What's on the plate

Last week, a second grader told me the tamales we’d made looked like puke. Last month, a coworker told me the cookies I’d baked were dry. This next part may be hard to believe: the former comment (yes, the one about vomit) is actually the less offensive.

“But, second graders LIKE puke” my father reassured me in an email earlier this week. He’s right too. Not in the sense that any child likes to be sick, but disgust in not inherent, rather inherited from our surroundings—taught and passed down. A child is not fundamentally opposed to all those things we deem uncivilized with age. Think of your own youthful self, likely runny nosed and carefree, eating lunch hungrily with your inexplicably but perpetually sticky fingers.

As a kid, you probably ate dirt. I did, although only once. The chocolate muffins I’d mixed from mud in my parents’ front yard for a moment so mesmerizing that I completely lost track of reality and dug in with the biggest bite.

The point is, the kid’s comment was an innocent observation; a child racking his brain to align the sight of this new, foreign food in front of him with anything, some sight or texture, that would be familiar. That he landed on puke was not really insult so much as happenstance. The coworker comment, however, that one was premeditated, not a helpful critique rather an exertion of power. Fittingly, I asked the second grader to elaborate for me why he thought the food reminded him of this particular bodily fluid. I didn’t offer my coworker a second cookie.

When I first started assisting with the kids’ cooking classes, I was acutely aware of the physical obstacles. Often several of the students couldn’t reach the stovetop without the use of a stool, or rather energetic teaching assistant. But there were less tangible obstacles too: unfairly, ingrained opinions about food, specifically what one liked, or didn’t like, to eat. And because the goal of the curriculum is to expose kids to a variety of foods, exploring different ingredients, recipes, tastes and textures to inspire interest in diverse cuisines, there were inevitably many foods identified as enemies early into the lessons.

I anticipated that my job was to change their minds; to spend the day convincing kids to devour whichever ingredient had piqued their distaste. That is counterproductive effort. What I do instead is teach these kids how to transform the components before them into a meal. I teach them how to cut the vegetables so they’ll cook uniformly, how to brown the meat so it’ll let off the most flavor for the stew, and so on. And by offering the students the responsibility of participating in this kitchen environment, they return the trust with an enthusiasm for cooking, and then tasting.

The kids’ cooking classes all end the same way: a meal prepared and shared by the students. They arrive at the table hungry from the morning’s culinary adventure, but they also arrive tableside with a genuine excitement to taste, and discuss, the meal they’ve made. The desire to sample their work can even trump any initial ingredient skepticism.

My goal was initially to offer this group of students basic cooking lessons, to make sure everyone left well fed, and with all their fingers. (They always do, by the way. The single hospital trip I’ve ever taken was with the 25-year-old culinary student whose cavalier ego was briefly cut down to size along with the tip of his thumb). The actual accomplishments of my work in the program are subtler, but also further reaching. It’s thrilling that the lunch-table chatter becomes a fuller story of the ingredients, the work that went into transforming them into the meal, and which parts the kids want to recreate over and over again. And sometimes, that conversation is all thanks to that one ham who stands on his chair, fork in hand, and declares that the meal looks like spew.

That kid, after being gently reminded about table manners, offers his peers the very important opportunity to talk about what they’re eating. The tamales looked like puke because the texture of the masa we’d mixed and packed into cornhusks was nearly, entirely exotic as a food to this group of adolescents from Brookline elementary. This kid was just begging for a better understanding of his meal.

Loving every bite is never a requirement, but it is important to taste everything, to be able to participate in our conversation about the meal. I don’t teach kids that they have to like certain foods, but rather give them a way of expressing what it is, exactly, that they don’t like, or do in fact, want seconds of, pretty please. I don’t reprimand the kid who announces he doesn’t like the lamb curry, I only ever ask why. The same goes for the fourth grader who thinks she’ll impress me just by saying the gazpacho is delicious; I’ll need to know the reasoning.

Texture, temperature, mouth-feel, aroma. Maybe these things seem beyond the eating experience of the average elementary-schooler, except they are actually the most basic understandings we have of our food, and they are at play even in the minds of the youngest eaters. It’s why I’m so continually disappointed by youth cooking curriculums that emphasize “kid friendly” as synonymous to “fried with cheese.” Macaroni leaves little room for dynamic discussion of what’s on the plate.

None of this is to say that I haven’t seen several, well seasoned, chefs brought to the end of their patience by a group of high-schoolers vehemently voicing their opinions about the meal being prepared before them. “Before you say anything,” announced our chef-instructor lecturing on the cuisine of southern china and tipping the fermented black bean paste into the wok, “remember that I grew up in Hong Kong and when I first came to this country, I thought your beloved Doritos tasted like feet.” Taste, is relative, she’d deftly pointed out. And everyone had laughed, and then, albeit cautiously, tried the dish.

By talking about food—the good, the bad, and even the pukey—the meal becomes more valuable.

To protect the innocent, and the not so innocent too, no photos of kids, but fresh ingredients, washed, chopped and waiting patiently for their turn in the wok.