Helping Kids Diversify their Eating

I just convinced my 7 year old to eat some par-cooked (blanched) carrots, and it struck a note with me that we've used a number of techniques over the years to get our boys to try new foods. In this case my wife had purposely only par-cooked the carrots so they would have a crunchiness to them still - our oldest loves raw carrots but will not eat them cooked. This was a perfect "gateway technique" to get him eating cooked carrots too. It took a while to convince him to try the first carrot, but once he did, he was fine and ate it all.

Perhaps one of the most unscrupulous "gateways" we've introduced were the notorious "supper timbits". I had gotten an idea that since the boys (about 3 and 5 at the time) loved Tim Horton Timbits so much, that we should deep fry our falafel instead of making burgers, and tell the boys they were "supper timbits". It worked like a charm and now we basically can introduce any food by using the "gateway" of deep frying it into a ball the first time we feed it to them. Sure, deep fried foods are terrible if they eat them every day, but much as we love ours, it is still limited to 2 or 3 times a month so this is just fine for growing boys who are otherwise active (which many their age are not these days)

On the other hand, potatoes are still not a "gateway" for our oldest. Even though he loves them in very many forms like poutine and french fries and more, he still will not eat them by themself. Then again, there is not much nutrition in potatoes to begin with so maybe we are better off letting him have his way on that one :-)

If you can relate a food a child does not like, to one she or he does, you can "trick" them into trying new foods on a regular basis. As much as I sometimes complain about how picky these boys can be, they eat an order of magnitude or two better variety than I did at their age, and they are always willing to experiment with new foods. Our oldest even knows that you may not like something the first time you try it, but a few months later you may decide to like it all of a sudden, so he regularly tries things he recalls trying before but not liking.

I'm pretty impressed with how easy it was to raise our boys not only liking good food, but understanding why it is good simply by explaining simple things to them. For example, they know that white bread and rolls are terrible for you in part because the whole grains have roughage that helps your digestive system. Both of them think it is normal to eat whole grains and abnormal to eat that pale, pasty poor-excuse for a grain product know as "white bread". The Germans actually call this "toast" using the English term to refer to the typical North American loaf of white bread, I guess because it is not much good for anything else. Which I would have to agree with! And even for that it is not much good.

Actually the approach of explaining good health with hard scientific facts works exceptionally well with our oldest boy. He is a real science/numbers geek and just chews up scientific data at an astonishing rate. Once he knows the "why" of good eating, he is almost always keen to follow it just because he now knows why.

To be certain every child is different, and we notice this in spades since one boy is a "hard scientist" and the other very much an "artsy fartsy". We do find that some things work well with both of them, but others not at all with one of them. Have you done anything similar with your kids? What works, and what does not?