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Food preferences

A family column for the 100 Mile Free Press
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My wife really doesn’t like mushrooms. In some dishes, she finds them tolerable. But often times she’ll pick them out and feed them to our son as best she can.

He, for the past week or two, has been having a hard time as he’s been sick having caught a virus somewhere. He was contagious, meaning he wasn’t able to go to daycare. The virus he caught also posed a risk (albeit small) risk for my wife’s pregnancy meaning she also wanted to avoid hanging out with him as much as possible. To contextualize it within the current political debate, you could say his approval ratings have plummeted.

As a consequence, he’s spent almost the entire weak with grandma. That’s the kind of circumstance that will make him want to be sick all the time.

His mouth during all of this has been a bit painful. For about a week he straight up refused to have his teeth brushed whatsoever and generally spit out any hard or crunchy food. At one point it got a little gross with him waking up in the morning with dried blood crusted around his soother. However, as a whole, he took it all rather well. As a bit of a bonus for us, he went to bed earlier than usual.

As a consequence, he asked primarily for soft foods. Things like grapes and banana have always been popular and their approval ratings only increased. The other day he asked for mushroom. We were both home and hadn’t cooked any and neither of us were exceptionally keep to whip out a pan to fry about one and a half mushrooms.

I just gave him a raw piece instead. My wife responded with “that’s disgusting, he’s not going to eat that.” Within seconds he finished it and was back at the fridge asking for more mushrooms. Suddenly, one of his favourite lunch options is grapes mixed with raw mushrooms, a combination my wife considers truly horrifying.

My son’s grandfather added to this combination by dipping the grapes and mushrooms in honey, also a popular choice. I’m not sure my wife considered this an improvement.

If nothing else, he’s back to daycare now and I bet there were some funny looks opening a container for slices mushrooms and grapes.