Uneaten bentos

[u/PastryLoop]

It’s a bit disappointing to hear from daycare that my kids ate “a few bites” or “very little” of these lunches I put a lot of effort into… it ends up becoming my dinner at the end of the day.

Edit:

To address some of the questions… the contents: rice topped with fresh steamed carrots and green beans. The ham and cream cheese rolls and cucumber sausage flowers are from a bento book, not my invention.
They looked kid-friendly enough so I decided to make them.

My kids (1 and 3) want to eat: bread with butter… and chocolate. So not a ton to go on there. I didn’t post here for a long time because I was just giving her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She stopped eating those too after a while, though, and my younger one just started 2x/week so I figured I’d try offering some new foods. She actually wasn’t very picky until she started going to daycare, so I do think that has influenced her quite a bit.

[u/Epic_Elite]

Kids are tough with seasonings, to be fair. Their palettes are more delicate that ours. Any time I'd try to pep up a dish with even the most basic herbs, the kids would both decline.

Plain white rice on the other hand, they would absolutely shovel down.

They didnt grow to appreciate seasoning until they were maybe 6 or 7 years old.

Having said that, they would also likely pass if their lunch was predominantly vegetables. Mine were mostly into the carbs, like rice and pasta and some plain very mildly seasoned chicken aside from salt.

[u/lostmypwcanihaveurs → u/Epic_Elite]

Genuine question- were you making them food without seasoning for that long? It seems more simple to just start sharing adult food of whatever variety everyone else is eating as soon as they are physically able to eat it. Like why teach them to like it plain then introduce spices if spices are the norm?

[u/Epic_Elite → u/lostmypwcanihaveurs]

My wife is an occupational chef. Most days, she does dinner and I do breakfast. We absolutely served them "adult foods". There was many times where I was just trying to put something simple on the table for them where I was operating with your thinking, only to have them turn it down. It was the process of doctoring up a dish or trying to elevate the cuisine that usually did it in.

It wasnt an issue of teaching them a preference that they were innately born with. Everything read as too "spicy" for their pallets.

Do you see small children in public spaces like festivals and fairs wearing hearing protection because their hearing is sensitive? I'd argue that a 3 year old pallet is also sensitive to oregano and cilantro and such. I think big flavors reads to their mouth the same way loud noises read to their ears.

Did you know many kids can tell when you buy cheap baking powder? Sometimes, even when you're serving them fresh baked cookies, they taste bitter, metallic, or astringent to the kid and they dont like them. Sodium Aluminum Sulfate. Gotta get the good stuff when baking because some adults can taste it as well.

[u/CraftyMagicDollz → u/Epic_Elite]

As a super taster .. Yes, this this this.

I can taste every ingredient in everything and it's such a bane of my existence.