Growing up, my younger brother was a picky eater. I’m not talking about “only eats things that are tan and beige” picky eater. I’m talking about a diet so restrictive and specific that he could have passed for an orthorexic bodybuilder—steamed broccoli, baked chicken breast (as dry as possible, he specified), peanut butter and jelly, and thin crust pizza. Unlike other so-called picky eaters, he didn’t like chicken nuggets, burgers, or fries. He hated white bread (his PB&J had to be on whole wheat bread—not because we were health conscious but because he preferred it.) And his least favorite food—one so disgusting he brought it up with me just the other day at the age of thirty—was ice cream cake.
Like many people who didn’t yet have children, I judged my parents as they catered to this absurdity. Dutifully, my mother would use aluminum foil to bake a bone-dry chicken breast every dinner, steam some broccoli, and occasionally beg him to try something else. On the occasion he agreed to try something, he was basically doing this:
And ultimately, my mom gave into him by continuing to feed him his bespoke diet. The diet was harmless—if anything, he ate much healthier than your average kid. He was tall and thin, but not underweight. He didn’t have any nutritional deficiencies. But it was so restrictive and so specific that it made dinner prep and restaurant outings incredibly hard. He would even gag when trying new foods, something which I assumed he was doing purely for attention.
His issues with food went beyond typical complaints of things being “yucky.” He invented a completely new way for food to be disgusting—zee-ish, which he now explains as a “horrifying astringency,” and something he still insists is real:
My brother didn’t grow out of his picky eating until his early twenties, when a semester abroad forced him to eat different foods, or starve. Suddenly, sunshine washed over his taste buds. Now he eats sushi, oysters, chanterelle mushrooms, and steak—but still loathes ice cream cake. And while he remembers his childhood of picky eating, it doesn’t seem to have any long-lasting negative effects on his relationship with food.
For some reason, I assumed I wouldn’t fall into the picky eater trap that befell my parents. I told myself I would start my children out eating adult foods, and they would simply never know there was any alternative. I wouldn’t be caught dead making a separate dinner for a three-year-old. After all, no child is going to starve themselves to death because they don’t want to eat rigatoni with chicken and sundried tomatoes. Eventually, they will simply eat.
Or at least I assumed.
What I didn’t expect was that—perhaps through the same genetics that affected my brother’s palate—I would have a child who was just as picky as he was, if not more. I would discover that many parents were in this boat, through no fault of their own. And more distressingly, almost all the advice to expand their children’s palates—from the colorful lunch plates with star-shaped watermelon slices suggested on Instagram, to the old-school technique to just let a child be hungry until he agrees to eat roast chicken—would fail.
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