Accepting My Son's Picky Eating, and Fear of Carrots

We’ve all met this kid before. He only eats pasta with butter and plain oatmeal. Or Cheerios and French fries. Before I had children, it was impossible for me to imagine that I—a home cook, a frequent restaurant-goer, a lifetime subscriber to Gourmet—would call this kind of kid my own.

But as fate would have it, I have a picky eater. His name is Nate, and he is adorable, smart, funny, warm, creative, talented, and a terrible, no good, very bad eater. His staples are hot dogs, cheese sticks, and pasta without sauce. He refuses all vegetables and fruits and anything slightly outside his comfort zone. Which is everything. It started when he was a baby (he was revolted by his first piece of avocado) and at age 4, he would rather forgo TV than eat a snap pea.

I have gone through the stages of grief: 1. No way not me! 2. I can change him with my clever cooking. 3. I will punish him until he changes. 4. I don’t care. Let him starve. 5. I cracked the code! 6. I don’t care. Let him starve. 7. Help!

For years, family dinners went something like this:

6:15pm: Nate refuses to even try the cauliflower with cheese sauce or hummus and carrots. He asks for ketchup.

6:18pm: Nate eats four strands of pasta and asks to be excused. We say no and he slides off his chair onto the floor, then tries to stick forks into water bottles. We tell Nate to join us; he cries. Nate goes to his room. We eat his dinner.

6:25pm: I clean up a million dishes.

In 2014, Nate ate a carrot, and I got so excited that I served carrots with every meal and as a prerequisite for every treat. That is until Nate, under the adoring gaze of his grandparents, refused his one baby carrot. I pushed and threatened and 30 minutes later when he finally finished the tiny carrot, he made a weird gagging noise, came over to me, and threw it up in my lap.

It wasn’t a lot of vomit—but it was the whole baby carrot, the one I made him eat, in regurgitated flecks on my lap. (My husband Michael and I later noted that this was a pretty brilliant move that we now refer to as “throwing up the carrot”—when a kid makes it almost impossible to continue to make him do something.)

By then I was fully in stage eight, denial, so I soldiered on. I tried all the tricks, including instituting schedules for meals and snacks, as Dina Rose recommends in her brilliant book It’s Not About the Broccoli. We tried mandatory tasting to no avail, and I had little success with the hide-the-veggies approach to recipes a la Jessica Seinfeld. My banana-peanut butter-spinach muffins were bland and dense. Nobody liked them…all 48 of them.