FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD?

Ben won’t eat.

Okay, he eats. But he’s five. He eats maybe six or seven different things. And it’s starting to wear on me.

Ben will eat:

French toast (but only when I make it for him);

tuna salad (ditto. And no celery, no anything in it but a bit of mayo);

fries (which I’ve scaled WAY back on);

chicken (both grilled and fried, finger-style. Guess which one I’m always pushing on him?);

fruit (bananas, bananas, bananas. And also strawberries, apples, and possibly melon, but only if it’s cantaloupe, and only if we’re at Red Robin)

pizza (and if it doesn’t come from our favorite place, it’s a battle to get him to eat it)

frozen blueberry waffles (I foist the NutriGrain kind on him; he protests, but he eats them)

He used to eat a lot of Raspberry Fig Newtons, but I won’t buy them anymore since I realized the very first ingredient is high fructose corn syrup. He also recently tried hamburgers, but he picks them apart so slowly that by the time he’s done, you can’t really recognize it as once having been a burger. I have followed advice from every parenting magazine, as well as fellow parents. I have tried they’re food advice ten times, to no avail. He flat-out refuses to try. I don’t want the dinner table to become a battlefield, but the kid needs to eat something fresh, natural, and not full of preservatives.

Last night, I broke the cardinal rule of mealtime: I made a meal from scratch and wouldn’t let him get up from the table until he finished everything on his plate.

It was turkey meatballs and penne pasta in a homemade tomato sauce and it was delicious, if I do say so myself. My older son, Jack, devoured his two meatballs and inhaled his pasta. Ben sat there and stubbornly refused to eat. It was like that famous sequence in “Mommy Dearest”, in which Christina refuses to eat her steak and sits and sits until Joan gives in and lets her leave the table. But in our little movie, Ben actually ended up eating all the meatballs and four whole pieces of penne. Despite the tears and the proclamations from him that he would never eat anything ever again (you gotta love kids when they make a stand like that), I held firm and made him sit there. “No TV until you finish,” I said. “No going outside with your friends. You’re going to sit there until you eat it all.” I felt worse than Joan Crawford, but the kid needs to learn that my kitchen is not a restaurant (meaning, he eats what we all eat) and the dinner table is not a chessboard…we do not sit there until we reach a stalemate. We sit there and enjoy a meal together because we are a family and that is what families do.

Jack went through the picky eating phase as well. I recall many bowls of macaroni and cheese. I made him more cheese sandwiches than I could ever count (not grilled, White American cheese only, on sourdough bread, thank you). And now, at nine, Jack is a mini-gourmand. He eats sushi, mussels, crawfish, shrimp, pork chops, and steak (take that, Christina Crawford!), among many other delicacies. I hope Ben will follow suit, sooner rather than later. I could probably make his French toast in my sleep by now. I am trying to be patient and understanding about this. I know most kids have weird food things (hey, I still do), but eventually they realize there’s more to life than Goldfish crackers and apple juice.

Until Ben’s palate catches up with the rest of us, I’ll just have to be Zen about all this. Still, soon you might hear a whoop of joy coming from a small house in Vancouver, and it will be me, delighted that Ben asked for a second helping of spaghetti.