As a child, Jill Bloomfield remembers pouting at meals until her mother would reheat pizza or give her peanut butter and jelly. So what happened when she grew up?
Jill Bloomfield.“I became an adult who sought out peanut butter and jelly,” said Ms. Bloomfield, 33, a former middle school and high school teacher in St. Paul, Minn. “I was a picky adult. I wanted things like grilled cheese.”
But Ms. Bloomfield quickly learned that colleagues look askance if you order a grilled cheese sandwich at lunch. Realizing that fussiness about foods is a handicap in a grownup world, Ms. Bloomfield began looking for ways to retrain her taste buds.
“I had to train myself to branch out and like more foods, and with that came learning how to cook,” she said. “”It’s not impossible to retrain yourself, but it’s difficult.”
What’s unusual about Ms. Bloomfield’s journey is how far she has come. Today, she is a food educator and cookbook author. Her personal struggles as a picky eater have fueled her interest in helping children learn to cook and to avoid the social and health problems associated with picky eating. (Just two years ago, Ms. Bloomfield was diagnosed with high cholesterol.) After creating a popular cooking course for her high school students, she began offering kids cooking classes and birthday parties.
In the spring, she edited DK Publishing’s “Grow It, Cook It,” which teaches children how to cook with vegetables they grow in a pot or garden. And this fall, she co-authored the “Jewish Holidays Cookbook,” aimed at kids and families. Some of the dishes make it hard to believe Ms. Bloomfield was ever picky about food. She offers simple recipes for harvest rice with pomegranate seeds, pumpkin soup, and chickpea and couscous salad.
Now she’s working on a new book that teaches basic cooking techniques — including seemingly obvious methods like boiling water. “Why do you start potatoes in the water, but you add pasta to water that is already boiling?” she said. “It breaks down a cookbook in the way you don’t normally see and offers recipes to help you practice that skill.”
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Ms. Bloomfield hopes that by teaching kids to cook, she can help them avoid the pitfalls of picky eating.
“In my household growing up, a cookie and soda before bedtime was normal,” she said. “Unlearning that as an adult has been an extreme challenge. My journey in food has been about overcoming my childhood.”
Here is the recipe from “Jewish Holidays Cookbook” for chickpea and couscous salad.
Chickpea and Couscous Salad
Ingredients:
1 cup vegetable broth
1 cup uncooked, instant couscous
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons white vinegar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon garlic powder
¼ cup fresh parsley, minced
¼ cup fresh basil, minced
1 (15 ounce) can chickpeas
4 plum tomatoes, diced
1 medium cucumber, diced
1. In a small saucepan, bring vegetable broth to a boil. While on the heat, stir in couscous. Immediately cover pot, turn off stove and remove saucepan from heat so liquid is absorbed into couscous. When all liquid is absorbed, fluff up couscous using a fork so grains are separated and light and fluffy. Be careful because the saucepan is hot. Set couscous aside and allow it to cool.
2. Combine oil, vinegar, lemon juice, and garlic powder in a mixing bowl. Gently fold in the parsley and basil.
3. Add chickpeas, tomatoes, and cucumber to the cooled couscous. Mix in oil and vinegar mixture.
4. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate. Serve cold.
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From 1 to 25 of 61 Comments
I was the original picky eater. But my few favorites were real food, not junk, because my mother and grandmother were great cooks that prepared most things from scratch. It was junk food and re-heated convenience food and the usual school cafeteria fare that I frowned upon.
So the picky steak-lover grew up a curious food explorer and home cook. There is hope for us.
— anonymousI was a horribly picky eater, all the way through high school. The most important step in widening my tastes was developing an interest in food and cooking. During college I began preparing my own meals, often with friends. I experimented with flavors and cooking styles. I also stopped eating meat, which forced me to try things I normally would have avoided. These days I have a healthy, varied diet, and I love playing around with new recipes.
Bloomfield’s approach sounds totally on target to me.
— NicoleI’d love to stop being an adult ‘picky eater,’ but I’m cursed with uber-supertasting tastebuds - some foods will literally cause pain or make me immediately vomit, which doesn’t look so great at a business lunch. And yes, it’s a real thing - just ask Dr. Linda Bartoshuk at Yale who does extensive research into the topic.
I have been able to broaden my horizons somewhat, but given the choice, I still prefer quite plain, bland food - give me bread and cereal and I’m a happy camper (although like the first responder, I tend to prefer those made with ‘real’ ingredients - all the additives and colors never worked for me either).
I should add that all this fun is apparently genetic; I have a half-sister I met as an adult and we both have the same issue - the same goes for much of my birth family. It’s anecdotal, to be sure, but it’s an area that is being studied.
There is an upside, though - I’m a certified beer judge because I can pick out individual flavors and ingredients very well. I’d probably be great in the wine industry too - if only I could swallow the stuff, but ‘grape’ is on my list of flavors I can’t get to grips with.
— anonI’m with Anonymous up there. I was a picky eater. I would only eat vegetables raw, not cooked, and never with a sauce on them. I would only eat salad without dressing. I hated cheese, and wouldn’t eat anything with cheese (including pizza). And so forth. I was a skinny, skinny little kid.
Now I eat tons of fresh vegetables every day - many of which my mom refused to serve at our dinner table - and cook healthy food every night. (Okay, okay, my other half does most of the cooking.) My palate still hasn’t adjusted to accommodate super-spicy food, though I give it the old college try every few weeks, but in most ways the spectrum of foods I eat is much broader than it was when I was a little kid.
Unfortunately, I now love cheese, which is probably why my waistline is also much broader at 37 than it was at 7!
— Nicole GustasIt’s one thing to be “picky,” as in refusing to eat a range of foods. It’s a different thing to be a discriminating eater, as in someone highly motivated to eat only the best-tasting or highest quality foods.
Picky-ness is obnoxious and unacceptable to me. I don’t want to eat with a picky eater, and I certainly won’t cater to one.
Discrimination is admirable, given the right circumstances. If there’s a choice, one should eat the best and most enjoyable food possible.
If the possibilities are limited, one should graciously make a choice, and eat or pick on the food without making any comment. I think it is very bad manners to critique food while others are enjoying, or trying to enjoy it.
I was among the reverse snobs who commented on the winespeak blog. Maybe I’m a reverse snob about this, too. Still, I think parents should teach their children to eat a variety of foods, and to be respectful when they dine with others. It’s one of the most basic social skills in life.
— WesleyIt has been my experience that picky eater children come from picky eater adults. My boyfriend grew up not eating anything unless it was doused in hot sauce and once wrapped in plastci (the army cured him of that thank God, and I’m doing my best to stretch his pallette further). Anyway, I came to realize that he leaned towards plain food because his mom cooked plain food to please his Dad.
— AndreaMe on the other hand, I was raised with “you eat what I cook or you go hungry” and it has made myself and my brother two of the least picky eaters I know, thankfully. The idea of parents fixing 3 or 4 different dinners to please different tastes is just crazy to me. Parents may think they are helping but they are really just enabling bad habits which will be carried into adult hood. Trust me, if your child is hungry enough he or she will eat it….and perhaps even grow to love it.
I, too, was a picky child. It took me the longest time even to eat pizza. In contrast to Andrea’s theory (#6), my household was incredibly diverse in the range of foods served. Everything from pizza and tacos to chicken & dumplings to full spreads of Indian food. A different dinner was never prepared for me–usually just simpler versions of whatever was on the menu–and I was always required to try something or eat “just three bites” of that nights veggies. Didn’t do a bit of good. I learned to take pills by swallowing peas whole.
Now, for some mysterious reason, I am more willing to try new or “strange” things than my husband, who was not a picky child.
I suspect that it simply took my tastebuds time to develop. This former wouldn’t-touch-a-vegetable-with-a-10-foot-pole eater now enjoys parsnips and chard.
Sure–there are still foods I dislike, but (mostly) not from lack of trying.
— ElisabethTo anon #3:
OK, as a “certified” expert in sensory evaluation, we know there are “super-tasters” with genetically determined sensitivity to certain compounds.
But as I recall (as I’m not “practicing” this specialty, anymore), super-tasting, as Linda Bartoshuk defines it, is about the taste and not the olfactory response. You refer to aromatic sensations as you opine on your level of discrimination.
My opinion, having trained hundreds of “certified” tasters, is that some of your super-sensitivity might be psychological. Maybe you have made some very specific emotional associations with certain qualities, such as “grape.”
I would also say that it doesn’t take a super-taster to be discriminating. More often, discrimination is just about being interested and aware, and having a good memory. When we trained panels, we gave very difficult and very involved aptitude tests, which usually predicted performance very well. We found that the best candidates were not necessarily super-tasters, although some super-tasters WERE in the final cut.
— WesleyI wrote too impulsively about supertasting. Yes, of course, sensitivity of the taste modality affects perception of foods with characteristically intense basic tastes. And there is growing evidence that there are more dimensions than just the classic basic tastes of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter.
I heard so many misperceptions in my years training panels, and saw so many panelists trying to assert their superiority, due to their “supertaster” status, that I’m a little reactive to the claim.
Whatever.
— WesleyNeither of my parents are picky eaters nor are my sister and I…but my brother….until college his diet consisted almost entirely of simple carbohydrates - bread, chips, cookies - with the occasional baby carrot or bologna slice thrown in to spice things up.
— KatMy parents didn’t like and his sisters teased about it constantly (he may have hung on to the picky eating for a while out of stubbornness) but his diet didn’t change until college. I think he realized that his new California friends looked askance at his bread and bread sandwiches and that college was the perfect opportunity to re-invent his palate and his persona. Now he eats a wide variety of foods and eats more healthy foods than anyone in the family.
His diet growing up doesn’t seem to have damaged him either as he grew to 6′3″ and has always been healthy.
I have a lot of picky eaters in my family. I’m the type of person who is willing to try just about anything atleast once, so I guess I never really understood what was so difficult about trying new things. I love that Ms. Bloomingfield has obviously overcome being a picky eater and is helping others taste the best things that life has to offer.
— kayla vandervlucht-Kayla
I agree wholeheartedly that preparing food and cooking meals are great treatments for picky eaters. My mother swears that I would have starved if not for Kraft Dinner. Once I started cooking meals for myself enough that I tired of the same few recipes, I was ready to eat foods that I didn’t like for my first 30 years! Now I am the mother of a child who is not simply a picky eater, but has a sensory disorder which makes her dislike many textures. She attends feeding therapy with a speech-language pathologist to introduce new foods and is coming along nicely. And what do they do at the therapy sessions? Cook with the kids!
— MassMomOh, how I cannot stand picky eaters who have to query the poor serving person at a restaurant about every last ingredient in a dish, how it’s prepared, etc…..i mean, if you have to ask, don’t bother, get something else. My kids tried this picky eater business with me just a couple of times. i explained calmly that the food i made was what we were all having. they could either eat it, or skip the meal altogether. problem solved.
— petergHmm, there seems to be a wide range of definitions of “picky eater”. I was a picky eater as a child (sometimes my mother had to hit me to make me eat food), but that is not the same as having unhealthy eating habits. Now that I am an adult in charge of my own food, I’m not a “picky” eater at all. I enjoy cooking, eat a wide range of different types of food, often try new recipes, eat a lot of fresh fruit, read the latest articles on food and nutrition, and conscientiously try to put what I read about nutrition into practice. I ate a lot of junk food as a child and drank soda all the time, but as an adult I can’t stand soda and hardly ever eat fast food. I think fussiness over food and mealtimes as a child had more to do with control issues around food in my family. We’re a stubborn lot.
— KarenThe best way to get rid of a bad picky eating habit (or die of starvation) is to travel a lot. You’ll also learn to identify foods and their methods of preparation. Moving abroad and trying to replicate comfort food from home has really taught me about what’s in the things we eat.
— Ami in DeutschlandI’m super-picky, I’m a texture eater, and like poster #3, will gag/vomit if I force myself to eat foods that I genuinely dislike.
I don’t think being forced to clean my plate helped, nor did the commentary from those righteous folks who “won’t tolerate a picky eater”.
I eat a much wider range of foods now, but what I had to do was patiently try one new food at a time. The thing that helped me more than anything was going on my own and doing my own cooking. I also had my horizons expanded by a couple of foodie friends who would cheerfully encourage me to try things but not get offended if I reacted badly.
I discovered I liked many vegetables if they were raw or lightly cooked–for example, I just love raw spinach, it’s fine when it’s lightly blanched, but I’ll gag on it when it’s been boiled to death. It’s the same thing with peppers, I eat them often at home but cook them only to the point that the natural sweetness has been brought out but they’ve still got a bit of crispness to them.
I can’t eat canned vegetables, either, because they’re mushy. I cannot stand onions–the flavor is no problem, but mature onions have ribs in them, and I can detect a piece of onion the size of a fingernail clipping, even when it’s camoflaged to the point that most wouldn’t even notice. (No, I do not like onion rings, to answer a frequently-asked question)
To the people who believe it’s a matter of will and claim that I’d eat even disliked foods if I were hungry enough, well, I lost about thirty pounds in six months in my teens when I didn’t have sufficient access to foods I could tolerate. I was not, I might add, overweight at the time and was badly underweight before the situation was corrected. I was not anorexic nor was I bulimic, I just found going hungry was preferable to choking down something I couldn’t stand and then vomiting it back up on a daily basis.
Fortunately, in real life, people are far more gracious than some of the comments here might lead one to believe, and a quiet word of explanation has generally smoothed over any potential awkwardness.
— J Greene#3, i have to ask: have you actually seen a doctor about this or are you self-diagnosed? If you haven’t, perhaps you should- you might find a “cure” in the psychiatrists office. No one should have to live a life with only bland food- you should be able to enjoy the culinary diversity available to us as properous Americans.
— EmilyUgh, I also find picky eaters obnoxious.
A co-worker of mine is the kind of junk-food-and-simple-carb focused picky eater described in the post, and not only does she flaunt her pickiness, squealing when other people eat foods that are not white or are not packaged and detailing ad nauseum her trevails as a picky eater (she actually buys sushi rolls and removes the fish and the nori and just eats the rice, which has got to be the most willfully ignorant action I have ever witnessed)…
…but she also flaunts her health problems that are surely the result of eating nothing but famos amos cookies, goldfish crackers, diet coke and plain cheese quesadillas!
She calls in sick constantly, and is often unwell when she does come in to work, complaining, always, of malaise, stomach and head aches and constant colds. She is young, under 25, and she acts like an old lady, is already kind of pudgy, and goes to the doctor more than anyone else I know.
— DeborahMy sister in law is also a very picky eater, and similarly annoying and often ill.
Every time I cook for her I make a point of using anchovies, just because it would totally freak her out if she knew.
FROM TPP — Isn’t that a little passive aggressive?
— DeborahMy folks were not really picky eaters, but I was. Until one fateful day, when I was absolutely starving. I was in college and on a road trip to visit a friend in Boston. It was over 6 hours of driving, and we did not stop to eat.
I might have had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, I might not have. I don’t remember.
We finally got to Boston and went to a restaurant where, luckily, a salad was served with dinner. I never even looked at raw vegetables before; salad was never served in my house growing up. Salivating, I took a bite… and then another… and wouldn’t you know it? it was an iceberg-lettuce epiphany.
I think one answer might be letting picky kids get really hungry, putting the raw veggies in front of them without a word, and tiptoe-ing out of the room. If they think you’re not looking and they’re hungry enough, they just might take a bite. And like it.
— LizI think it’s great to be a picky eater. If it doesn’t taste wonderful to you — don’t eat it - a sure way to put on weight and if it tastes too wonderful, nibble it…
most people are not picky enough eaters…
— “Hetty Green”This type of cookbook for kids seems like a MUCH BETTER idea than the ones that “hide” the healthy foods from your kids. If your children don’t know they’re eating cauliflower, they won’t realize that they don’t mind it, and then you’ll just be raising more picky (and possibly unhealthy) adults.
Love the cookbook. One of my favorite childhood memories is growing my own pumpkins and then making various delicious pumpkin dishes out of them. Also grilling asparagus that my grandmother grew at her house…mmmmmm.
— EleanorI was always a picky eater and I still am. But I don’t eat junk. My pickiness was pretty benign. I hated pumpkin. I hated uncooked tomato. I hated mango, avocado, pawpaw and purple grapes. And banana.
I still hate all those things.
The key for me was that it was well handled. I ate sweet potato instead of pumpkin, and loads of fruit, just not those I hated.
That is hardly soda and cookies before bed. Junk is junk and good food is good food - picky eaters are a different issue. As long as you’re picky but still eating healthy food who cares how long you’re picky? I have no intention of stopping being picky. I call it being DISCERNING.
If you think that picky explains your junk-food-addicted kid then you’re kidding yourself. That’s just a combo of bad examples and disobedience.
— JillyflowerI was a picky eater as a child. I ate a wide variety of foods because that was what was available, but there were and are certain foods which I can’t swallow. I have figured out as an adult that I have a very active gag reflex and foods with certain types of fibers in them “stick” in my throat when I try to swallow them. This was worse when I was pregnant so that my husband wouldn’t allow me to eat green beans because he didn’t like watching me gag on them.
So if your children refuse to eat certain foods, it may be due to the texture of the food rather than any bias.
— Margaret P.i’m not referring to “picky eaters” as people who don’t want to (or couldn’t if they tried) eat foods they don’t like…i don’t care for eggplant, so I don’t eat it. i’m talking about those supercilious folks who interrogate the server re: where the scallops came from, if the chicken is organic, if they can have extra this or none of that….or how something is sauteed. these are the people whose parents gave in to their demands to make something else. my kids have a choice…they can eat what i make, or they don’t eat that evening. that’s the choice.
— peterg