The Lost Art of Feeding Kids - Minestrone

The Lost Art of Feeding Kids: What Italy Taught Me About Why Kids Need Real Food

By Jeannie Marshall

240 pages, Beacon Press, 2014

When I spotted Jeannie Marshall’s The Lost Artof Feeding Kids, I felt that not only did I need to read it, I needed to go against my usual pattern of letting a new book gather dust on my bookshelf for months or even years before getting around to it. Because I have a kid I need to feed, and although I believed I was doing a decent job at it, it couldn’t hurt to get more information, or at least validation. I’ve said it before: I detest parenting books. The idea of a manual for raising your child irks me. But I have seen so many picky toddlers, so many little (and not so little) ones who seem to subsist on junk food and empty calories, that I made an exception for this one. It’s not really a parenting book anyway, more like a manifesto.

So, what did I learn? I am indeed doing a decent job at feeding my toddler. But according to this book, I could be doing better.

Cooking for Gracie - Spaghetti with anchovies, walnuts, mint and breadcrumbs

Cooking for Gracie: The Making of a Parent From Scratch

By Keith Dixon

224 pages, Crown, 2011

Originally posted on The Chocolate Bunny on May 4^th, 2013 and edited for context and style.

Keith Dixon’s Cooking for Gracie is surprising reading choice for me. Allow me to explain why before getting to the book itself.

As soon as we announced my pregnancy in early 2012, people started giving us stuff. A lot of stuff. Most of the gifts were predictable, but very welcome: clothes, toys, gift certificates, more clothes. Others were pleasant surprises: a baby food maker, a soothing noise-making machine (which never really put the baby to sleep, but is still really cool – it projects waves of light and everything!). I was grateful for it all. But there is one type of gift which I specifically asked people not to give me (and fortunately, most of them complied): parenting books.

My dislike of parenting books (and most self-help books, really) stems from way before I ever became a parent myself: it started during my teen years. I was a fairly typical teenager, undergoing all the angst, drama, and emotional rollercoaster those years often entail. But around that time, my mother started developing the annoying habit of attributing anything I did that rubbed her the wrong way to my age. “I know teenagers are unkempt / rude to their parents / selfish, but I will not have you wear your hair like that / speak to me that way / behave like that.” It was as if I had been labelled practically overnight, and anything I did would inevitably be traced back to that label. Granted, not all her criticisms were undeserved: my hair was indeed a mess most of the time, and I wasn’t always the most thoughtful daughter. I was also moody and weird. But I could have been the best-groomed, most polite, most altruistic, most well-adjusted teen, and my mother probably would have found something else to blame on teenagehood. Looking back, I think she simply didn’t want her only child to grow up.

And one day, while browsing through one of our many bookshelves, I found The Book.

The Year of Eating Dangerously - Soft-shell crabs

The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes

By Tom Parker Bowles

374 pages, St. Martin’s Press, 2007 (Ebury, 2006)

The year was 2008. I was just starting to be more seriously interested in food. While browsing in a bookstore, I glimpsed this book on the discount table (sorry, Mr. Parker Bowles) and bought it, as I often do, on impulse. I emerged from reading it a more erudite person; but would that still be the case today?

British food writer Tom Parker Bowles’ The Year of Eating Dangerously chronicles his adventures as he travels the world with a twofold goal: to see how local food cultures are standing up to globalization, and to try dishes that, while commonplace in some regions, strike the Western imagination as strange or repulsive.

Flipping through the book now, five years my first reading, I found myself wondering which has changed more in that time: food culture, or me?