Dialogue: Oh that they'd all eat what is served

By ROANNE PARKER

Kids and meal times, eh, they just keep on coming. Now I know my mother was right when she said that some days she felt like she never got out of the kitchen. She didn't have to fit in nine hours at work though, did she?

I remember hanging around as a kid from about 5 o'clock, asking what was for dinner and getting fobbed off with a cabbage stalk and a "wait and see." I always tell my kids it's concrete sandwiches when I am feeling harassed at dinner time.

For fun (all right, for this column) I asked a few people what they were told when they asked what was for tea. In the 1940s it was a pinch of salt and a walk around the table; my girlfriend from Holland was threatened with little brother's pooh - which sounded just as unappetising in Dutch, I'm sure.

And fussy! My three kids are about as unfussy as any I know. They like most fruit and veges and eat lots of both, but anything other than that gets a bit tricky. None of them has a huge list of "no ways" but each has a few.

I understand we don't all like the same things but it would make it so much easier if they would at least dislike the same things because it is nigh on impossible to make something that they will all eat.

Here's an example: only two eat meat, two eat beans, two eat pasta, two eat zucchini, two eat kumara and pumpkin, two eat peanut butter and two Marmite, two eat eggs, two eat Weetbix, two eat toast, two eat cheese.

Now I challenge you to provide three meals a day, seven days a week, keeping all three happy and well-nourished while avoiding the disliked foods so as to have no noses wrinkled at you.

Or, as I have to do usually, adapting one dish to suit all three by adding or subtracting just before it's served.

What are the rules at your place, I wonder? Do your kids eat everything on their plates before they get dessert? Do they get dessert? Do they eat at the table or in front of The Simpsons? Do you make them try something even if they hate it?

I try the old "kids are starving around the world," but if they hate it they hate it. God knows I still shudder at the memory of my first run in with a lump of ox tongue.

I was in an Indian restaurant the other night and watched an Indian mother trying to coax her son to try a particular curry, but he wasn't having a bar of it.

Then I began to wonder what happens if you are born in China and hate rice, or India and hate curry, or Ireland and you hate potatoes, haggis in Scotland, humus in Turkey, pizza in Italy, frogs in France, whale in Japan, sauerkraut in Germany, caviar in Russia, fish in an igloo.

You'd be bloody skinny, I suppose. Or perhaps you just wouldn't have the first clue about being fussy.

I justify my kids being as fussy as they are because they are not as bad as some I know and at least they eat lots of raw stuff, but of course they are much more fussy than my siblings and I were. Fussy wasn't even invented when my mother was small.

I read that as a punishment a solo dad and his two boys have a system of Porridge Days - if the boys misbehave, they have to eat porridge for breakfast instead of fancy cereal. If my mother had eaten anything other than porridge for breakfast when she was little her digestive system would probably have arrested in shock - and now porridge is a disciplinary device.

Breakfast cereal with sugar and colouring gets treated with disdain in my house. I explain to the kids that it's all a plot cooked up by the dentists to get more money for filling teeth with metal alloys.

But the other day my son said to me in disgust that he had had the same thing for breakfast for three days in a row and wasn't there anything else? He was lucky I didn't have a pot of porridge in my hands at the time.

Speaking of breakfast: it has been my pleasure to join you for yours each Saturday, but the powers that be have claimed this spot from now on for some serious political commentary.

All is not lost, however. From this coming week I will be joining you and your porridge each Tuesday on the Dialogue page. See you then.