Something has been frustrating me lately and I need to get it off my chest. There is a trend in food right now that finds home cooks “hiding” vegetables and other healthy ingredients in the inconspicuous comfort foods that their picky eaters love. I see it a lot with mac and cheese, cheeseburgers, potato-based foods, and I am tired of it. To put it lightly, it’s a crime against food. Let me tell you why.
My husband, Mitch, is one of these “picky eaters” but has obviously taken his food preferences with him into adulthood. I’ve been told that as a kid, he had digestive issues (undiagnosed lactose intolerance, for one) that made him miserable after most things that he ate. He would suffer through glasses of milk that made him nauseous, red meat that made his stomach cramp, and more, all because he was too young to realize that eating didn’t have to be so unpleasant. To make a long story short, his negative experiences with food that his body had a harder time digesting when he was young made him into a very picky eater.
Now when I say that he’s particular about food, I mean that he is very particular. He doesn’t like burgers, mac and cheese, fish sticks, or other common foods fed to the classic “picky eater”. And I don’t blame him! Two of those three things would make him feel sick still today, and the other (fish sticks, sorry) is objectively icky. He is very much unlike myself in this respect, as I love eating any and all food, with very few exceptions, and I also love cooking a wide variety of different meals.
But from where does my frustration stem? Because it's certainly not from him.
People still tease my husband today for his dining choices, claiming that “he doesn’t eat anything” and making him feel bad for being a bit harder to please. When going out to restaurants with others, people make sure to point out the kids menu to him (full of cheeseburgers and mac and cheese, mind you) and have even gone so far as to say that they don’t understand how he and I are together. We laugh good-naturedly, but Mitch and I know the truth: Mitch loves eating just as much as me (now).
I pride myself on Mitch’s love of food because I take most of the credit for it. As the one that genuinely enjoys cooking and mixing it up in the kitchen, I am responsible for all of the meals that we eat unless we go out or order in. I know that, of course, his love of food was always within him, but I can proudly say that I have inspired him to try many new things that he has ended up really enjoying, and I make him meals that he looks forward to tucking in to. The best part? I don’t hide healthy things from him, but he still eats them! Imagine that!
My goal has always been for him to enjoy food and actually look forward to it, as much as I have all of my life. At the beginning of our relationship, that meant eating a lot of pizza, pasta, and frozen popcorn chicken because I didn’t know what to cook for him. Then, it meant feeding him subpar homemade pizza with bready crust, greasy chicken parmesan, and more pasta because let’s face it, pasta’s delicious. I wanted so desperately for him to just enjoy food, I didn’t care so much about how healthy it was when we were starting out. I wasn’t a picture of health as a college freshman, anyway.
But as time progressed and the food I was making wasn’t all that tasty or that healthy, I knew I wasn’t accomplishing my goal of making him food that was more delicious to him than the stuff he was eating before I came around. This is when I stopped just playing it safe, and we talked a lot about what meals and ingredients he already knew he really enjoyed. As I learned more, I began to realize that he liked a lot of food, much more than I was led to believe. With this knowledge and a lot of my time spent studying better cooking techniques so that whatever food I made actually tasted, you know, good, I set out to achieve my goal for real.
Turns out, Mitch loves shrimp. Like, loves it, could eat it every day. One of the first things I cooked for him that we both really enjoyed was popcorn shrimp. I breaded and fried it, so it was predictably delightful but still inarguably unhealthy. Once I decided to bake instead of fry and the result was still really solid, I knew I was on to something. Shrimp is absolutely excellent for you, high in protein, vitamins, and good cholesterol, and it was one of the first ingredients Mitch told me he liked. Once I started capitalizing on the foods that he wants to eat (and that his body wants him to eat), I understood that it’s not about trying to get picky people to eat healthy foods that they hate.
Cut to now: I still happily do the cooking, Mitch has tried countless new foods and loved them, and we are regularly eating healthy. His absolute favorite food is the shrimp scampi recipe I developed just for him, which is indulgent but not too heavy and served over pasta. I make it with a lot of shrimp to fill him up and tons of garlic for the antioxidants, and he eats it happily over a smaller portion of pasta. Because guess what? Pasta is still delicious and not evil. Rather than count calories, I take stock of what good ingredients are present. Shrimp? Check. Garlic? Check. Lemon? Check. I'm concerned not with how low-calorie it is (he's a healthy weight and his breakfast and lunch are lighter, anyway), but with whether it contains high-quality ingredients that make his body feel good. He eats shrimp scampi weekly.
Cooking for picky eaters needs to be about finding what works for them, not hiding the foods you want them to eat by chopping them up really small and drowning them in other “harmless” flavors. I’ll admit, there was a rice pilaf I made somewhere along the way that contained sneaky little carrots and peas. This was a mistake, because they ruined the flavor of the pilaf and he didn’t enjoy that meal (I didn’t even like it) - a huge backwards step away from my initial goal! He is, of course, a grown man, so he still ate it, but I had failed him by taking it upon myself to force him to eat a certain way.
It’s not fair to food and it’s not fair to your eater, who shouldn’t be tricked into eating healthy, to be sneaky with your ingredients. This is especially true for children, who are still developing their relationship with food, and no good will come from lying to them about the contents of their meal. Don’t sneak a vegetable you know that they hate into their cheeseburger. Instead, take the time to figure out what vegetables they do like, and then give them lots of those. It will definitely take time and effort, and sometimes you’ll just have to give them what they want. But take it from a young woman with no kids but a husband who is only recently eating less picky: even if they’re only eating one healthy ingredient, their body will thank them for it, and they’ll thank you for caring enough about them and their experience with food to make a meal they appreciate. I'm not a nutritionist or food expert, but I know what makes mine and my husband's bodies feel good and we're going to keep working with that.
Slow progress is so, so much better than no progress.
Your picky eater needs to trust you and they need to trust food. Over time, they’ll probably start opening up to more ingredients and eating healthier automatically. Think long-term: trust the process, let them eat the empty calories they want to eat every once in a while, and always make sure that they like the (healthy) food that they’re eating.
