SC - Byzantine foods.

[Alderton, Philippa]

By the age of 2 my daughter was demanding hot spicy Thai food. By 4 
she was eating snails and squid by personal choice. She has never 
liked fast food burgers (although we did occasionally eat quality 
burgers), and has always found those chicken fluff bits appalling.

My one rule was "Taste a little bit. If you don't like it, you don't 
have to eat it."

The only foods she really disliked back when she was still eating 
meat were lamb and eggplant. After i served her a modern ethnic 
Moroccan eggplant dish, she was more willing to taste eggplant cooked 
other ways, and is now a big fan of Szechuan eggplant and various 
Near Eastern eggplant dishes. She never liked lamb, no matter how it 
was seasoned or cooked.

I never had a rule about what was proper food for particular meals. 
Pizza for breakfast? Why not? And i had no particular rule about what 
order to eat the food at a meal. If she wanted some ice cream first, 
why not? I believe that it is in part because of this that she is not 
one of those kids who scarfs down large amounts of sweets, because 
they were never "forbidden" or somehow special ("eat all your 
broccoli and then you can have dessert"). She will leave dessert 
behind if she's full and instead eat all her spinach or broccoli 
because she likes it.

She would be delighted to test period food, although as she is now 
vegetarian, she'd have to pass on the meat dishes. She would 
definitely have refused the "happy meal" in preference for what the 
more mature diners were eating.

I can understand that some children prefer the familiar to the 
untried, but i still am unable to understand a preference for fast 
food over real food... Can someone explain this to me?

Sincerely,
Anahita the puzzled