Just Eat It

At 17 months, Willem is working his way up the food chain and reminding me how trends in food have changed with each generation.  For example, he eats spinach, mango and pea puree which you squeeze out of a tube like toothpaste, onto a spoon.  This wonder product contains super grain salba, whatever that is, plus omega 3’s and is “packed with antioxidants” along with fiber and protein and is organic and gluten free to boot. That’s an impressive resume.  When you compare it to what I ate growing up, combined with exposure to DDT, mercury and second hand smoke, it’s a wonder I didn’t grow a second head like some of those mutant frogs they find in polluted backwaters.

My mom was and is a great cook (See my post “Food, Glorious Food”) and made a lot of mostly healthy meals from scratch, but the 50’s were the era of processed foods.  We ate sugared cereals like Frosted Flakes, Sugar Pops, Sugar Smacks and Cocoa Puffs, and we buried cereals like Cheerios and Shredded Wheat in sugar ourselves.  We ate bacon and sausage for breakfast, hotdogs, baloney and chicken liver (aka braunschweiger) for lunch and ham or Spam for dinner. Turkey sandwiches only made an appearance the day after Thanksgiving.  Miracle whip and Mayonnaise popped up in everything from salads to sandwiches to casseroles and the concept of lite mayo (or lite anything) wasn't even on the drawing board.

My mom served vegetables and a salad every night, but Jello with mandarin oranges and pineapple counted as a salad in the 50’s.  Tossed salads were made of iceberg lettuce which we now know has the same nutritional value as shredded tissue paper with salad dressing. 

At least we didn’t go through soft drinks the way kids do today.  Sports drinks like Gatorade hadn’t been invented.  In fact the only energy drink we ever had was an eight-ounce Coke on Friday night and it worked like a charm.  Naturally we did go a little crazy on special occasions – picnics with other families on Memorial day or the Fourth of July were a time for sparklers, wiffle ball and draining as many bottles of Dana  root beer, red pop, orange pop, and lime-green pop as possible before the adults started counting the empties.  One year, my dad’s high school friend, Bud, a W.C.Fields knock-off, told my brother, “If you take any more of those, I’m going to dump the rest in your dad’s gas tank.”  And he meant it.

In the 70’s, there was a lot written about the ill effects of too much salt, sugar, and chemicals like nitrites in kid foods, especially baby food.  I took it seriously and followed a book called, “Feed Me, I’m Yours” to what now seems like crazy extremes.  I made my own granola and edible Play Doh.  I cooked and pureed carrots, spinach, sweet potatoes and peas, laid out blops on a cookie sheet, froze them and then stacked up the frozen blops to use as needed. That worked well except for the time I used a knife to pry the frozen blops apart and wound up in the emergency room with a stab wound in my hand. 

I couldn’t puree any meat to a texture David would eat except chicken livers (the real thing, not braunschweiger) which I put in spaghetti sauce.  I didn’t serve bacon, baloney, ham, sausage or any processed meats except nitrite-free turkey hot dogs from the health food store. And, I now acknowledge that I was pathologically obsessed with David not starting on sugar at an early age to the point that, the first time someone gave him a cookie in a store, I grabbed it and popped it into my mouth. 32 years later, I still get a hot flash of embarrassment just thinking about that scene.  And, by the way, the theory that kids who don’t have sugar as toddlers won’t develop a taste for cookies, cake and ice cream later in life is totally bogus.

For today’s baby, eating combines gourmet foods and natural ingredients, beginning with the bib.  When Willem started eating real food, I was excited to find the best piece of baby gear on the Internet - a flexible plastic bib which catches everything that comes out of the mouth, rolls over the chin and heads for the floor. These bibs look and work exactly as they did when David and John used them, but now they have a pedigree a mile long – no PVC’s, BPA’s, Phthalates’s (look that up in Wikipedia), lead or anything even mildly toxic. I thought it was ridiculous to make a bib safe enough for a kid to eat until Megan sent us this YouTube video last winter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cOMfkZ2xZk

Willem’s culinary adventures started with Baby Mum-Mum Selected Superior Rice Rusks.  He has segued from pro-biotic oatmeal, to macaroni and cheese with butternut squash sauce to chicken mango risotto.  As a child, my acquaintance with delicacies from exotic cultures was limited to Chef-Boy-AR-Dee Ravioli and Chun King Chow Mein.  Willem, however, has savored couscous, hummus on bagel, black beans on crackers, pureed mango and pasta with both basil and sun dried tomato pesto and he isn’t even two yet!

It’s a little overwhelming, and I was worried about how we’d tempt Willem’s highly developed palate when he comes to visit us again.  Which Kroger’s carries sushi or dim sum or escargot in the baby food aisle? On our latest trip to New York, it was a relief to see him devouring cream cheese and turkey sandwiches.  And, apparently, it was love at first bite when he met up with Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks at his friend Mason’s house in Connecticut so the pressure's off.

Click this link for the source of this post's title   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za_hBk8gdZU