By Leslie Watson

Is there anything more wonderful about being alive than the simple act of eating? I don’t think so, which is why I fall squarely in the camp of the food worshippers, driven to prepare and share meals with others and to seek out culinary adventure in all sorts of happy and unexpected places.

You can imagine, then, my disappointment that Ned and Helen have turned out to possess entirely pedestrian palates. At nearly 5 and 7, they still demand a steady diet of plain noodles, fruit, and that most tedious member of the sandwich kingdom, the omnipresent PB&J. Not only that, but Helen is exceedingly particular about both food preparation and service.  Crusts are anathema to her, for instance, so that not one crumb of browned exterior can pass her lips.  I mean, this kid won’t even eat the outer edge of a tortilla.  Meanwhile, Ned has perfected the art of melodramatic gagging and spluttering in response to unfamiliar food, punctuated by the desperate swig of milk. 

I accept that this is all my fault, and that somewhere during their babyhood there was too much mashed banana and too little hummus and pulverized curry. But as they’ve grown older, I really have tried to broaden their culinary horizons.  About a year ago I instituted a no-thank-you-bite policy for any new dish, explaining to them that you can’t legitimately refuse something unless you’ve actually tried a bite. Predictably, at least for our household, the no-thank-you bite rapidly degenerated into its uglier, less welcome cousin, the IT’S-YUCKY-I’LL-HATE IT bite. I’ve cajoled, threatened, dangled dessert, stirred in extra sugar, and melted American cheese on the top, but they have only grown more suspicious of my offerings, and quicker to beg for bread and butter.  “Mom, you’re the worst cooker,” Helen informed me recently.  Even though I could have produced a dozen adults to testify to the contrary, I knew she was telling the truth as she saw it.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to consider the matter from an unusual perspective.  This semester our family is hosting a young man from Switzerland, Andreas, who is a student teacher at the German Immersion School where Ned is a first grader.  I was an anxious überhost during the first few days after Andreas arrived, which meant that dinner was a much bigger production number than usual. One night, for instance, I served polenta with wild mushroom ragout.  I wasn’t so foolish to try the ragout on the kids, but I couldn’t imagine anything less objectionable than polenta with a little cheese sauce and so anticipated a painless execution of the no-thank-you bite.

Boy, was I wrong.  My children’s faces registered complete horror at the sight of that innocent little slab of yellow on their dinner plates. To his eternal credit, Ned-perhaps influenced by the presence of our mannerly European guest-quickly choked down the requisite forkful before stoutly refusing any more.  But Helen, clearly unmoved by my wish to keep up appearances, began to writhe in anguish at the prospect, protesting at an ever-increasing volume that she would not eat any terrible, horrible, no good, very bad polenta. Acutely aware of the polite Swiss silence across the table, I finally browbeat her into trying it.  She took a small mouthful and before even closing her lips started to scream around and through it.  Within seconds she was bubbling polenta like an insane little volcano, even as I hastily clapped a napkin to her mouth and ordered her to the kitchen.  Ned followed in a show of solidarity, and from the dining room we could hear her anguished, tearful reliving of the nightmare-“Ned, it was so gross!  I couldn’t even swallow it, Ned, it was so awful!”-while he murmured sympathetically, a fellow victim of their mother’s mad cruelty.

The silver lining to this debacle was the rapid breaking of any remaining ice with the newest member of our household. Deflated, yet oddly relieved that he had finally seen some of our worst, I asked Andreas how his parents had handled mealtime when he was a kid. “Well, there were five children in our family, so we had to follow the rules at the table,” he explained.  “And if we did not eat our dinner, my parents would be serving it to us for breakfast.” I sat back in astonishment at this revelation, but my vision of dawn breaking over a bowl of rewarmed polenta had barely formed before Andreas delivered the real moral to the story. “Of course,  my parents were like all parents” he added, with a gentle smile.  “They didn’t know what to do either, so they just did their best.” 

Later that evening, as I buttered and decrusted a hungry little girl’s slice of bread, I found myself considering the gift of gracious compassion, and its magical ability to restore harmony, impart wisdom, and bring us back to ourselves.  Like parents the world over, sometimes I really just don’t know how to handle my kids. But I am giving it pretty close to my best, at least most of the time.  And if I’m really lucky, perhaps someday they will come to understand that however ridiculous and flawed my methods might have been, I really believed the part about it being for their own good.

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