Kid Chow

There's a good article in the NYT today about menus for kids in most restaurants nowadays. David Kamp discussed the ubiquity and tastelessness of most "kid food," both points I agree with. Why should kids be fed some flavorless pabulum instead of real food that is every bit as good as what adults get? Admittedly, a lot of adults go to restaurants and order the least adevnturous and most boring item on the menu, but for those who know better, it is painful to watch your kids choose something pathetic and tasteless while you've carefully selected a mind-expanding taste treat. My strategy has been to make sure they know what I'm eating (not always an incentive to order adventurously, since that means they witness me eating pork hocks and coagulated duck blood at the Vietnamese place we like), and to try to encourage them to at least think about the fact that the place has dishes unusual enough to trigger their fear of the exotic.

Part of the problem not covered in the article is that school lunches suck. Kids are fed worse food at school than anything ever served to me by the lunch lady. Their chow is of poor quality, of unknown nutritional value, presented in an institutional manner, but with condescendingly cute names like Zany Jungle Chicken, meaning that after it was defrosted, they sloshed a spoonful of high fructose corn syrup with imitation pineapple flavoring onto it. The main difference between these horrifying meals and what kids are served at restaurants is that the restaurant does a slightly better job of preparing and presenting it, sometimes going so far as dumping it all into a cardboard box shaped like a car or something. Couldn't we make school lunches a bit better? Raise the level on quality, preparation, etc? Food has a major impact on society. Many of the US's problems with energy, the economy, and healthcare are all about food. Maybe food would be less of a problem if we taught kids that it was important from the time they entered public school by demonstrating that it's important. If kids got used to eating good food, they would demand it when they got to a restaurant, and they would demand it as adults. They would take some steps to secure a strong supply of good food, steps that should have been taken 30, 40, and 50 years ago.

An interesting question to ask, ala Freakonomics, would be whether exposure to a variety of different foods early in life leads to adventurous eating habits as an adult. I don't have very specific career hopes for my kids, merely that they do something that they enjoy doing, but I do want for them to grow up recognizing and appreciating good food. I want them to shed what I assume are juvenile hangups about spices, strong flavors, and other (in my opinion) silly artificial sensibilities. I don't think that making kids eat crazy stuff would accomplish that, but I don't think that giving them the opportunity to try will hurt, either.

Here is my proposal, modest as its influence (nobody, essentially) may be: instead of having a kids' menu, offer child-sized portions of all the adult food. Worst case: they eat the least adventurous item on the menu and complain about it. Best case: you create a lifetime fan of your food and expand the horizons of a young diner.