Remember when my zucchini plants presented me with three giant specimens? They've kept at it. This could be a good thing, except that a Boy Who Must Not Be Named (BWMNBN) has declared that he will not eat zucchini. Not in a house, not with a mouse, not in the rain, not on a train. He does not like green zuc-chi-ni; he does not like it, Sam-I-be.
It turns out that food prejudices are considerably more contagious than food enthusiasms. When the BWMNBN says, "Give me zucchini-less-ness or give me death!" and "I have not yet begun to fight [against zucchini]!" it can begin to seem downright patriotic to eschew zucchini.
Sometimes, when a person has as much zucchini on hand as I happen to have at the moment, this leads to stealth cookery.
Yesterday I made a big pot of vegetarian chili. To the onions and garlic and peppers and scallions, I added some shredded zucchini -- at most a quarter-cup. "Diced would be better," I thought to myself, and so I set my kitchen helper to dicing. Enter BWMNBN. "Are you putting that in the chili?" he said in tones of deepest suspicion and disgust, pointing at the dice. "Because I'm not eating chili with zucchini."
"Wow," I said in a neutral voice, "that's a pretty emphatic reaction." He came back shortly before dinner was ready. "Did you put that zucchini in the chili?" I answered him with the truth, though not the whole truth: "I did not add a single speck of zucchini to the chili after you told me how strongly you felt about it."
Tonight for dinner Elwood added ground beef to yesterday's chili and baked it under cornbread. BWMNBN was scarfing it down when the truth came out: there might, just possibly, be a shred of zucchini on his plate. Or -- horrors! -- even two or three. You guys, Thyestes himself could not have been more outraged than BWMNBN. I had lied, he insisted. LIED!
There are all kinds of ways that parents respond to food preferences. There's the "be quiet and eat it" school of thought (too harsh for me), and the "fix yourself a substitute if you hate it" school of thought (leads to too much ramen noodle consumption), and the mom-as-short-order-cook approach to family meal prep (completely untenable in a large family, and IMO unwise even if doable). I am usually sympathetic to food aversions (by which I mean there'll be something that everybody can eat, even if he doesn't love what's served), though I do require impolite complainers to donate to Food for the Poor.
Tonight I was flummoxed. I mean, really? Fingers pointing, lips quivering, voices rising -- over a couple of shreds of zucchini? BWMNBN said he would need an ingredient list for future meals.
I did not laugh. I said to Elwood, "I'll be back in a little bit." If I had been Atreus I might have sailed away in my black-hulled ship, but I am a zucchini-slicer and not a child-chopper. Instead I hopped into my minivan and drove away scratching my head. I stayed away until I had cooled off, but I'm still mulling over the conversation. I would be indignant if a child deliberately withheld relevant information when I asked him a question. Does that mean I shouldn't have done it? How often does honesty require the whole truth?
And would they notice the zucchini puree in the chocolate cake I'd made for dessert?
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