Lying mama chefs

(Quasi-honesty -- the sequel)

Here’s an article from Slate.com that suggests that even when you try to trick kids into eating vegetables by sneaking them into foods you’re doing them a disservice. You’re not teaching them to love vegetables in their purest, healthiest forms and you’re practicing a form of deception. The article, entitled, “Lie to Your Children—It's Good for Them: The Terribly Wrong Message Sent by Jessica Seinfeld and Missy Chase Lapine” is a slam against the cookbooks "Deceptively Delicious" by Jessica (Mrs. Jerry) Seinfeld and Missy Chase Lapine’s "The Sneaky Chef," which apparently advocate things like adding mashed sweet potatoes to hot cocoa and pureed zucchini to macaroni and cheese. I still say it’s not a problem if you make some delicious zucchini brownies mostly because they truly are delicious, call them zucchini brownies when you hand the dessert over to your child, and then serve up zucchini in other more typical dishes on other days -- or if you make a soup with pureed cauliflower and carrots and turn it into a little adventure with magical ingredients like sunshine and moonbeams (see the August 22 post on the subject of getting kids to eat vegetables) – as long as you tell the kids the real ingredients if they’re curious about the real stuff behind the magic.

But it makes sense to me that in general it’s best to be forthright with kids about healthy eating and serve up lots of whole, unprocessed vegetables until you discover several staples that prove palatable to your child.