Eat Your Veggies, Dammit
For many, a daily Oprah episode signals the beginning of a session of pleasure, a desperate excitement that lasts for an hour and then melts into a lathered puddle of women lazily lounging around on the steps outside of her studio, grabbing cigarettes and moaning about how the sparks flew and lit up their eyes for the better part of an afternoon. To some it’s a satisfying event; for others, she leaves us ridden hard and hung up without a vigorous towelling-off. Not even the “O” word in magazine format can possibly wrench us from the idea that whatever just happened on that TV probably cost us a few tenths of our soul.
A couple of days ago, I managed to gather that Jessica Seinfeld, wife of famed and funny Jerry, was on Her Majesty’s program to promote her new cookbook about how to hide vegetables within foods that children have naturally found easy to stuff down their maws in large quantities, thus avoiding a task that most parents have found to be unpleasant at best. As many have found, broccoli would go down a lot easier in the younger generation if it was coated with frosting, carbonated, and deep fried in a rich, caramel sauce.
So, Jessica’s method of circumnavigating this parental mountain is to simply whip all manner of plant material into the consistency of Slim-Fast and incorporate it in the mix for any number of foods that are more acceptable to the refined and delicate palates of children. Ha-HA! Take that, ye denizens of culinary hell, we have you pegged now! Enjoy those chicken nuggets, but beware — they’re chock-full of nutrition! Naturally, Oprah loves this shit and presented it as God’s own nectar and the saviour of cooking-frustrated parents everywhere. The rash of people showing up at Wal*mart that afternoon to purchase a Cuisinart must have been impressive.
Does anyone else besides me see a problem with this entire idea? The consuming of various vegetables may not be the most memorable experience for a child, but it certainly isn’t an event that should be traumatic or detrimental to their development as a human being. The show had some parents and children on there that threw huge tantrums about eating veggies and the exasperated parental units lamented that their days were filled with the screams of their tortured offspring who were being crippled by the carrots, bled dry by the beets, and ostracized by
the onions!ostracized by the onions!
Give me a break.
All this points to is a lack of boot-in-ass-itis, and the children are both infected and carriers of the disease. Eating vegetables, as well as other foods of varying types, is part of learning to be a discerning human being who has the ability to try and experiment with any number of culinary creations and to not be rude about ones that don’t appeal to them. Saying, “I don’t prefer these” is a skill to be developed, not avoided. Giving in to immature refusals and resorting to trickery seems to me to be a bad parenting technique. What are you going to do when they don’t want to do chores, take laundry to the pool, toss it into the water, and encourage kiddo to play “sink-the-bra”?
Mrs. Seinfeld’s ideas aren’t completely out of whack, of course. The idea of incorporating more healthy ingredients into any recipe is encouraged and smart. However, there are limits to how far you should go to combat what is, in most cases, a lack of parental effort in discipline and instruction, not a crisis of creativity. Of course, this goes for a lot of things, not just food creations.
I do, however, have to wonder about Jessica herself, because she seems a bit too involved in this entire, “puréeing”, thing. A quote for you, to demonstrate: “This is a secret that most people don’t know about me…I love puréeing and packaging,” she says. “I used to just have like one or two purées, but this has changed my purée paradigm.”
Purée paradigm?
Oh, sweetie, you have serious problems, and I’m not talking about mathematics.
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