Hello, my friends!

Since I was pregnant last year, I've been learning everything I could about plant-based nutrition for babies and toddlers.

Now that my daughter is eating solids, I'm trying to put what I learned into practice. Well, to the best of my ability.

Not all of it applies to my daughter yet. She's still a baby.

I find that lot of these principles and strategies I’m learning are applicable to all of us, not just babies and toddlers.

So if you're trying to eat more whole plant foods while living with people who aren't on board, whether that's a toddler, a partner, or a parent, this letter is for you.

I'm a picky eater myself, so I'll be using these tips too.

In this letter, we’ll talk about:

When someone at your table won't eat their vegetables, you typically do one or more of these 5 moves:

Every one of those adds pressure to a nervous system that is already flinching, and pressure is what makes the flinch worse.

I hated vegetables long before my cancer diagnosis. I struggled with them even after the diagnosis too.

4+ years into my plant-forward diet, there are still foods my body resists on sight: onion, ginger, garlic, bell pepper, celery, and more.

Yes, a lot more I won’t list here.

Even though I know they are good for me. My brain still says "yuck!"

I have made progress, though.

I’m fine with onion, ginger, and garlic in powder form or blended in sauce. Bell pepper is fine grilled. Like those grilled veggie fajitas from Chipotle.

That progress came from something researchers call neutral exposure: repeated, low-stakes contact with a food, with zero requirement to swallow it, let alone like it.

That’s how I started to learn how to love eating veggies at 30 years old.

So instead of bribing, hiding, or holding someone hostage at the table, may I suggest five swaps that create neutral exposure both for you and your loved one.

You decide what. They decide whether.

"Two more bites of broccoli and you can have the cookie."

"Finish your vegetables and we'll watch one more episode."

Bribery works in the moment, which is exactly why we do it all the time.

The problem is what the trade teaches.

Every time the vegetable is the toll and the cookie is the prize, you raise the cookie's value and lower the broccoli's.

There’s a better way. Try this.

You choose the food, the time, and the setting. The other person chooses whether to eat it, and how much.

This is called the Division of Responsibility. A framework from Ellyn Satter, a dietitian who spent decades studying feeding relationships.

How I do it now:

I eat the vegetable in front of my baby, then I offer it to her. I let her decide what to do next.

Most of the time, she eats it.

Sometimes, she throws it away or hides it under her seat when I’m not looking. (She’s getting too smart.)

My job stops at what's on the table and whether she watches me eat it first.

But so far, she loves the fruits, vegetables, and whole grains we've given her. She doesn’t like the mashed veggies in a jar and would rather feed herself with her hands.

Say what's in the pot.

Sneaking looks like pureeing the zucchini into the pasta sauce and hoping nobody notices the color.

It might work once. But the moment it's discovered, every dish you serve gets inspected.

Don’t break their trust.

Just announce it. Tell them what veggies are in there.

In our house this is a two-way rule.

When my husband makes pasta sauce and veggie curry, and he always tells me what went into them. Onion, blended. Garlic, blended.

I eat both without a problem, because the powder and the puree simply don't trip the alarm that a visible chunk of onion does to me.

And even though my husband is an adventurous eater, I still tell him every ingredient when I'm the one cooking.

Nobody at our table has to guess what they're eating. That's our rule.

Touching counts. Smelling counts. Swallowing is optional.

In my house growing up, the clean-plate rule was literal.

Everyone else finished dinner and left. I stayed at the table with the food still on my plate, my eyes red and puffy from crying, because I was not allowed to get up until it was gone.

Usually it was onion or garlic, which show up in almost every Filipino dish, and in almost every dish everywhere else too.

I remember watching my brother eat onions without blinking and feeling jealous. I wonder why it was so easy for him and so impossible for me.

Sometimes, I like to think that he was just pretending to enjoy those onions, so he could get out of the dinner table first. (He’s on my email list, let’s see if he reacts 😉)

No shade to my parents though.

And honestly, almost all adults do that. They only did what they knew how, and clean-plate rules were standard advice at the time.

What that rule taught me as a kid was to think of onions as a threat. It made me hate it more, even decades later.

So let me suggest a strategy I call the Learning Bite, and the bar is much lower than swallowing.

Let them touch it, smell it, lick it and put it back down. Every one of those counts as exposure.

Researchers Sullivan and Birch found it can take 8 to 15 exposures before a child in the 3-to-4-year-old range accepts a food they initially disliked.

Some kids need fewer, some need more. None of them need a clean plate to get there.

I use the same principle now, as an adult. I’ve probably done hundreds of ways to expose myself to onions at this point. And I’m still working on it.

One meal, built so everyone can eat it their own way.

Short-order cooking means you’re making the family dinner, then making a second dinner for the person who won't eat the first one.

Chicken nuggets alongside the curry, hotdogs alongside the stir fry.

Two pots and two cleanups every single night. Until you're too tired to keep it up.

Do a deconstructed meal instead. Here’s how:

Serve the meal in separable parts. For example, rice in one bowl, tofu on a plate, roasted vegetables on the side.

Everyone builds their own version from the same table, and the person who only takes rice and tofu tonight still sees the vegetables sitting right there.

My husband does most of the cooking in our house, because he’s the better cook.

For 11 years he's been the one adjusting to my pickiness. And this is one of his strategies to help me eat ALL of my veggies.

That's a grown, board-certified lifestyle medicine professional still needing her food deconstructed.

If I need that, so does the picky eater at your table, whether they're four or forty.

Start with one piece.

I know a lot of people who hate okra, so let’s use that as an example.

Picture a full side of roasted okra next to the rest of dinner, six or seven pieces taking up a third of the plate.

For someone who already dislikes okra, that portion reads as an obligation before the first bite.

Now picture just one piece of okra, sitting off to the side.

That's how I learned to eat carrots, okra, and eggplant, three vegetables I used to genuinely despise.

Back then, I’d only put a single piece on my own plate on purpose.

When we ate at home, my husband served me smaller amounts.

When we ate out, I ordered the dish and took one piece from it. No expectation that I'd finish it, and no expectation that I'd even like it.

That took months of tiny tastes. Somewhere in there I went from tolerating those three to actually enjoying them, and I couldn't tell you the exact meal it flipped.

Is there a vegetable that makes you flinch?

The one you still can't get past, no matter how many times someone tells you it's good for you.

Mine’s still onions. And garlic, bell peppers, celery. What’s yours?

Reply to this email and tell me what it is, and which swap you're going to try first.

Talk soon.

Still picking out the onions,

Grazelle 🌱