My brother is the kind of dad who goes out early on a Saturday morning to buy fresh blueberries for pancakes requested for breakfast by his four year old daughter. Or who bakes moon-sized chocolate chip cookies on his day off just for her, a prize for when she eats the kind of food a growing child should eat. Anything in her mind counts, even if it’s just a lizard lick of something green.
I can’t remember not liking much of the food put in front of me when I was a kid. I ate almost everything, and we were eating Sicilian dishes like cudduroni – tuna fish with tomato sauce and spinach wrapped in a crust like a cookie sheet-sized calzone – or chiappetta con olive, or as we called it, sour meat, cold and for breakfast. A dish of pork and beef and a mysterious vegetable carduna, as suggested in the original recipe, stewed together in vinegar, red wine, and capers and olives. My mother claims she and my father debated about what carduna is but used artichoke hearts instead. I do remember not liking fish or fresh tomatoes, even those out of the garden, or Captain Crunch disintegrating in a bowl full of milk , but I would eat meatballs in tomato sauce, fried eggplant or scrambled eggs with tomato sauce, garlic, parmigiano and asparagus or artichoke hearts.
My niece on the other hand has an opinion about every crumb on her plate.
I thought she might survive this “I’m not eating just anything” phase when at two years old, she ate any fresh fruit you put in front of her. She stuffed the berries into her toddler-sized mouth so fast I feared she might choke. Still she picked out her favorite fruit or berries first, the cherries or blackberries, then the raspberries, and the strawberries or grapes maybe last. Now she eats fruit, but it comes reshaped into squares, a not so appealing color of brown, with added apple juice, in a bright pink foil package and sometimes a prize.
“You used to eat so much fresh fruit. What happened?” I asked recently.
“It’s not sweet,” she said.
So while mango snacks are healthy as snacks go, the extra apple juice biases her to choose the fruit snacks over the real fruit. I don’t know, but the real fruit looks and smells so much better.
Another of her approved dishes is rice rolled up in seaweed wraps. Seaweed wraps are also a reasonable food option. They are green, and they do contain some nutrients, like iodine and vitamin A, but I wonder if it’s the salt she really likes. My niece can eat a ton of these rice rolls, as long as the rice is white and they are dipped in soy sauce.
Some variations on rice are also on her menu. Fried rice which is just white rice sauteed in soy sauce. No egg, no vegetables, no green onion, but sometimes “red meat” which turns out is Spam.
“It’s just ham,” my brother says, “so it’s not full of junk or even preservatives. Just a lot of salt.”
Do kids not have a threshold for salt? I once made macaroni and cheese in college the way my mom did when were kids, with Campbell’s cheddar cheese soup, and couldn’t eat it – too much salt.
Pasta, farfalle and linguini or spaghetti, and thankfully, the tonnarelli we make together at home are also acceptable to eat.
When my brother asks me over for dinner, often it’s an invitation to come over to make noodles. I make the dough, just watch any typical video on making pasta and that’s what I do. A lagoon of eggs, water, salt and olive oil surrounded by a ring of flour. The dough rests for 30 minutes and then we get to business cranking out the noodles. I can manage the whole process on my own just fine, but it works best with my brother rolling out the dough into sheets of pasta with the hand cranking pasta machine, while I cut the noodles on the chitarra, which is the Italian word for guitar.
My niece is now at the age where she can participate and she wants to participate. The chitarra is a rectangular wooden frame with wires strung across it lengthwise, like a guitar, to cut the noodles into the tonnarelli. You can’t cut yourself – it’s just wire – so we let her cut the noodles, which requires pressing the dough into the strung wires with a rolling pin. The noodles fall through, sometimes only after strumming the wires. It’s kind of musical and when it’s time to strum the wires, my niece will ask, “Can I make the music now?”
The tonnarelli my niece will eat as many, or maybe more than my brother and I eat together.
“More, more, more,” she says.
The catch is that she also eats these handmade noodles with soy sauce. Technically, as my sister-in-law says, “Her version of pasta is no different than ramen.”
It’s progress that she eats the homemade noodles – at least she’s getting some egg. At the same time, she’s missing an opportunity to eat them with my brother’s tomato sauce and meatballs. This is when I tease my niece, “You will be sorry one day that you didn’t start eating the meatballs sooner.”
“No, never,” she says.
Ice cream, chocolate covered raisins, and just about anything else where the main ingredient is sugar are also on the diet approved list.
I gave her the choice one morning to eat a hardboiled egg. I guess when the other option is a chocolate covered kid power bar, the hardboiled egg isn’t going to win. The power bars are some facsimile of adult power bars, so they don’t taste that great and they’re like biting into powder. But, they’re covered in chocolate.
Eating a moon-sized chocolate chip cookie is probably more nutritious.
Sometimes the food is right, but the circumstances are not.
One day, after she had eaten her cherry jam with bread, her father gave her one of those moon-sized home baked chocolate chip cookies for dessert (sure dessert after jam on bread). Without thinking about it, he put the cookie on her cherry jam with bread plate.
“Daddy, I don’t want jam on the cookie,” my niece said.
My brother got up and brought back a clean plate for the cookie.
“Daddy, this rice is too cold,” my niece said another night. Which is funny because she doesn’t seem to mind pouring soy sauce right out of the refrigerator on her noodles or rice.
My brother took the rice and zapped it in the microwave which fixed that problem. But then it was not enough soy sauce. And then it was not enough salt.
I’m not sure what her behavior around food is a reflection of. Is she conscious of manipulating the adults in her life? Or is it the result of something biological, like not yet fully functioning neuronal pathways?
But it struck me then that I knew exactly where the idea for Goldilocks and the Three Bears came from.
Books…
Norwegian Lessons in Indonesia (2023)
An Accidental Artist: Discovering Creativity through Scuba Diving (2018)
Art for sale at AnemoneWatch on Square
Janice Nigro 
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