How Iron Chef Jose Garces Got His Kids to Eat Their Veggies | Big Think

You know, as a parent – so I have an 11-year-old and a 7-year-old, and I’ve gone through the whole process up until now. I think I have, like I would say, a ten-year market study of my kids’ eating habits and how they were formed and hopefully, like, where I can take them to.

When they were young, and I’m going to go back all the way to like from bottle feeding. They went from breast milk to formula and then onto solid foods. And that was a key point where we could still control what they were having, what their intake was.

Knowing this as a chef, I would make fresh purees in the restaurants and then cryovac them. So I would make sweet potato puree, malanga puree, spinach, and carrot. These days, you can vacuum seal just about anything. You can buy a vacuum seal at Target and make your purees, put them in the freezer, pull them out and then, you know, you’re giving – you can really, at that point, still control their internal environment.

I think where we made a mistake – and I’ll say this – is that we started to, as they got older, we started introducing them to whether it was pastas or French fries, and that sort of kind of like, you know, the busy parent ends up feeling like, oh, I just want to like feed them and move on. It’s foods that they like and I just think that that’s a mistake that we made, and now, ever since then, we’re still trying to make up the ground on how do we get kids away from these unhealthy foods that they naturally gravitate towards.

I think that there’s a textural issue with kids that really is hard to overcome. So I’ve kind of overcome that by doing a lot of, putting a lot of things in the blender and getting that first initial eating experience as a soup. So it’s a warm soup but that has all the good nutritional ingredients and elements into it so that they can have something healthy. And then at that point, it’s still a battle; it’s still tough.