Plying with food

I wrote the fol­low­ing let­ter to Ray­mond Sokolov, a Wall Street Jour­nal Edi­tor who wrote an excel­lent cri­tique of “The Sneaky Chef and “Decep­tive­ly Deli­cious” in his Eat­ing Out col­umn, titled “Play­ing With Their Food,” in the Jan­u­ary 26 issue of the Wall Street Jour­nal:

Dear Mr. Sokolov,
Thank you for your well-thought-out arti­cle on the two lat­est “culi­nary” block­busters. As a reg­is­tered dietit­ian and moth­er of two healthy 18-year-old boys, I always encour­age par­ents to teach kids to eat health­ful­ly by using a calm, mat­ter-of-fact demeanor and by serv­ing exact­ly the same foods that Mom and Dad are eat­ing. And my kids eat just about every­thing, even though one of my sons had all the mak­ings of a picky eater. We just did­n’t react to it. Experts warn that hid­ing veg­eta­bles can under­mine the par­ent-child feed­ing rela­tion­ship if the child finds out what the par­ent has been up to. They also warn par­ents not to demo­nize foods by hid­ing them, forc­ing them, coerc­ing kids to eat them, or react­ing neg­a­tive­ly to them. I am absolute­ly stunned that the two books became the hits that they are and that the media is feed­ing and feed­ing into the fren­zy. Your arti­cle was most wel­come.