When my middle daughter was a baby, she rejected almost every kind of baby food I gave her, oozed it slowly out of her mouth, stretched her neck so it would run down her chin, and into her shirt. She would look at me in horror, as if to say, “How am I ever going to learn to trust you if you keep putting that nastiness in my mouth?” She was already showing me that feeding her would require endless patience, and it has.
She has tired of the label picky and has self-diagnosed herself a supertaster. Whether super picky or supertaster, I’m
just super happy she started cooking for herself at ten.
When we first traveled to Europe for the summer, she was four. Her regular at-home-menu wasn’t available in the places we were visiting. The macaroni and cheese wasn’t exactly the same brand, the milk didn’t taste exactly the way ours did at home. She was not impressed.
That summer, despite my best efforts to get her to try new foods, she refused. Not sure why I thought she would be more open in Europe if she never had been so in North America. In fact, the new environment made her even more resistant to try new foods. There was enough “new” going on in every other way. She was so dug in, her lips may as well have been welded together. It made her angry when we would coax her to try something. Quickly I had to let go of the notion that she should try new foods to experience new cultures.
That entire summer she ate three things, baguette, tomatoes, and chocolate ice cream. That’s it, not a lick of anything else. In the morning we would go to the bakery, and she would pick out her baguette for the day. I remember early in our trip, we were touring The Forum ruins in Rome, and she clutched her baguette after she was too tired to eat any more. I think she was worried that she wouldn’t find anything else she would eat, so she’d better not let it out of her sight. Throughout the rest of the summer, that’s what she ate, without butter, without meat, without anything, dry
baguette. I kept thinking she would starve or how imbalanced her diet was.
Our baguette clinging monkey didn’t starve that summer, nor any subsequent trip. She is older now, and has expanded her list of edible European foods to include french fries and Nutella crepes, which brings her grand total to five. Once I accepted that her travel diet was even more narrow than what she would eat at home and stopped
coaxing her to experience the culture in a culinary way, we have gotten along splendidly.