Dear Reader,
What I am going to share with you is what Beloved and I have learned over the years with our boys. They are both sensory seeking young men and sensory avoidant young men. Now that they’re older, they can communicate to us what about a particular dish was ‘off’ for them. Sometimes the flavor is too strong or too spicy. Sometimes the textures are all wrong. Having them communicate to us that information has been a huge help in figuring out what we’re going to eat for the week. Making sure that the menu is consistent helps too.
Back when they were much younger, we tried very hard to encourage them to eat a wide variety of food. We didn’t really understand the problem. It seemed like they were rejecting things at random. For a while, Beloved and I were convinced that our youngest was a vegetarian until we introduced him to bacon. Next thing we know, that boy was eating just about every kind of meat we put in front of him. His doctor explained to us that his tastebuds had to develop enough to tolerate the flavors.
For a long while, the boys had three things that they tolerated really well and seemed to love. Macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (had to be grape jelly though), and hamburgers. Breakfast was almost always a fight until they discovered scrambled eggs weren’t evil and toast was the same thing as regular bread. Eventually, through some investigation and inquiry, we came to understand that taste sensitivity was a thing for them. For a while we went with fairly bland foods until the boys started talking about how good the mildly flavored stuff that I was making for the adults of the household smelled.
Trial and error was less terror because we were letting them lead the way (with some guidance, 5 lbs of candy does not equal a healthy meal). As the boys got better at communicating things, it opened up a whole world of options for them to try. We would go through a routine that hasn’t changed much since we started it years ago. First we presented the new food to them, told them its ingredients, and asked them to try one bite. After they had that bite, we asked them if they liked it. If they did or didn’t it was the same question next: why?
At first the answers were things like ‘It feels funny in my mouth.’ or ‘It needs to be smooth.’ Describing flavors as physical textures was very confusing at first. We worked out how to communicate spicy vs bland vs smooth. It took a little while, well maybe a bit longer than that. But as the boys’ language skills improved so did their ability to tell us what they liked and didn’t like.
My youngest son one day last month said to me, “Mom, I don’t like fish because it doesn’t feel cooked enough in my mouth.” He completely blew me out of the water with that unprompted response to my working on that week’s menu. I asked him a couple questions and it turns out that he dislikes all fish because of that texture. He said the taste was boring but ok. But the texture was wrong. This was not something he would have volunteered even last year.
So, it is an on-going process of investigation and discovery. We keep presenting new things or things from the past that they turned their noses up at. They tell us what is good and how it is. Then I seek out more variety with their food keeping the ‘good’ traits in mind as the theme of my search.
The Thrifty Housewife 