Like many kids, I grew up gagging on zucchini, asparagus and brussel sprouts. My brother liked vegetables so much he hid them under the table. Most kids feed them to their pet dogs, but we didn’t have one in the house. My mother was a great cook and did her best to disguise vegetables for us but whatever was served, we had to eat it…our family was enrolled in the Clean Plate Club. So I’m as surprised as anyone that today I not only eat vegies I hated, but I actually like them. A great dinner to me now is zucchini spaghetti. If you haven’t bought a spiralizer yet, they really are pretty fun. I know this seems incredible, but I don’t miss pasta when I have zucchini noodles with red sauce. Asparagus started to get better when I gave myself permission to eat only the tender tops and to buy the smaller thin ones – not the older more fibrous ones my Dad grew. Brussel sprouts…yeah, no way. They are still awful.
There is an argument to be made that kids need a lot of energy to grow and vegies don’t provide that. They aren’t very calorically dense, and in fact, some vegetables contain so much indigestible fiber and so few calories that they may use as much energy to digest as they contain. (I need to know which ones these are!!) “Of course, being the brilliant species that we are, we’ve somehow managed to mess this up and are now facing a childhood obesity epidemic.” (credit for that good sentence – spoonuniversity.com) Mostly though, kids don’t like the taste of vegetables because their taste buds are different than adult taste buds. They are more sensitive to the ‘bitters’ of vegies. I didn’t have any explosive vegie events as a kid, so I eventually started to like the ones I avoided. But I knew someone with a family story about beets coming up through his nose at dinner one night and he’s never gone near one since.
There is an argument to be made that kids need a lot of energy to grow and vegies don’t provide that. They aren’t very calorically dense, and in fact, some vegetables contain so much indigestible fiber and so few calories that they may use as much energy to digest as they contain. (I need to know which ones these are!!) “Of course, being the brilliant species that we are, we’ve somehow managed to mess this up and are now facing a childhood obesity epidemic.” (credit for that good sentence – spoonuniversity.com) Mostly though, kids don’t like the taste of vegetables because their taste buds are different than adult taste buds. They are more sensitive to the ‘bitters’ of vegies. I didn’t have any explosive vegie events as a kid, so I eventually started to like the ones I avoided. But I knew someone with a family story about beets coming up through his nose at dinner one night and he’s never gone near one since.