Should moms sneak vegetables into their kids’ food without their knowing it?

As any mother knows, given the choice, kids will avoid eating vegetables. You’d have to wonder where kids got this innate dislike of the taste of vegetables. Granted, many vegetables may have a bitter taste, have a sulphuric odor, and may have a consistency that just isn’t pleasing to a child’s palate. But does that mean you should just eliminate vegetables from the menu so you don’t have to get into fights with your children? Absolutely not!!!

Jessica Seinfeld wrote the book, “Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food”, as a way to get kids to eat their vegetables and not even know they had them. By pureeing them and including them in sauces, for example, few children’s palates are that perceptive to notice there are vegetables in the sauce. Yet, what have children learned about eating vegetables? Nothing.

And that’s the rub. Children haven’t learned that vegetables, fruits and grains should be a part of a healthy diet if they’ve never seen what they actually look like in their natural form served to them on a plate. If you want to go with the Seinfeld approach, then I suggest you get your children involved in the cooking process. Let them see you making a puree of, say, broccoli. Get them invovled and let them help make the food. They’ll put it together in their mind that they’re eating vegetables – just in a pleasing way.

Personally, I don’t believe that everything that your child doesn’t like should be masked as to its real identity. So, if you’re pureeing a vegetable, also finely chop that vegetable and incorporate it into the dish. The next time you make it, roughly chop the vegetables, making them larger than the last time. Continue to introduce the vegetable in small steps until your child is eating them as you do. Of course, you’d better be eating your vegetables, fruits and grains, setting a good example and acting like a good role model. I wonder if the younger President Bush eats broccoli after hearing that his dad, the elder President Bush, doesn’t like it?