My kids won't eat their locally grown vegetables
I started out with good intentions, but my plan to teach my kids about local vegetable farming failed.
Last summer, I decided to subscribe to Green Cay Produce, a Boynton Beach farm that sells and delivers its vegetables to local homes. It was expensive ($400 to receive a box every other week from October through May, or about $22 per box, plus $5 per box for them to deliver it to the house), but we would get a chance to support a local farmer, see our vegetables grow and see if they taste better straight from the vine.
As the deliveries began, I immediately detected a problem: There were lots of vegetables my kids and my husband were not going to eat. The farm sent over about half a dozen yellow squash and zucchini each time, and there was always lots of arugula, scallions, radishes and eggplant that my family wouldn't go near.
Some of the vegetables ended up going to waste, which I felt terrible about (How much yellow squash can one person, me, eat?) And my kids never got to see the farm up close because we had other plans on their Visiting Day.
So because of the expense and the refusal of my family to try new veggies, I am not going to renew my subscription. Hopefully local growers will start selling their wares at centrally located markets; that way, I can still support them but have more choices as to what I want to buy each week.
Comments
That's too bad - the very vegetables you mention we eat regularly. One of my pet peeves is adults who are picky about food. I always want to tell them to grow up already. When I was a kid, you had to take one bite of everything at least. Turns out, this was a good parenting skill. To this day, there is nothing I truly dislike, or won't at least try. We do this in our own home now with our kids; I refuse to raise picky eaters. I wish more parents were this way, it is a real adventure when we take some of our kids friends out to eat with us, and watch them turn their noses up at anything that is not a chicken nugget. We even had one friend of my son send back a cheese pizza because he said it was not "done". What the heck does a 7 year old know about cooking for one, and where does a 7 year old get the notion to send food back to the kitchen ?
Posted by: Jeff | May 8, 2008 11:28 AM