By Wendy Hammond

Perhaps
Grandma taught me
To snap the string beans
For anxiety relief
Maybe she
Knew more
Than I gave her credit for
Because here I sit
Forty years later
In the middle of it
With a bowl of
Tense green beans  
And a pile of little endings
I need to throw away
On a hot summer day
In the middle of July
I split my fears
And eat my tension
Every seven times
And I see grandma’s hands
Showing mine
Breaking off
The split ends of life
One bean at a time

Teaching Babies to Like Vegetables by Jill Epner

One of the most popular baby food flavors at Little City Kitchen Co. is Swiss chard and kale with caramelized onions, apple and white sweet potato.  Kids eat chard?  Really?  I talk to parents all day at the farmers market, and one of the most frequent statements I hear is “My kid doesn’t like _____”.  Typically they fill in the blank with a green vegetable like broccoli or green beans.

Which begs the question: Can you teach food preferences, or do babies already know what they like and don’t like?

I recently had the honor of attending the first annual Childhood Obesity Conference hosted by Slow Food San Francisco.   You may know one of the keynote speakers, Dr. Alan Greene, author of Feeding Baby Green and creator of the WhiteOut initiative that calls for a ban on baby white rice cereal.

My long-time readers know that I’m honest to a fault, so while I was familiar with the book Feeding Baby Green, I must now confess that I picked up the book for the very first time last week and sorta “crammed” for the conference – sorry Dr. Greene!  Imagine my surprise that nearly every philosophy and conclusion that I came to through my own research (with the help of experts like pediatricians and nutritionists) was echoed and even expanded upon in this wonderful book.

So back to baby’s food preferences…can they be learned?  YES!

Why is it important to expose your kids to a variety of foods at an early age?  Because you’re setting them up for a lifetime of healthy eating.  You have a distinct window of opportunity when they start solids to teach them to love a variety of flavors. Once they start walking, that window closes and they rely on what they’ve been taught so far to carry them throughout toddler-hood and the rest of their life.

Dr. Greene talks about the key word to introducing new foods is patience, and to that I would also add the word persistence.  If you keep those two words in mind, you’re likely to have a drama-free feeding experience and a healthy eater in the end.

Three small steps that parents can take:

Involve baby in the new food ahead of time.  Let them feel the avocado skin, squeeze the cooked sweet potato in their hands, watch you chop up the green beans before you feed it to them.  Getting them familiar with flavors and aromas will help them be more accepting of those foods.

Eat these foods yourself for dinner.  Kids will naturally want what’s on mom or dad’s plate, so if you eat the same foods, they’ll be more apt to try them themselves.

And the most important one: Try new foods 7-15 times before allowing baby to make up her mind.  Just a spoonful a day needed, once a day, for at least a week.  No need to force it, just try again the next day if they aren’t interested.  You’ll be surprised when all of a sudden they gobble up the Swiss chard they’ve been refusing for days!

Yup, you too can grow a broccoli-lover!   Please feel free to leave a comment below about your own experiences with getting kids to eat less-common whole foods!

Jill Epner is the owner of Little City Kitchen Co. a company built on the belief exposing kids at an early age to various flavors, textures, and spices sets them up to be healthy eaters later in life. We’ve developed seasonal and International-inspired baby foods that your little ones will love with the nutritional content that you can feel great about as a parent. Visit our Website or Like our Facebook page for current flavors and selling locations.

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I grew up on my grandparents’ small farm in the summer months during childhood.  I remember watching my Pop-Pop cultivate and seed perfectly straight rows.  Within in a few weeks the seedlings appeared, and after a month or so we were up to eyebrows in all things fresh and yummy.

The kitchen was full of garden tomatoes, green beans, peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, lettuce, peas, you name it.  Making a salad never involved a trip to the grocery store.  Instead my grandmother grabbed a butcher knife and headed out back to the garden to literally cut a head of lettuce.

One summer my brother and I got it in our heads to start a produce stand in their front yard — with all of the extra fruits and veggies. Come to think of it now – it may have been my Pop-Pop’s idea as a way to keep us busy.  My Uncle Charlie ran a successful seafood shop next door, so when the local tourists came by to grab a bushel of crabs – there we were two rosy faced kids and a load of fresh produce broken out in pints.

One summer I convinced my grandfather to take our produce stand on the road.  We hung off the back of his pick-up truck gate and hollered out to families at the local campgrounds. “Get your fresh produce – locally grown tomatoes, cucs, peppers and onions…”

Our hands were in the dirt nearly every day. We were as close to our food as one could get.  The only things I ever remember my grandfather buying at the grocery store – were a gallon of milk, a whole fryer chicken and a box of Entenmann’s doughnuts (special on Sundays).  They purchased  only those things they could not pull out of their own back yard.

Inside the house I would watch my grandmother for hours making everything from scratch in her colorful kitchen.  She was renowned for her pies, Chicken n’ Dumplings, canned Bread n’ Butter pickles and my personal favorite beach plum jelly.  Her hands were always moving – during the day it was composting, laundry, snapping green beans, and cooking.  In the evenings it was cleaning-up, crochet and sewing.

In today’s hectic world, these memories sustain me.  Simple things, and real living.

Being ‘green’ wasn’t something my grandparents did to be trendy, it wasn’t even a political cause (they were both staunch Republicans).  It was just a way of life they had been taught for generations – parents handing it down to children and grandchildren.

As we raise our son, we find ourselves relying daily on two things – a lot of God and our grandparents’ wisdom. I am so thankful for both.  May we continue to imprint the lessons they’ve handed down to us for multiple generations to come.