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Honolulu Lite
A new Zogby poll found young Americans are choosy eaters. This riveting piece of news, of course, was a shock to millions of parents, whose children always eat whatever is put in front of them. Yeah. Right. Veggie hate is a
matter of tasteYou can't blame Mr. Zogby for conducting such a silly poll. He was hired by a vegetarian outfit to find out how many Americans were still engaged in the disgusting habit of eating cow chunks. Vegetarians are always hoping that everyone will finally see the light and quit eating meat. Stuffing cows full of grass and wheat pellets simply to kill and eat them later is a waste of energy, not to mention kind of hard on the cows. We should eat the grass and wheat pellets ourselves and leave the cows out of it. Of course, if no one ate cows there wouldn't be any around since they don't make very good pets and don't have much entertainment value. (You never see a decent cow race at Churchill Downs, for instance.) So by eating cows we actually are protecting the species from extinction, kind of like Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees except for the eating part.
Anyway, the Zogby survey was disappointing for both vegetarians and parents, since one group didn't get the results it wanted and the other learned what it already knew.
My daughter was never really picky about what she ate. But she was particular. She's the only kid I know who's eaten artichoke, crocodile, guacamole, raw fish, bruchetta and deer, although not in one sitting. She likes expensive food. When the parents of a friend of hers tried to serve her a hot dog for dinner, she claimed to be a vegetarian. I had to explain to them that she was one of those rare lacto, prime ribbo, filet mignono, lobstero vegetarians.
Kids, as a rule, don't like vegetables. How they all got together and came up with that rule, I don't know.
I suspect their dislike of veggies comes from parents forcing them as infants to eat stuff like mashed beets and creamed squash. Parents would never think of eating that gunk, so why do they think a baby's going to like it. By the time they're older, kids are completely turned off to anything green, except Jello.
It doesn't help that most people don't know how to cook vegetables. We were brought up on canned asparagus and peas. You take canned mushy peas or asparagus and then boil whatever little life was left in them away and you get a substance that tastes worse than it looks, which is quite a feat.
I was an adult before I ever tasted fresh asparagus or squash. They had absolutely no resemblance to the alleged vegetables we were forced to ingest as children. It turned out I didn't hate vegetables. I just hated canned nuked vegetables.
I tried to eat some canned asparagus recently, just for old time's sake. I wanted to see if maybe I had unfairly vilified the vertically inclined herb. I hadn't. For one thing, the canned asparagus was not vertically inclined. In fact, it was barely perpendicular. The word "flaccid" comes to mind, a word that should never be brought into a discussion of food. The taste was similar to what I remembered, which is to say, bad.
My advice to the Vegetarian Resource Group, which paid Mr. Zogby, is to quit wasting money on polls and start a nationwide campaign against canned, mushed and overcooked vegetables.
When a baby spits creamed sweet potatoes across the room, he's trying to tell you something.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
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