By: Beth Duncan
We really don’t need to follow every dinner up with a sweet dessert, so we have a fairly strict dessert policy in our home. The three older kids know it well, but the two-year old is still learning. She is a strong-willed tot, that’s for sure. She is not very interested in food and what she does enjoy has a common ingredient—that’s right, sugar.
The primary reason we have her pegged as strong-willed is that she is not easily bribed at dinner time. The others were easily conditioned to the “eat this, then you can have this” routine. On the other hand, this child won’t eat even the easiest food—chicken nuggets, for example, in order to get some ice cream. She will watch us eat our ice cream, noticeably jealous, but she will stubbornly refuse the chicken nugget. No problem. We don’t give in. We don’t feel sorry for her. She can go to bed hungry.
Recently, at the dinner table, she wouldn’t eat her salad (they all usually like green salad with Ranch dressing) so she could get some M&Ms. Her 7-year old big sister blurted out, “Children don’t eat good… and grown-ups don’t either.” We laughed at the matter-of-fact way she said it, like she is an expert in dietary habits.
She is right though. In general, the American diet is pretty junky. Adults and children alike are often guilty of preferring to skip the veggies for the sugary dessert. Sometimes I even leave a few black-eyed peas and lima beans on my plate and move on to the cookies. Maybe if I actually finished what was on my plate, I wouldn’t even care for dessert. And wouldn’t my body be so much better off?
I will always remember a quote in a book I read years ago. The book was Sugar Blues by William Dufty. In it he recounted a chance meeting with Gloria Swanson at a press conference in New York City. She was sitting beside him and observing him placing cubes of sugar into his coffee. “That stuff is poison,” she hissed. “I won’t have it in my house, let alone my body.” Dufty said that Swanson went on to say, “I used to get positively livid when I watched people eating poison, but I’ve learned that everyone has to find out for themselves—the hard way. They can eat ground glass in front of me now and I don’t even twitch.”
The “ground glass” is the part that has stuck so firmly in my mind. My husband appreciated her comments too. We sometimes remind each other when it seems that too much poison is being ingested in our home.
So, here I am reminding myself again. And maybe tonight after dinner, we’ll skip the “ground glass.”
We really don’t need to follow every dinner up with a sweet dessert, so we have a fairly strict dessert policy in our home. The three older kids know it well, but the two-year old is still learning. She is a strong-willed tot, that’s for sure. She is not very interested in food and what she does enjoy has a common ingredient—that’s right, sugar.
The primary reason we have her pegged as strong-willed is that she is not easily bribed at dinner time. The others were easily conditioned to the “eat this, then you can have this” routine. On the other hand, this child won’t eat even the easiest food—chicken nuggets, for example, in order to get some ice cream. She will watch us eat our ice cream, noticeably jealous, but she will stubbornly refuse the chicken nugget. No problem. We don’t give in. We don’t feel sorry for her. She can go to bed hungry.
Recently, at the dinner table, she wouldn’t eat her salad (they all usually like green salad with Ranch dressing) so she could get some M&Ms. Her 7-year old big sister blurted out, “Children don’t eat good… and grown-ups don’t either.” We laughed at the matter-of-fact way she said it, like she is an expert in dietary habits.
She is right though. In general, the American diet is pretty junky. Adults and children alike are often guilty of preferring to skip the veggies for the sugary dessert. Sometimes I even leave a few black-eyed peas and lima beans on my plate and move on to the cookies. Maybe if I actually finished what was on my plate, I wouldn’t even care for dessert. And wouldn’t my body be so much better off?
I will always remember a quote in a book I read years ago. The book was Sugar Blues by William Dufty. In it he recounted a chance meeting with Gloria Swanson at a press conference in New York City. She was sitting beside him and observing him placing cubes of sugar into his coffee. “That stuff is poison,” she hissed. “I won’t have it in my house, let alone my body.” Dufty said that Swanson went on to say, “I used to get positively livid when I watched people eating poison, but I’ve learned that everyone has to find out for themselves—the hard way. They can eat ground glass in front of me now and I don’t even twitch.”
The “ground glass” is the part that has stuck so firmly in my mind. My husband appreciated her comments too. We sometimes remind each other when it seems that too much poison is being ingested in our home.
So, here I am reminding myself again. And maybe tonight after dinner, we’ll skip the “ground glass.”
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