Writing the Book on Picky Eaters

Carolyn B Healy

Some people remember certain classics from their childhood bookshelves – Black Beauty, Green Eggs and Ham, The Velveteen Rabbit. For me, it’s the little-known Cheese, Peas and Chocolate Pudding by Betty Van Witsen, last published in 1971. It tells the story of a little boy who would eat only those three foods and nothing else. Thanks to my mother I heard it hundreds of times. When I get hooked on something, I stay hooked. At least I was until I joined the Weekly Reader Book Club and got started on The Pink Motel, No Children No Pets, Leader Dog and the like. And then Nancy Drew came into my life and I put childhood things aside.

By the time I needed it again, Cheese, Peas and Chocolate Pudding was long gone, out of print and available only in my memory. One miraculous afternoon in a pediatrician’s office, I found a copy in a stack of tattered children’s books. I persuaded the receptionist to let me take it home overnight to copy.

Unlike Catcher in the Rye and Dick and Jane, which I have re-read with disappointment, C,P and CP held up over time. (SPOILER ALERT: there are currently no copies available on amazon.com, but just in case you experience a serendipitous discovery like mine and get to read the book on your own, you may not want to read the rest of this paragraph.) It had tension – earnest parents try to get him to eat. It had drama – he sits under the dining table refusing dinner. It had climax and resolution – a scrap of his older brother’s hamburger drops into his mouth and he finds it delicious. And it had realism – after that, he only eats cheese, peas, chocolate pudding and hamburger.

In a twist that suggests that the universe has a sense of humor, I gave birth to that little boy in real life, in the person of my daughter Katy. While gobbling her way through boxes of rice cereal and jar after jar of baby sweet potatoes, she spit out all meat products and anything green. As a toddler, she graduated to a monochromatic diet of grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese and applesauce. No candy, no cookies, no meat, no frills. I could have written a book. If the term picky eater didn’t already exist, I would have had to coin it.

It wasn’t that she didn’t experiment some. She liked fish sticks until she found out that they were made of fish; same with tuna salad. She was briefly willing to try hot dogs as long as they touched nothing else on her plate, until someone (I suspect her older brother) told her they contain things like rat lips and cat brains. And she was the only child in America who hated chocolate.

Just like the book, her story has a happy but realistic ending, as she finally ventured out into Grandma’s Cheesy Potatoes, cheese pizza and the other Grandma’s mashed potatoes and eventually, the occasional pasta and chicken breast. While the color palate remained the same, she could enjoy much more variety.

Once, well into adulthood, that same brother took both of us to an Ethiopian restaurant in his neighborhood. She tried to like it but her revulsion was real and at the end of the meal, she went straight across the street for the biggest slice of pizza I’ve ever seen.

I have a copy of Cheese, Peas and Chocolate Pudding set aside for her once she gets as far as parenting. I know she will bring special insight to its reading. In honor of her, here is one of her breakthroughs, Grandma's Cheesy Potatoes. CBH 09/08