talon | Kids Hate Vegetables?

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/HealthyLiving/healthy-choices-fast-food-children/story?id=9497089

Since when? Every child I've ever known and fed over the past 50 years has loved vegetables. I've never had to hide them in other foods or trick them into eating them. The rare times that we ate out, my children and their friends always filled their plates with vegetables, often in preference to any meat at all.

Perhaps it's this pervasive media bias against vegetables that makes people think children don't like them. All these books and articles about how to add "stealth" vegetables to children's food that don't help the perception any. The ads for juicers and things all proclaim recipes for "hiding" vegetables in juices, and V-8 makes the claim that children won't know their fruit juice contains vegetables. It's like there's this adult misconception that children won't eat their vegetables unless tricked or coerced into it. Even the media blitz surrounding the White House Vegetable Garden promoted the idea that kids hated vegetables, and might be coaxed into eating some if only they participated in growing and harvesting them.

Children love vegetables. They may go through a phase where they won't eat a particular vegetable or one prepared a specific way, but there are lots of other vegetable choices. Children love the colors, textures, and variety as well as all the different ways they can eat vegetables. Let us count the ways of the vegetable: raw, steamed, boiled, baked, fried, roasted, grilled, creamed, blanched, sautéed, deep-fried, or stir-fried, served pureed, mashed, julienned, roll-cut, spear-cut, coins, diced, cubed, quartered, crinkle cut, paper thin slices, sliced, waffle-cut, hollowed, chiffonaded, minced, freeze-dried, dried, shredded, parallel cut, crushed, filleted, triangled, or peeled, not to mention using tiny cookie cutters or carving knives to cut vegetables into flowers, faces, animals, pop-up toys, or various objects or even to create landscapes.

Maybe the child won't eat raw tomatoes, but loves ketchup - it's still tomato! Especially if you make your own, ketchup can be a healthy way to serve tomatoes. If a vegetable served one way doesn't meet with joy, try the same vegetable another way. If they really don't like one vegetable, try another. There are more than 200 different kinds of cultivated, commercially produced vegetables (not varieties or cultivars of the same vegetable, but unique and different vegetables) and this doesn't include exotic vegetables or edible wild plants that aren't commonly eaten as vegetables, nor have I counted fruits or nuts - just vegetables. More than 200 different kinds! Among that huge variety of colorful, crispy, crunchy, chewy, mushy vegetables is a collection of vegetables for each and every child to proclaim as their favorites.

Vegetables can be paired up with so many other vegetables, sauces, spreads, and more in a dizzying array of goodness.

Best of all, kids can play with vegetables before they eat them - and I don't know a kid who doesn't love to eat the playing pieces of a game they've just finished playing. My kids had shoot-outs with broccoli and carrots and cauliflowers, made "dolls" of slices of kohlrabi, and built forts and moonscapes of greens or mashed veggies. And then they ate their "stories".

Let me say it again, because it can't be said often enough - kids love vegetables. They just need for adults to stop saying they hate vegetables and trying to trick them into eating them. It's a game, now, of kids avoiding vegetables because adults are "stealth" adding them to things.

Kids love vegetables.