I've received a request! I feel like a blog rockstar!
The first thing I have to say about "Generation Pad Thai," the NY Times Magazine article about chefs' kids, is that once again the Times is walking well-trodden ground, though usually articles on chefs' kids feature Alice and Fanny (sorry about the nasty Times Select links).
The second thing I have to say is that if I'd read this article six, five, even four years ago, I would have nodded in smug recognition. M is the quintessential chef's kid. Ask her what her favorite foods are and she will reply, as she did just the other day to yet another surprised inquisitor, "oysters, mussels, and lobster, really all seafood." She is a passionate fan of speck (it's a kind of ham--I can't find a good link), she sucks the marrow out of lamb chops, she begs for brussel sprouts, she disdains fast food, and, of course, her mac and cheese is Annie's.
Then came E.
We did it all the same: spent as little time as possible on baby food, fed her what we ate, took her to nice restaurants. So much for that. As everyone knows, E eats breakfast, pasta, rice, tortillas, cheese, vegetables, fruit, and dessert. I guess she gets chef kid points for the copious amounts of raw vegetables and fruit she consumes, but that's about it. Nature not nurture, anyone?
As I was thinking about the article, though, I realized that there is a difference between M and E's food histories, and it's probably significant. When we were at work, M spent her first three years with nannies at home, eating food we purchased and, often, cooked. E spent those years in Red State Capital City Suburb family daycare, eating food that was as middle American as you can get, including McDonald's at least once a week. Perhaps it made a difference. Except that now she won't eat that kind of food either.
And then there's J. She is one of the best cooks I know, definitely chef-quality. She has personally supervised 95% of the food her kids have eaten in their lives. Her kids spend months at a time in Spain. The results? N eats everything, a la M. Their E eats nothing, a la our E.
Conclusion? I'm glad the chefs' kids in those articles eat so well, but I'm not quite sure they should be so smug about it. Then again, smugness always plays well in the New York Times, and any chef worth his or her salt knows that publicity is all.
4 comments:
my girls are like yours-- one wolfs down spinach and asks for more, the other will not eat a cracker if one corner is broken off. nature vs nuture, indeed.
Thank you. I appreciate the quick turn around service. :-)
Best!
Margaret (too lazy to get a blogger id)
You know, the more I think about this piece the more annoyed I am. I'm not going to apologize for using shredded cheese in my tuna casserole, for example, even if at some level I'm debasing my kids' tastebuds. My daughter was colicky and that seems to have been related to a high sensitivity to all kinds of sensory data, including taste. So she liked bland foods and had a lot of trouble with anything else. Should we have made her eat pad thai? (Actually, she loves it, so maybe that's not the best example, but you get my point.)
Folks who have only one child believe in nurture, believe that they have created the child they have with the environment they provided. Folks who have more than one are a lot more ambivalent.
I was about to blog on this same thing, but of course you did it much better. And I don't have family proof to offer as examples. Yet. We need to give it time.
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