How to get a Child to Eat Spinach

The first time Matilda tried spinach against her will she was four years old and the neighbours probably thought they’d end up on the news that night.

She kicked up such a fuss you’d have thought she was being murdered rather than being asked to try something delicious.

And to be clear she had eaten spinach before, but never on it’s own or to her knowledge. There were these chocolate muffins which Mike, Matilda’s father made which had not just spinach but carrot and zucchini hidden in them, blended into the wet ingredients. Just about every pasta sauce and the like which got made in big batches had vegetables and herbs blended up into them, too. It was the path of least resistance. Mike would happily spend two or three times longer than absolutely necessary in the kitchen than have a full on head to head with Matilda or Archer at the dinner table.

The dinner table, which used to be such a relaxing and fun excuse to put down the tools at the end of the day or even something to look forward to when it was a special occasion had at times in recent years become a battle ground of sorts. Not that Mike dreaded it, he always looked forward to time spent with family but if was rife with compromise and consolations.

Now, spinach isn’t everyone’s favourite food to be sure but Mike did used to be a chef and if just about anything has been bathed in enough brown butter and salt it should a least be palatable. But you could tell there was going to be a struggle from the get-go - as soon as Matilda’s eyes levelled on the intended dinner there was a moment of breathlessness; a pause before the initial review that would tell you whether the next fifteen minutes or so were going to be calm or stormy.

She chose violence.

She had been doing so a lot lately. For nearly her whole third year of life that little girl had been a handful. Not bad, you wouldn’t call her bad, but not pleasant to be around a lot of the time either. Most mornings, it would take close to an hour before you could get a smile out of her, and if you pushed too hard trying to get one you were more than likely to regret it. Mike had often wondered if there was anything he could do for his daughter - gentle wake ups, cuddles in bed, sparing use of TV or phone apps. When most of those failed he started to wonder from what age can you start drinking coffee anyways?

Of course most of us would be empathetic to Matilda’s plight, oppressed as she was. Many of us are not morning people and fewer still are spinach people. Such an enthusiastically negative review might be discouraging but it’s hardly the first time a child has rejected a meal. Most parents or indeed most people who used to be children can empathize - Mike among them.

He told me once that he could recall the days when he was basically scared of bell peppers (capsicums) since he had got it into his head that they were spicy. Mike’s parents, Fred and Lou Lou, as they called her, had done well and the boys all ate well but certain foods still got pushed to the side or ignored on a regular basis.

Mike brother’s would often push pieces of tomato or the fat from meats to the side of their plate, and that’s if their mum and dad were lucky. More often than not they’d push the unwanted pieces clean off the plate, forming little piles on the edge of placemats. Still some other kids might have tried feeding them to the dog, but they didn’t have a dog in those days and what kind of a dog likes vegetables, anyways?

So it was until summer camp one year, when Mike, who had a big appetite, realized that if he was going to make it through the session he was going to need every available calorie. Two weeks is too long to reject pizza because it’s deluxe instead of margarita. Little by painful little he learned to eat what was there. By the end of the summer he even learned to like it. Ever since then and for various similar reasons he and his brothers have been on the adventurous side of eaters.

Matilda’s mother, Katie, was largely the same. So they didn’t begrudge their little princess her tantrums - pickiness and hangryness being as natural as any other part of childhood. They’d read somewhere that the picky kids, back in the neolithic era, were the ones who had survived to pass on their genes. It makes sense that all the adventurous kids, the kids with a genetic predisposition to trying new berries, mushrooms and the like, probably weren’t going to have the chance to pass on those genes.

Mike recalled that he had also read this idea that pickiness was brought on by overuse of processed foods early in life. It seemed plausible - most formulas and kid foods are designed to be as palatable as possible, and if a kid gets used to that and suddenly is being asked to eat something so much more foreign looking or smelling you can bet they’ll tell the chef where to shove it.

Plausible - maybe - but this didn’t square with Mike, Katie or anyone else’s living memory of their own childhood. It seemed more likely that parents just used to combat pickiness with more combat and back when that sort of thing was legal it was easy to see who was going to win.

Even Henry, two years older and at the time no less picky, would gladly have subsisted on beige foods had he been allowed. Beige carbs, specifically. He was a growing boy with a big appetite and there were exceptions, he happily ate raw broccoli for example, but his favourite foods by far were bread, pasta and pizza and I can say with absolute certainty that he wasn’t the first young person to worship the culinary achievements of Italy.

They did okay with that though, it was easy to justify basing a good deal of meals around carbs, especially if they were using brown breads, rices, pastas and pizza bases. Most of those meals were crowd pleasers and according to most traditional wisdom or nutrition science at the time, they probably had about the right kinds of nutrients in them to help a young family thrive.

But between the busyness and the lack of sleep of those days it had got to the point where some combination of brown carbs and tomato sauce - that’s marinara to be clear, not ketchup - became not just the norm but the only kind of dinner. Katie mentioned one day that it might be nice to change things up, maybe just a little.

They experimented and found some new favourites, sausages and burgers among them. It was a welcome change of pace to find some higher protein foods to add to the beige rotation, and after all they usually were still shades of brown. Mike began to wonder how many combinations of things would go with crushed tomatoes, anyway.

In fact Mike, who had always enjoyed baking, took it upon himself to experiment with all kinds of recipes to make their own versions of these staples. It seems crazy when I think about how he’d find time to make all these things but these are the kinds of things we do for love aren’t they?

It began with making bread. There has got to be something elemental, something satisfying to the soul in bread making - otherwise who would make the time? Sure it became popular during pandemic lockdowns, but that kind of proves the point doesn’t it? Who would do this if they didn’t have the free time? I’ll tell you who - someone who wants to find a wholesome, delicious, healthy way to feed their family.

But as most people who bake will tell you, making bread typically means that sooner or later you’ll want to buy a mixer. You can do it by hand but after a couple dozen kicks at that can, you start to dream about justifying the cost. Next you discover sourdough. The little jar of bubbling flour and water which occupies a small shrine in so many kitchens, that pet of chefs everywhere which eats better than the chef himself. And along with sourdough comes a whole new set of flours as well - rye flour to feed the starter, strong bread flour for the loaves, whole grain of course and white rice flour to dust the baskets, bannetons, with to make sure the sticky loaves come out of the basket and into the oven, cleanly. And with so many types of flour it makes you start to wonder, where do all these flours come from anyways? Well, they come from grains of course but where can you get big enough quantities of whole grains from to bake with? Online, it turns out. The same places you can buy a table-top, electric stone mill to home-grind your own grains into flour. Now once you’re making your own stone-milled flour what else can you make with it and shouldn’t you a professional oven or maybe start a micro bakery and wasn’t all this meant to be a way to make your life easier?

One night, when Clementine was less than a year old, she awoke grumpily to the sound of that stone mill grinding away and Katie pointed out that maybe this whole thing had got a bit out of hand. Well when else were you going to make flour? You weren’t.

So that was the beginning of the end of that. Of course it makes sense, talk about hitting the bull’s eye on the wrong target. Not the Mike hadn’t enjoyed it all - far from it - but it just made much more sense to learn to just manage disagreements at the dinner table after all.

So it was with empathy that Katie, Mike and Matilda’s brother Henry watched their little girl scream and pound her fists and run back and forth around the house after being shown her dinner.

It wasn’t long either before Archer realized that this was his dinner as well - a saag paneer - among some other Indian dishes, and that he was expected to try some of everything, too.

Then there were two kids getting murdered.

When they finally settled down, it was with some amazement that Mike and Katie watched, I think it was Henry first, sulk back to the table calmly, sit down and try a single molecule of the curry.

“Yummy” said Matilda.

“Not bad” said Henry.

“More, please” said they both.

And that was the beginning of the end of eating mostly beige foods.