Grand Avenue by Mike Thompson for April 22, 2020

If my mom made something we would not eat we didn’t eat period kids today got it way too soft.

Luckily I know ways around this.

(It also doesn’t hurt that I’m Indian, so I know a thing or two about making vegetarian food delicious and healthy. Seriously, my six-month-old godson is besotted with my broccoli-mushroom sausages.)

That’s a wrap.

Someone should be going hungry!

Who’s running this house anyway?

Anyone else read this and suddenly have the song ‘Foil’ by Weird Al start running through their head?

Obviously this could be Grand Avenue in NY or somewhere in CA.

After a particularly aggravating evening my sister-in-law told her boys, “Eat it or wear it!” They ate.

I fell asleep on my Lima beans, one night. I mean, I Liked, and ate spinach, liver, brussel sprouts, cabbage, several types of beans. Hadda draw the line somewhere. Still won’t eat them.

I have always loved vegetables. Only veg I won’t eat is …ork ork okra.

My wife used to make these foil-wrapped dinners when the kids were small. They didn’t like them, but I thought they were ok.

When I was a kid I was surprised that “adults liked/ate everything” at dinner, and us kids felt we were somehow misbehaving when there were things we didn’t like. I later found out that there were some things my parents actually didn’t like (for example, corn bread, which I loved!). I finally realized that the reason it seemed like they liked everything was that they didn’t serve things they didn’t like! Logical, of course, but it can still take a child a while to understand that.

What too many adults don’t realize is that children’s taste buds are a lot more sensitive, and everything is “new”, so things that might seem “normal” to an adult might be much too strong for a kid’s taste. People have different tastes, and parents think that because they like something, the kids should too. For instance, my dad used to pour so much salt on things it would make me gag (I avoid salt as much as possible now)! Parents shouldn’t make a kid eat something that will make them puke, but at the same thing not cater to the kid’s spoiled whims either (I had a relative whose child “wouldn’t eat anything except chicken nuggets” so that’s pretty much all they fed him! Now, as a young adult, he really isn’t that healthy – don’t know if that’s the reason or not, but still…).

OK, I’m on a roll about this subject, so one last comment: I realized many years later that the taste of some foods wasn’t what made me “not like” them. After all, I like pretty much everything and almost always have. I learned that in most cases, it wasn’t TASTE, but TEXTURE! It wasn’t the macaroni and cheese that made me gag, it was having to eat dried and burned bits from the top of the oven-baked casserole; and it wasn’t the chicken pot pie, it was having to eat bits of the burned crust (as two of several examples I can think of)!