Quite a Pickle
I was quite optimistic about my daughter’s eating habits when at one year old she was fond of gnawing on pickles, sucking the salad dressing off of my caesar salad, and slurping down her carrot soup. She still likes some healthy food, but somewhere between 1 and 2, she stopped eating any vegetables except tomato sauce.
A while back, I watched a program on Discovery Health about school children’s eating habits. Psychologists claimed that the most effective way to get a child to eat something he or she doesn’t like is to use peer pressure. They got a bunch of child celebrities who liked eating vegetables to go to a school, meet the kids, then eat lunch with them. The children saw their peers eating vegetables and enjoying them, so they decided to try eating them too. The experiment ended with all of the kids eating their vegetables.
Since setting up a situation where you can use peer pressure to influence your child’s diet can be tricky, they then went on to describe the next most effective way to get your child to eat something he or she doesn’t like: accustom your child to the food by eating a small amount daily. A boy who couldn’t stand avocado agreed to eat one small cube of avocado every day for 20 days. The theory was that after repeatedly tasting the food, the child’s palate would change, and the child would actually start to like the food. The upshot was that after 20 days, the boy thought that avocado wasn’t too bad. So it was conceivable that after time he might like it.
I went away from the show thinking that was something to store in the back of my head for when my daughter was older. I was bemused and amused the day I made spaghetti with meat sauce expecting to have to pick the lumps of meat out of the sauce, as usual, for my daughter, when she said “Meatballs!” I remembered that she’d just seen an episode of her favourite TV program, Pinky Dinky Doo, where Pinky and Mr. Guinea Pig are super spaghetti tightrope walkers. Since then, she has enthusiastically eaten the meatballs in her spaghetti sauce.
The other day, she wanted to eat a pickle. She hasn’t eaten pickles since she stopped eating them at around one year of age. I remembered that in a recent episode of Pinky Dinky Doo, Pinky needs a musical instrument, and tries to play a pickle because pickle sounds like piccolo.
Still, the peer pressure is not easy to arrange. So I get her to have one small bite of a food she doesn’t like. She doesn’t mind having one small taste. I’ll see if that helps.
