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My mom used to make her own applesauce from scratch and freeze batches of it for later in the year. She'd pull it out and warm it so we could eat it, but it never defrosted all the way in the middle. So though it was not on a stick, we would eat what we called "applesicles": icy in the middle and warm on the outside. Yum!

I never tried frozen peas with my kids...hmmm...

Kriston, "applesicles" sounds delicious. I'll have to give it a try!

Somehow, eating frozen veggies seemed more apparent to me than eating frozen fruit, which is odd, now that I think about it. I'll have to give frozen bananas a try too. Thanks! Hmmm... I have a whole bag of frozen blueberries that I use in my hot cereal in the morning. Maybe I'll have to go snitch one and see how it tastes frozen?

I read an interesting book recently called Twinkie, Deconstucted. It is not only about highly processed food and where it comes from. It applies to almost every food that we eat now, which is rather sad. The book takes the ingredient list for the Twinkie and devotes a chapter to each ingredient, starting with the first ingredient: wheat flour. He goes to the farm where the wheat flour that ultimately ends up in a Twinkie is grown. He describes holding in his hand the bright pastel shades of the wheat seeds encased in a protective shell of Round-up pesticide. He then takes the reader through the process of harvesting the wheat, shipping the wheat off to the grain milling plant, removing the outer bran from the wheat, and then the bleaching that is involved. The next chapter takes the reader to China, where you see the factory where they synthesize from chemicals the vitamins which they add back into the wheat flour. And so forth. Every chapter walks the reader through the entire process of how that particular ingredient is grown or made. It is really an eye-opening view into our world of food.

Yes, I should read that book, E-beth, I need to lose more weight. Sounds like a great dieting tool!

Applesicles do sound good, I could definately handle that. I don't know about peea-sicles, though.........




No disrespect, but I try not to "trick" my kids, especially concerning food. They're pretty darn smart and you never know what they are processing and on what level and how it will effect them.

I throw stuff in sometimes if it's not utterly unexpected. Like I'll put shredded zucchini in my pasta sauce. They can see it if they look hard, but there's no discernible taste (even to them!) and in tiny shreds like that, there's no real textural effect on the sauce. But I often change up my pasta sauce, and they don't ask "What's in this?" very often. (When they do, it's usually because they think it's really good!) So I don't think it matters much to them.

I try not to make things too weird though. It's not worth the trust issues.

Never using recipes helps! They don't expect my food to always be the same. And both my boys say they want to become chefs when they grow up (as well as engineers, race car drivers, chemists, architects, etc., etc.), so I think I'm doing okay.

I like to play with food and try new things, so they do, too. I think that's a big key in our family. Food is fun!

And I should note that my kids aren't terribly picky eaters. I think acs is right that some kids are just easier with food than others, and no amount of tricks, cajoling or techniques will change some of those tough cases. I always feel like parents get blamed for that: those who feed their kids nothing but McNuggets from birth deserve it, but those poor parents who are doing everything they can to teach good eating and are just stuck with kids who won't eat are unfairly blamed.

I just love these kinds of books.

First of all, Round up ready wheat is not yet on the market. Its still under development.

Second, Round up is not a pesticide. It is an herbicide. It breaks down in days under normal growing conditions. It is so safe that many environmental organizations use it to control invasive species.

"Glyphosate itself is practically nontoxic by ingestion or by skin contact. The acute oral toxicity of Roundup is > 5,000 mg/kg in the rat.[24] It showed no toxic effects when fed to animals for 2 years, and only produced rare cases of reproductive effects when fed in extremely large doses to rodents and dogs. It has not demonstrated any increase in cancer rates in animal studies and is poorly absorbed in the digestive tract. Glyphosate has no significant potential to accumulate in animal tissue."

Without it, older herbicides would be used - atrazine is one - and there would be increased tillage and greater amounts of fert used - so its a VERY GOOD tradeoff.

As far as twinkies go, my favorite twinkie story is the one involving the San Fran city council.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense

I certainly think more of this is hard-wired than I had originally thought. Before DS was on solids, I was rather confident and smug that I would not have one of those picky eaters. DH and I eat tons of healthy foods, lots of fresh fruits and veggies, whole grains, hardly any processed foods and that would just be what DS ate too because there weren't other options in the house. It seemed so easy.

And what was the punishment for my smugness? A kid who gagged when he even touched a noodle with his hands. A kid who looked sceptically at anything new, a child who could discern a submicroscopic green speck a mile a way, a child who lived almost exclusively on milk products, bread, apple sauce, and bananas for the first 8 years of his life. But an energetic, happy, tall, thin, kid who never gets sick. Go figure!

Well, be fair there, Austin. ebeth was recounting her memory of the book, not quoting from it. I presume she's not a farmer, and so she may not have gotten the details quite right.

Please be sure that you're taking issue with the book, and not attacking her memory of it. (Said the middle-aged woman who is amazed at how many things she can forget in a day...)

Hey, acs, does he have allergies or food sensitivities (like lactose intolerance or glutin issues)?

I always wonder if some of this pickiness is there for a reason...

No allergies that we ever found, except pollens.

What we found interesting was that he never put toys or anything non-food in his mouth. There was never a worry about poisoning or choking with him. I see babies chewing on all kinds of things and I think it looks so weird, even though I know it is normal.

He is also what I would call a food person. He knows what people are eating, what is in everything. He reads recipes for fun and looks forward to helping make stuff he would never eat himself.

I cannot imagine for a second getting away with zucchini in the pasta sauce; he flipped out when he saw a tiny tiny speck of basil once. Not that it matters, really, because the pasta sauce was a new addition in the last couple years, anyway, but I would be a fool to try to add a green thing to it. This kid has laser vision for the green flecks.

DS7 was the same way about never putting things in his mouth. After about 6 months or so, it just was never an issue. He did suck his thumb--especially when he was thinking about something or studying how something worked--but he just didn't mouth toys. However, he is my "I'll try any food" kid, so I don't think that was a sensitivity issue so much as the fact that he's a really visual kid and he liked his thumb a lot.

DS4 did mouth stuff, so it was a real adjustment when he came along! Of course he also managed to reach up inside the fireplace stove, into the wall and pull out a handful of fiberglass insulation when he was a little over a year old. We didn't know that was even possible! The room had been childproofed for 4 years by that time! And when he was about 18mos., he locked me out of my bedroom. By the time I got the door open, he had pennies in one hand, his arm was wet to the elbow from the toilet, and he was reaching for the outlet with the other hand. No exaggeration! All he was missing for the "child kills self with exploration" hat trick was a bottle of something poisonous waiting to be guzzled! I would have thought it was a made-up story if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes!!!

Sorry to digress...My point is that the 4yo adventure nut who knows no fear is my picky eater. My 7yo cautious, responsible kid with food allergies will eat whatever I put in front of him--and we eat some unusual things compared to most Americans!--and ask for seconds and thirds.

Weird.