The Crabby Cook - by Jessica Harper

Because of its color, it took years for me to get my kids to eat pasta with pesto sauce. Pasta was one of their favorite foods, but only if it came in white. The girls even found red sauce undesirable for a long time, but green was completely out of the question. It was way too suggestive of the odious world of vegetables. Read More

My husband loves tomatoes. Raw tomatoes, that is: he will not eat them cooked. (He has the same peculiar picky streak with regard to carrots: loves ’em raw, hates ’em cooked.) His sister Julie, on the other hand, does not only dislike raw tomatoes, she finds them repulsive. She will not eat anything with seeds, including olives. A pomegranate would give her a nervous breakdown. Tom’s other sister, Ellen, won’t eat spaghetti sauce, hamburgers, meat loaf, cheese of any kind, jelly (hello?), peas or lima beans. Like her father and Tom, she also dislikes onions and garlic, and, a la Julie, ix-nay the tomatoes and olives.

It’s just another example of how kids are genetically designed to drive their parental menu-planners crazy. Read More