If hunger is the best sauce, tears are the worst spice. That?s what I was thinking as I sat through yet another family dinner full of sniffles. ?I can?t do it. I?ll try it next year,? my four-year-old son sobbed as he stared at his meal. You would have thought I?d placed a bowl of steamed salamanders before him.
It was much worse. It was broccoli.
Welcome to my personal hell. A nightly routine in which my son summons the fires of Hades to rage against the injustices of vegetables. Carrots. Yuck! Peas. Bleh! Cauliflower. Hard no! The only vegetal item he occasionally deems worthy of his digestion are those smiley face frozen potatoes, so that what were once spuds look like circles of third-degree burned children grimacing up from his plate. It wasn?t always like this. I have flashes, legume-laced fever dreams of happier days, when diapered and wholly dependent on me for sustenance, my child would eat vegetables. Or at least I think that happened. I spent one recent afternoon obsessively searching my photo archives looking for proof of my son consuming anything containing chlorophyll. I found one image of him eating green bean baby food. It was taken in 2015.
?Jeez, it?s been that long"? I shuddered.
Researchers at the University of Kentucky School of Medicine have recently suggested that ?a gene that makes some compounds taste bitter may make it harder for some people to add heart-healthy vegetables to their diet.? And I?m sure, once he learns to annotate his anti-veg i...