Kid Food

On building a relationship with real food — and suggestions to get your kids to eat.

The folks at WARKITCHEN were kind enough to ask me to write about kid food and nutrition for their April issue and I was more than honored to oblige. Check out the full issue here, where, besides a terrifically laid out version of this post, you can read about hosting dinner parties, a review of Rick Rubin’s latest book, and drool over some good looking meals. If you liked this kind of thing, I’d highly recommend subscribing. Check out their Substack at

WARKITCHEN

Below is a full version of the article, mostly adding in a few dozen footnotes which add some additional nuance and context — and generally just make me laugh. As always, I encourage you to read them.

Kiddo CWD loves to eat, sometimes insatiably. She, like the Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar, will devour a smorgasbord of cottage cheese, apples, mangos, toasted sourdough slathered in cultured butter¹, an entire porkchop, ground bison, homemade tortillas, goat cheese, a tomato she picked off the vine. She’ll wash it down with a slug of kefir, a swig of kombucha, a gulp of “special water.²” She eats, like I do, often and voraciously.

Except, of course, when she doesn’t.

Sometimes breakfast is a nightmare, lunch and dinner worse. 

“I don’t like that!” 

“But, you love pasta!”

“I don’t like that! It hurts my belly!”

Sitting on a bookshelf³, somewhere, I have the book French Kids Eat Everything. I read the first few chapters, so I feel confident summarizing: French kids eat everything because they have to eat everything. There’s no kids menu, no bailout option with chicken fingers and French fries⁴. They eat what they have in front of them, and most of the time, they like it. 

(The author, in one early example, describes enjoying canapés during a school orientation for her children — and getting funny looks, since, obviously, the rillettes de thon and foie gras were for the kids, not the parents.)

While we don’t go full Francophile during meal times, no checkered table clothes with pristine place settings, we do try to have her eat what we eat. It’s easy to drive yourself insane, walking down the “kid’s aisle” at the grocery store, trying to make sense of the purees, the starter foods, the smoothies, the snacks. Each item is a marvel of food engineering — hiding “healthy vegetables” in an array of texture, color, and artificial flavor. It’s no wonder something like 40% of kids in a recent study thought bacon came from plants — the foods they eat and come in contact with are unbelievably removed from the source⁵!

When we sit Kiddo down for meals, often as a family, but sometimes just her, we present her with a dinner that allows her to recognize and acknowledge each part. She eats what we eat: a protein, vegetables, a starch⁶. The rules are simple: she has to try everything. If she truly, absolutely, hates something, she doesn’t have to eat it — but she has to give it a shot⁷. 

In practice, that means she knows what each component of her meal looks like, what it tastes like. There’s no hiding broccoli behind apples, mangoes, or pears; no stashing lamb behind sweet potatoes — what she gets, she gets⁸. Because of this, she can identify almost everything she eats by name. When she’s standing in her tower next to us while we’re prepping food, she points things out, requests a taste. 

“I want that onion! Peppers, please! More meat!⁹”

This makes meals fun. Kiddo knows what she’s eating, knows what she likes, what she thinks she doesn’t, and has a real connection to her food. Most of the time, she’s right there with us as we’re making it¹⁰. There’s nothing more satisfying than sitting down to a family dinner, watching your preschoolers eating real food. 

But this doesn’t happen overnight. It takes some work, some painful meals, some fall back options. That being said, over the last year or so of solids, we’ve picked up a couple tricks that made getting to this point much easier. For those going through the same journey, for those who want to try and give their kids a connection to what they eat, so they don’t mistake a pig for a plant, I’ll outline some of those lessons learned below. 

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The CWD Kid Food Playbook

Segment Their Plates.

In isolation, Kiddo loves pasta, loves cheese, loves bacon, and loves eggs. But if you combine these ingredients together into pasta carbonara, she won’t even touch it. Likewise for pasta with meat sauce, for eggs scrambled with vegetables, beef stroganoff, for anything that combines multiple ingredients into one dish¹¹.  If you give her the separate, component ingredients in isolation, she’ll eat them up. It’s the amalgamation that gets her goat¹².

I think this is because kids like to be in control¹³. When her meal is segmented, Kiddo can choose when she eats the bacon, dips into the cheese, takes a spoonful of pasta or bite of egg. In a world where so much is dictated for them, kids like to be able assert themselves and make their own decisions. If your kid is a picky eater, try getting a divided plate and putting each component in a separate section¹⁴. The results might surprise you.

Spice Things Up.

We cook with a variety of spices and seasonings in our household and only occasionally put them away — so we’ll often have a jar of spice mix out on the counter during dinner. During one meal, Kiddo pointed to a tub of Honey Hog on the island and asked “what’s that?¹⁵”

We told her it was “special salt,” and boy, did that revolutionize meals. Now, whenever Kiddo is hesitant about trying something, we ask her if she wants to dip it in “special salt” — she always does. I’ve watched her put down an entire chicken thigh, slice by slice, dipping each in Honey Hog, and then ask for more. She’ll do the same with anything she’s iffy on. We’ve had similar success with a variety of other spice mixes, with raw honey (which she loves), with maple syrup — it’s all deadly¹⁶. Give it a shot next time you have a refusal… you can get even better results if you really play up how “special” the seasoning is.

Get Them Involved.

I mentioned earlier that we try to keep Kiddo involved in the preparation of most meals. She loves stirring, whisking, and is just starting to help with cutting¹⁷. She always ends up eating more when she is part of the prep — sometimes just because she enjoys, so much, eating as she goes. Kids are natural helpers — they love to assist with prep work and with the clean up after — so you can tag on to this instinct to build the habit of cooking early. Plus, when they are involved, they can, even more so, learn what goes into their meals, where it comes from, why it is like it is. 

We’ve started to take this even further, by having Kiddo actively involved in the sourcing of our food. She helps us plant seeds and transplant seedlings into our garden. She helps water the soil, pick weeds, and, when the garden is ready, helps with the harvest — eating tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers directly from the vine, covered in dirt. I love that for her. 

Recently, we ordered a bison half directly from North Bridger Bison¹⁸. Matt, the founder, was kind enough to share a ton of photos documenting the field harvesting process, which we shared with Kiddo. When we eat bison¹⁹, Kiddo knows exactly what it looked like alive, what it looked like butchered, and what it looks like both raw and cooked. She even has a tuft of bison hair and a bison horn, which Matt sent us. That’s about as involved as you can get, outside of raising her own livestock²⁰ or hunting her own meat²¹. When your kids can get excited about the food process, and look at it with eyes wide open — that’s what gets them excited about eating²².

Know Their Limits.

I wish I could say that every meal was seamless and enjoyable, but even with all the steps we take to make eating real food feel natural²³, sometimes dinner ends up being buttered pasta with grated cheese. Sometimes breakfast is an entire carton of blackberries and yogurt smeared on the counter. You have to take the wins with the losses.

Every child is different, but generally, when all else fails, there are a handful of things we can get Kiddo to eat²⁴:

• Cheese, of all varieties.

• Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries.

• Plain pasta with butter.

• Cheesy quesadillas.

• Dried fruits, especially raisins and dried mangoes.

• Some select “snack foods” — specifically these from Lesser Evil, these from Fresh Bellies, and these from Skout Organics.

• Something liquid — green or peanut butter smoothies, kefir, bone broth, or anything else she can drink with a straw.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out what works in your household is through trial and error — so expect a few nights of thrown food and spilled milk. There’s no need to cry over it.

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So there you have it. A guide for thinking about how to get your kid to eat. Each family and each situation will be a little different — each kid show different preferences for different things — but I think if you roughly follow these guidelines, you can set a really strong foundation for your child’s relationship with food, and the world more broadly.

Wherever it takes you, enjoy the path of parenthood. Get outside this weekend — it’s officially spring — and bring your children with you. Visit a farmer’s market. Drink some water. Eat something real. And don’t forget to laugh.

1. I like to buy my butter cultured since I am not. (That’s a joke!)

2. Watered down electrolyte mix and  a dash of apple cider vinegar.

3. One of many scattered around the house, in various states of organization.

4. Sorry, pommes frites.

5. This is not a knock on buying pre-made foods, as much as it sounds like it. Finding the time, effort, and energy to make every meal is a challenge. Do what you can, when you can. As with most things, what is my ideal is not what is actually reality!

6. Since Kiddo has FPIES, we're a little limited for starches. She has a pretty severe gastrointestinal reaction to a lot of grains — rice, barley, and oats being the major culprits — so she’ll often get polenta, a flour tortilla, or homemade bread if we’re having something she can’t eat. Makes it a little more difficult, but also gives us a great excuse to bake a fresh loaf of bread each week — and she can help make it.

7. There’s some fantastic research that shows it can take a kid up to 15 times trying something before they realize they like it. As the old saying goes: “If at first you don’t succeed, keep forcing asparagus down your kid’s throat every meal until they like it.”

8. This is not to say there isn’t a place for purees in introducing babies to solids. We started her there, but on our own terms, pureeing our own batches of mush and starting her off with single ingredients. You can certainly buy these things premade at the store, but, like all cooking, there’s something to be said about knowing exactly what is going into your food. For better or worse, we’re probably a little fanatical about it, and we love to cook. Do what works for you.

Plus, Mrs. CWD liked the idea that as she stopped being Kiddo’s sole source of nutrients, she could at least be the one who made what she was eating. We even picked our garden seedlings for the year based on what we wanted Kiddo to eat. Maybe with Baby CWD, who is still a few months away from starting solids, we’ll try baby-led weaning, which, as I understand it, skips purees and jumps right to whole foods.

9. We’re still working on identifying different types of meat — everything from chicken to lamb gets categorized the same: meat. Bear with her — she’s only two.

10. And when she’s not, she’s probably eating leftovers — like we are.

11. The only exception is pasta with butter and cheese. She’ll eat that, all right!

12. We haven’t actually tried goat with her yet, but I do think she’d like it – especially smoked Kentucky BBQ style.

13. For this same reason we like to let Kiddo pick out her outfit each morning — within reason and from a carefully curated wardrobe.

14. Something like this might work.

15. A common question from her.

16. In moments of weakness, we’ll also let her add sprinkles to her pancakes or waffles if she’s being really obstinate. That’s how we make “birthday waffles!”

17. Baking is still her favorite, since, as I’ve written before, she loves raw batter and dough.

18. An amazing company that is all “fierce rationalism” in the food chain. Check them out.

19. And we’ll be eating a lot of it for awhile!

20. One day!

21. One day!

22. And if we’re being honest, probably most adults, too. Unless you’re squeamish!

23. There’s a pun in there if you can catch it.

24. Dahlia over at

I'm Always in the Kitchen

writes about this topic frequently, and I found her recent list of “5-minute Toddler Meals” to be right on the money — her newsletter is fantastic all around!