Down with Picky Eating!

June 11, 2008
Scorpions for Breakfast and Snails for Dinner

By MATTHEW FORNEY
IN Beijing, where my family lives, I once returned home from a restaurant with a doggy bag full of deep-fried scorpions. The next morning, I poured them instead of imported raisin bran into my 11-year-old son's cereal bowl. I wanted to freak him out. The scorpions were black and an inch long, with dagger tails.

"Scorpions!" shrieked my son, Roy. "Awesome!"

I had to stop him from chomping them all then and there, like popcorn. Then an idea struck him. "Dad, can I take them to school as a snack?"

This is what eating is like in my household. My children eat anything. My 9-year-old daughter reaches for second helpings of spinach, and when we eat out I have to stop her brother, now 13, from showing off the weird things he'll consume by ordering goat testicles. Think of a child staging a sit-in at his suburban dinner table because there's a fleck of dried parsley on his breaded fish finger, and you have imagined everything my children are not.

So when I read of American parents who hide spinach in brownie mix and serve it for dessert ("Your kids will never guess," Parents magazine promised), it spurs me to offer advice to my compatriots back home.

First, however, a bit of background. Both Roy and Alice were born and raised here in China, where people eat anything. I've seen animal markets in the southern city of Guangzhou where vendors sell live porcupines, pangolins, badgers, crocodiles, cobras and civet cats, all destined for the tips of chopsticks in the city's costlier restaurants. My wife, who is Italian, makes sure olives and strong cheeses reach our table every day, even in China. Roy and Alice never faced the snare of microwave pizzas, Cheez Whiz or spaghetti from a can.

"Hey, Dad," Roy asked me, "is it true that when you were a kid, you didn't know Parmesan was cheese? You thought it was just something that shook out of a green canister? Like sprinkles for spaghetti?" He could listen to that story every night. Yes, I tell him. It's true. I thought cheese was the color of a traffic cone, each slice individually wrapped in plastic. Even with an adolescent's natural conservatism — he still eats more pork chops than pork lips — Roy is a more adventurous eater than I am.

As for Alice, she says her favorite meal is Sichuanese snails and her favorite snack is Tibetan yak jerky in wrappers with the ends twisted, the way peppermints are wrapped. I suspect that behind this statement lies some gustatory one-upmanship with her brother; she also wants the crust chopped off her bread. Still, when I offered her an imported banana-flavored granola bar, her nose twitched, and she requested "dried beans or seaweed."

I asked my wife if we deserve credit for rearing such adventurous eaters. Not we, she said. According to Paola, our kids started off right because she breast-fed them, which "opened their taste buds." I'm not sure that's scientific. It's possible Italians are so haughty about their cuisine that they think even their breast milk is superior.

But Paola also said that in poor countries like China, people learn to eat what's available or they starve. Fussiness never enters the picture. (As I write this, a crew of construction workers who migrated from distant villages is squatting outside my window eating a lunch of rice and boiled cabbage. No meat. These men toil all day on what I would consider a starvation diet.)

Paola knows something about how poor regions dine. One of our favorite dinner-table stories is how, as a child, Paola refused to eat trout skins. Her father had caught the fish that morning, and Paola sat at the table with the untouched skins on her plate from lunchtime until bedtime, when her father threatened to kill her. Paola totally understood. "He was hungry when he was young," she said. "He prayed for trout skins."

We didn't raise our kids poor, thank goodness. We did, however, send them to a Chinese nursery school that fed them a daily lunch of zhou, a rice porridge with various seasonings: pickled turnips, flakes of dough sticks, green or red beans, sesame paste, or something called hot prickly mustard tubers. Roy and Alice ate it with perfect manners. It was only after they grew older and we sent them to the French school in Beijing that they started chewing with their mouths open and slopping their food on the table.

If you're not lucky enough to raise your children in China with an Italian mom, you could always try bribery. Roy's realization that it was cool to enjoy foods that his cousins in Indiana would never even sniff began with raw fish. He liked it, to his surprise, only after I paid him a buck to try a slice of salmon. The steps from there to pig ears, cow lung, camel feet and squid tentacles were as smooth as an uncooked oyster.

Or else, when the spinach brownie emerges from the oven, you could try cauliflower in the vanilla icing.