The Wall Street Journal-20080126-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Food - Drink -- Eating Out- Playing With Their Food- Testing -healthy- kids- recipes from Jessica Seinfeld and a rival
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Food & Drink -- Eating Out: Playing With Their Food; Testing 'healthy' kids' recipes from Jessica Seinfeld and a rival
Very few childhood bedwetters go off to college with rubber sheets. Picky eaters also mature, into omnivores. Judging by the crowds at restaurants I visit, they grow up into beef-cheek-gobbling yuppies with a yen for lemongrass ice cream. But parents of kiddies who refuse spinach and just about everything else that isn't soft, white or sweet can find it hard to take the long view.
Two best-selling cookbooks offer panicked moms and dads a way to trick their tots into consuming broccoli without a fight. Jessica Seinfeld's "Deceptively Delicious" and Missy Chase Lapine's "The Sneaky Chef" both advise the same basic panacea: Slip dollops of pureed vegetables into pasta and other dishes that children will eat. The moppets won't know the difference, and they'll swallow the healthy stuff without a whimper or the stamping of a size-two foot.
That's the theory. Neither book offers more than anecdotal evidence that picky eating is a major social problem even in homes like theirs -- affluent, nutritionally aware, and with a guilt-ridden parent as meal maker. But the books' popularity is a kind of proof that picky eating at family meals does trouble book buyers.
So we're not going to try to cast doubt on the basic premise of these rival evangelists for fraud in feeding. Nor do we want to venture an opinion on the legal spat between the two authors about potential literary theft (Ms. Lapine has brought suit against Ms. Seinfeld, the wife of Jerry Seinfeld, who dismissed Ms. Lapine's charge that Ms. Seinfeld is a copycat and called the lady a wacko on national television). We just want to tell you what their food tastes like and why the authors' reliance on packaged convenience foods and sweets is a poor way to educate youthful palates and lure them away from cookies and muffins.
First, how do their veggie-larded dishes taste?
The short answer is: "Eew, gross."
Or maybe "Yuck" would say it better.
Or, to put it in a more adult way, our well-meaning authors do not seem to care about the quality of what they put on the table so long as it contains a covert dose of vegetable.
It may well be that industrially packaged macaroni and cheese inoculated with white-bean puree (Lapine) or home-boiled macaroni with reduced fat cheddar and some cauliflower puree (Seinfeld) will give your grade-schoolers a healthful, adequate meal, but such low-end distortions of a classic dish do not help the girl or boy at the receiving end evolve into a grown-up eater.
I tried Ms. Lapine's mac and cheese with a supermarket house brand that used precut lengths of tubular pasta and powdered cheese. Ms. Lapine accepts any such boxed product. The one I picked at random ended up dead and muffled in flavor. The very processed cheese bore little resemblance to normal cheddar's pleasant sharpness.
Ms. Seinfeld's low-fat, pregrated cheese was at least as insipid. Neither author's recipe calls for baking, so a child raised on this stuff would never know the joy of crusty, traditional mac and cheese. But such kids have been put through a kind of sinister culinary special ed.
In fact, these books promote gastronomic regression. With their occult purees, they re-introduce their targets' tastebuds to baby food. Indeed, Ms. Lapine actually recommends commercial baby food as a choice for parents too pressed to boil and mash a sweet potato. And even if you don't recoil at this infantilizing stratagem, you may wonder how the wee Lapines and Seinfelds are going to acquire their moms' passion for the life-sustaining value of vegetables, if all bright-colored plant food in their homes is spirited secretly into meals and never discussed in a positive and straightforward way.
These women treat vegetables the way Victorian mothers treated sex, with silence. They also avoid another important lesson through tricky indirection. One of their tactics for infiltrating food with veggies is to mix vegetables into desserts and other sweetened foods. But does concealing zucchini puree in oatmeal raisin cookies (Seinfeld) or "purple puree," spinach and blueberries, in chocolate cookies do anything to wean sweet-toothed little ones from sugar? Even if allegedly less harmful brown sugar is substituted for white?
Of Ms. Seinfeld's 12 breakfast recipes, 10 contain some kind of sweetener. Twenty-five, or one-third, of her recipes are desserts.
So what do I recommend? Culinary transparency. No sneaking around. Serve as much real food as your schedule permits, and use each dish as a gentle advertisement for adult taste. With many children, this approach will work right away. Pork and beans is an honest and unfrightening alternative to nursery food that's been anonymously vaccinated with white-bean puree. Mashed potatoes mixed with cauliflower or celery-root puree is grown-up food but it is also childproof white. Children old enough to help out in the kitchen can be taught how it is made and why the different tastes and consistencies make for a pleasingly diverse food life.
For the recalcitrant, hysterically neophobic child, the wise course is probably just plain nursery food. Spaghetti with ketchup, peanut butter and jelly on Kleenex bread. Even this diet won't, by itself, make most kids clinically obese.
The same child may well love to snack on raw carrot sticks and Russian dressing. Mine did. Eventually, almost all tyrannically negative table-monsters grow up and eat salad. Some even turn into vegans. Now that's a real problem.
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