaf which are always well cooked and seasoned. I felt pain when the little boy’s mom told him he wouldn’t like it. I knew that he would. I also knew that he would probably love one of the juicy little lamb chops that I cut from the roasted rack of lamb. It’s a pity that he didn’t get the chance to taste them because he was being taught that he wouldn’t like them. Mom, during the dinner that night, ate 6 of the lamb chops came back 2 or 3 times for more green beans and rice and eventually came to tell me it was the best meal she had ever eaten.
We need to be careful in telling kids what they do and don’t like. On any given moment their curiosity can change their willingness to taste just about anything. Food that is fresh, cooked and seasoned well, doesn’t taste like the canned or frozen foods that are often prepared for kids. Kids are excited by the bright colors of freshly cooked food and with the way it looks and smells and are usually willing to give it a try. It’s just one more step in helping them to develop a palate that precludes the awful tastes of processed food and the sugars that are used to cover those awful tastes. Kids need to be fed for nourishment not for filling them up and to keep them quiet. I think a better answer to that little boy’s question about the food I was preparing would have been “he’s making green beans and rice, maybe he’ll give you a taste if you say ‘please’.” I would have hopped on that and given the kid a really nice meal.
That night, that precious little boy’s only nutrition was from the two whole wheat rolls he eventually ate (he asked for a second one). But those rolls may have been the best food he had ever eaten.
About the Contributor: Chef Bobo is a regular contributor to the NYC Firm Schools Blog in the area of area of school lunch and children’s food.
Hello,
I am a student currently residing and attending university, at The Fashion Institute of Technology. I was looking for some feedback from Parents and or Students to give me information as to what afterschool activities or weekend activities your children or yourself typically participate in. In my marketing class, we were given the task of creating a business and full marketing plan. The product we are marketing( a clothing line of school uniforms, marketed to the schools, students, and parents to be worn during school but with the versatility to be worn afterschool as well) had the demographic of Firm Schools in Manhattan on the Upper East Side. We were hoping to receive a little more insight as to what life was like for those students. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
That is really sad. This young boy could have had his tastebuds tantalized, his mind blown, and his eating habits shaped in a positive manner for the rest of his life, learning how delectable nutritious, fresh "real" food could be, and instead, he was practically forced to eat generic, lackluster processed junk snacks made by a company because his misguided mother assumed that that is what would appeal to someone who's not an adult.
It's the same way in restaurants. Adventurous, fresh, choice offerings abound on the "big" menu, while the children's menu is rife with chicken nuggets/fingers, fish sticks, and hot dogs. Why is it that adults assume that little Justin or little Samantha is going to throw a tantrum if he or she has to eat something besides an oversalted, nitrate-riddled processed meat-fat tube or a plate of insipid, factory-made fried greasies?
This mother made a very poor parenting move.
This story is so true and so sad. I am the school board chair for a small, private school in Oregon. We made a decision this summer to ‘healthy up’ our lunch offerings – cutting back on sodium, sugar, trying to use more fresh meat, use whole wheat bread and wheat pasta, try to cut back on the sauces made from packages, etc. You would have thought we were asking people to give up their first born – the push back, mainly from the lunch coordinator and volunteers, was immense. The excuses ranging from we don’t have enough time to make sauces from scratch, we don’t have enough help in the kitchen to do all of this, the kids threw away whole wheat hot dog buns and only ate the hot dogs, if the parents want their kids to eat healthy, they can make their kids lunch, etc. Believe it or not, I am now the most hated person at the school and, while we have replaced the kitchen coordinator with a parent who is actually a trained chef, I am afraid the push back is going to result in boycotting! I have no idea how to approach this subject anymore. We just wanted to our children to have healthier meals and instead we have WWIII. Help!