After five years of creating gourmet, uneaten lunches
for my son, now nine, I have decided to make use of some plastic fruit I have
held on to for way too long and pack this for lunch for him every day. I am thinking plastic pear for Monday,
plastic mango for Tuesday, plastic banana for Wednesday – not sure about
Thursday, and Friday he has takeaway from the Tea Shrine (a local vegetarian Asian café.) Usually something nutritious like
coloured steam buns!
This way, I will finally have accepted that I have failed
dismally as a parent! Because being a good cook is integrally linked with being a good parent (??) I have watched other children bite into their uneaten rolls while
waiting for their parents, and have wondered what I am doing wrong.
For a start he (Jorge) refuses any sandwich, in any form. Sometimes he will accept a roll, but it
usually comes home uneaten. I suspect my mistake is that once I get onto a winner,
I overdo it an within a fortnight, and he refuses to eat it ever again. Here are some of the foods we’ve tried:
Nori wafers
Pizza
Polenta
Soyaroni
Smoked kangaroo
Olive oil and fennel
Julienne vegetables with dip
Salami and bread
Bread and dip
Garlic bread
Crackers of all varieties
Cheese pies
Spinach pie (with home-made fillo)
Vietnamese springs rolls
Nori rolls
Papa
Minestrone
Corn bread
Corn and rice cakes
Watermelon (ok)
I can’t quite understand that given my near obsession
with food, I have a son who refuses to eat anything I prepare for lunch. I am equally distressed when I ask him
if he likes any of the lunches the other children have he says he likes Sarah’s
lunch, which turns out to be a meat pie each day. I am in a dilemma.
Do I concede defeat and give him a meat pie, or do I just give him
plastic fruit and a square meal when he returns home?
