Stealth vegetables

The latest weapon in the war on childhood obesity is the stealth vegetable — vegetables that are puréed and snuck into foods, like pasta sauces, where they are unlikely to be detected by veggie-phobic kids.

The advantage to using vegetables to win "the battle of the bulge" is simple, according to those who have been recruited to Operation Stealth Vegetable: you can reduce the number of calories in each serving of food without affecting the taste. (Within certain limits: You're not going to fool anyone if you try serving up a banana muffin that's three parts zucchini and one part banana.) A study conducted at Penn State University found that it was possible to introduce enough "stealth vegetables" into a serving of pasta to reduce the calories by 25 per cent without children (ages 3 to 5) objecting to the taste.

So does this mean you should go the stealth vegetable route? Maybe, maybe not. Some of the parents I interviewed for my Mealtime Solutions for Your Baby, Toddler, and Preschooler  book told me it's the only way they'd ever get a vegetable within ten feet of their child. Others said they felt it was sneaky and unethical to sneak anything into someone else's food. (How would you feel if your hostess announced after the fact that you'd just downed a serving of stealth worms?) So stealth vegetables aren't for everyone — parent or child.

And even if you do decide it's a great idea to purée a cup of spinach and add it to your favourite pasta sauce, children still need a chance to acquire a taste for the flavour and texture of vegetables, which means you have to give your child an opportunity to experience a wide variety of vegetables in all their various forms (grated, sliced, diced, mashed, steamed, etc.)

So basically it's all about becoming a vegetable detective. If nothing else, the cool title will give you a reason to hit the kitchen night after night. Besides, it's through culinary detective work that you figure out that the child who hates mashed potatoes is wild about sweet potatoes; the child who hates cooked green beans will chomp her way through half a basket of uncooked yellow beans; and the kid who hates everything loves grilled green peppers. For now, at least.

You see, the nutritional gurus have discovered that it can take a child 15 to 20 encounters with a particular food to know for sure that he loves it or loathes it — which is why being the personal chef to such a fickle creature can try the patience of even the most saintly of parents (and few of us fit that description on even the best of days).

A new mantra for mealtimes: My child is not trying to drive me crazy, even if it feels that way.

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