Food has changed a lot in 40 years. I remember as a kid seeing ads for things like Sunny D that referred to other products as “purple stuff” and suggested Sunny D was somehow better. Cereals loaded with sugar were sold as a key part of a balanced breakfast with many vitamins and also minerals! And unnaturally colored items with labels that read “prepared cheese product” (looking at you Kraft singles) were the only way to make a grilled cheese. To be clear, I ate and drank all this stuff, and loved it.
These days, I attempt to eat healthier, but there’s no denying how tasty a grilled cheese made from a stack of plastic-wrapped orange cheese-like squares remains. My oldest daughter, however, would disagree. She, along with our other two kids, are decided food snobs.
It’s not their fault.
My wife is an excellent cook and we’re all the lucky recipients of nearly nightly new meals that taste amazing. This is tremendous, but has inadvertently lead to a lifestyle where the kids don’t eat out much (cue the tiny violins, I know). All of which came to a hilarious head one day in Columbia, Missouri, about five years ago.
We were visiting the University of Missouri with friends, who were alumni, and always raved about a dive bar by the name of Booches that specialized in countertop sliders.
During the day, it’s family friendly-ish, so we took all the kids in for lunch.
Along with hot dogs and burgers, grilled cheese is on the menu — the latter of which my daughter ordered. A few minutes after the food arrived, she found her way to me … held half the sandwich up three inches from my face … and demanded to know what she was looking at.
“That’s a grilled cheese” I told her. “No, that’s not cheese”, she replied while pointing at the orange goo. I can’t honestly recall if she was willing to take a bite and try it, though I’m sure I asked. I do, however, remember she flat-out refused to consume it. Which I found quite funny as Booches is really not the place for the burgeoning food snob to have lunch. (To be clear, their sliders and grilled cheeses are EXCELLENT and I highly recommend both.) I know, because I ate both while our good friend — and savior — Becky, brought my daughter down the street to find something else to eat.
She returned with perhaps the most outrageously opposite food to a Kraft singles sandwich at an old bar — smashed avocado on fancy seeded toast with pickled red onions and a sprinkling of sprouts. I already knew we had been raising food snobs, but up to that point, I had not seen the impacts so clearly and to such hilarious effect.
They might be in for a rude awakening one day.
My wife and I are already laughing about what the kids are going to do when they encounter the next level of non-fancy food at college.
Lesson? Teaching kids to eat quality food is a good thing, but you might want to throw a grilled cheese made with Kraft singles into the mix once in a while.
