The Manoeuvres of Mealtime Pacifist

Dear Tamar:

My toddler has a typical (American) toddler-approach to food—he will only eat what he’s familiar with. It’s healthful enough, he’s growing, and the pediatrician isn’t concerned. We invariably end up with two separate meals, since we want more variety than he’s willing to accept at this point. Admittedly, I too was a simple eater as a child (subsisting largely off of buttered pasta), and have hopes that he’ll eventually come round to the joys of a more complex diet, as I have. But society seems to condemn the two-meal approach. I am caught in the middle: Are two separate meals really so bad? Will he ever learn to love new flavors and textures if he’s not faced with them daily? Please can you share your wisdom on how my husband and I should cope through this stalemate…

The Mealtime Pacifist

Dear Mealtime Pacifist,

I’m writing my reply on May 13—yesterday. I usually tend to letters earlier in the week, but this week has felt strange. I’ve been unable to sleep and logy, agitated and paralyzed. The most likely explanation for these distortions is that May 13 is the day my father died in 1993, when I was 15 and my brother was 11.

I should be accustomed, by now, to the somatic reactions. They come annually, whether I’m keeping an eye on the calendar or not—often I’ve lost track, only to discover the anniversary while seeking answers for a semi-debilitating physical syndrome. Neither ignoring the date nor observing it makes a difference. On the days leading up to May 13, my mind turns to mud and my hands shake. My nights are filled with inescapable preoccupations and my days with dull disinterest.

In other words, my grief, old and chronic as it is, flares up every year. This year, I’m grateful for the flare up because of the way it reminds me of the awesomeness of love. I mean “awesome” in its original sense: “respect mixed with fear and wonder.” What a supernatural force love must be, I’m reminded, to have created a physical syndrome like the one I suffer. I spoke with my brother, who told me that the anniversary creates a time lapse for him. During certain moments of the day, he is both his grown self and himself at 11. Hour by hour he lives two lives, his present one and his childish one. His version sounds just as exhausting as mine.

The anniversary of my father’s death might seem unrelated to your question about societal condemnation of serving two meals. But if I had not decided to reply to your question on May 13 while reflecting on the profound, inexplicable sublimity of love, I might have spent a lot of unnecessary energy on logistics.

Here is my answer—which you yourself, with your use of the word “stalemate” and its implications of transience, have intuited: What matters is love and life and death, and little else. No. Two meals are not really that bad. No, you are not robbing your child of opportunities to develop a broader palate. No, your child’s palate is not permanent. (It has this in common with…everything.) And no, it’s not something that you can, by will, change. You can get bent out of shape. You can yield to societal pressure to serve a perfectly balanced meal to your whole family, and hold to that as though to a pin in a grenade, enduring melt downs and breakdowns and whatever else. You can worry. You can blame yourself. You can buy books, listen to podcasts, subscribe to feeding newsletters.

I’m being extreme. My argument above is that of an existential victim. A more temperate argument is superior—and nudges its adherents toward the realm of existential heroism. It is not necessary, but likely beneficial that your family eats meals at home, together. It is valuable that you and your husband treat eating as an opportunity to seek pleasure, with each other. It is positive for your child to watch you eat new, interesting food, smiling at it and each other. I believe all of that, and at home, I employ a strategy I devised when my own once-hearty eater became, at the age of two, a reluctant and selective one.

It is to include one thing your child will reliably eat in every meal you serve—and not worry about the rest. If you and your husband love Thai food, or Vietnamese, or Chinese, or Indian, leave the rice plain—as the rice in those cuisines generally is anyway—and let your child eat buttered rice, while you enjoy gaeng khiao wan gai (แกงเขียวหวานไก่). Or make a Thai or Vietnamese or Chinese noodle dish, and set some noodles aside before adding herbs to the rest. If you love Italian food, scoop out two cups of pasta and put them in a bowl with butter before you add the remainder to the pot simmering ragú. If you love Lebanese food, buy or make extra pita, and let your child eat pita while you enjoy kibbeh. This strategy does allow you to avoid cooking two meals—not because it’s morally reproachable, rather because your time is valuable, and if your whole family can eat happily within the parameters of a single meal, you’ll have more energy to chat and love and read and play games and go for walks and make jokes.

Dear cook, there is no better day than the anniversary of one’s parent’s death to answer such a question. To make two meals, or four, or to eat on the floor, or to serve chicken nuggets, or whatever else it is that one can get tied up in knots about matters so much less than being alive, together, and in love. The sublime exists, grief tells us. Everything else is logistics.