Adam Liaw on the soul-crushing humiliation of cooking for children

One of the least great things about being a parent is pouring your heart and soul into a family meal, and then watching your children treat it as if it’s literal poison.

I’ve been on MasterChef, so I am no stranger to having my lovingly prepared food publicly derided, but it feels surprisingly worse when the person doing the deriding is a small human that you’ve cared for since the beginning of their existence.

I think what hurts most is the fact you know that they’re being honest. No greater truth comes from the mouths of babes than a frank assessment of what those mouths have just eaten.

My children are thankfully not fussy eaters. My eldest can polish off a dozen oysters, my daughter ate mushroom pastas that I made for years before casually mentioning that she in fact does not like mushrooms, and my youngest describes his favourite food as “mummy’s food and daddy’s food”, though he did once spit out a mouthful of Christmas pudding made by Stephanie Alexander herself.

However, as the children of a recipe writer, they often come across foods they turn their noses up at. In those moments, we have one rule – they are encouraged to try it once, and if they still don’t like it, I’ll get them something else.

Before you recoil in shock and deride this as weak parenting, let me try to convince you why this is truly the best and most scientific approach. Human children are useless. If you have children of your own you are likely nodding in furious agreement.

A deer in the wild can take a few rickety steps within minutes of birth, and within just a few days it will be prancing happily along, feeding itself and never once complaining that it doesn’t like berries today because they touched some other different berries at some point. Even before being born, that adorable baby deer sampled the tastants in foods its mother had eaten, and developed an understanding of what to eat in its environment.

Human children are useless. If you have children of your own you are likely nodding in furious agreement.

Human children, on the other hand, take months to even begin eating solid foods, years to walk and run, and remain incapable of cleaning a bedroom until well into adulthood. A child’s tastes are more sensitive to bitterness, which is a defence mechanism that evolved over thousands of years to prevent children from ingesting fatal amounts of bitter toxins.

Vegetables, on the other hand, evolved to be more unpleasantly bitter to avoid being eaten – a process that humans have attempted to reverse over the last few thousand years through selective agriculture.

If a child doesn’t want to eat a vegetable, it’s biology, not bad behaviour. We humans have to learn what to eat, and that takes years of positive reinforcement. We’re taught through the process of being exposed to different foods by a trusted parent, but as adults we forget that.

If you like coffee, you probably never pause to remember that as child you almost certainly didn’t. But after decades of watching your parents drink it, trying it with lots of milk and sugar as a teenager, and a little helping hand from the buzz of caffeine, you now can’t think of going a day without it a nicely pulled espresso shot. Nobody ever once yelled at you and forced you finish a cup.

Just like coffee, your children are learning to like vegetables not by being forced to eat them, but by watching you – their trusted and loving parent – eat vegetables and not die. Over years, their trust in you eventually overrides their instinctive distrust of vegetables and they learn to love them.

That said, I truly do get it. Every night like clockwork, we present our offerings before our children like doe-eyed reality TV contestants, truly believing we’ve done something good and kind, only to have our efforts dashed on the ground like a Matt Preston plate drop. It’s humiliating, and frustration and anger are a natural response.

Remember that every lost battle is one step closer to winning the war. There are countless foods that I avoided as a child that I now count among my favourites. I never appreciated the efforts my parents and grandparents went to when I was young, but I get it now. It’s perhaps not true in romance, but in food – love really always does win in the end.

But what do we do with a child who won’t eat a vegetable for love nor money? There’s always fruit. It’s the same nutritious food group, but unlike vegetables that evolved to avoid being eaten by being bitter and unpleasant, fruit has evolved to be as tasty as it can be so that it can be eaten and have its seeds
distributed.

It’s all biology, after all.