Educated Tastes: Food, Drink, and Connoisseur Culture

1. Feeding Finn

3 Feeding Finn lisa harper I wanted to raise my children with taste—to have taste, that is, good taste in food. And unlike many stories of boy-meets-beet, the story begins well. Like any perfectly reasonable child, my son, Finn, began to eat free from incident or trauma. From birth, there was nothing extraordinary about what or how he ate. Unlike his older sister, Ella, who ate desperately and heartily, then proceeded to spit up with gusto, Finn nursed contentedly until he was sated, then occupied himself with other important matters: sleeping, pooping, grabbing for his feet, gazing steadily at his spinning mobile, and so on. Food and feeding were necessary and rhythmical parts of his day—neither fraught nor especially craved. In the general scheme of things, babies are offered so-called solid food somewhere around four to six months of age, and so, somewhere in this period, like most other Western mothers , I bought a small cardboard box of baby rice cereal. My box was organic and adorned with a pastoral picture of a babe in a wheat field, even though I had been raised contentedly on the more ubiquitous brand that came in a bright green box. I mixed the cereal into a thin gruel with a little warmed breast milk and Chapter One 4 Learning to Taste offered it to my son. The runny goop dripped and drooled out of his mouth and generally baffled him (as it does many children), but he steadily mastered the task, and very soon he was opening his maw eagerly for the sustenance his three-year-old sister and I spooned into his mouth. Spoon, chair—those first real props of culinary culture—these became constant and stable elements in his life, as familiar as breast and lap. The gruel became a paste, then a porridge. He learned to eat, which at its most fundamental level involves basic physiology and no more. But in the natural progression of things, as soon as the art of swallowing was a sure thing, we offered Finn his first “solid” food, and the fun began. In our house, this first food was a bowl of sweet lacinato kale, freshly steamed and pureed. This, too, went well enough. If he was not as gleeful and eager as his sister had been to confront a small bowl of bright green mush, he was still grateful for it and ate steadily, first the kale, then the spinach, then everything else I put in front of him. Some days I thickened the vegetables with more of the grain cereal, other days it was served straight up. Over the coming months, Finn was introduced to the garden of produce eaten by his sister, his father, and me. He ate, without complaint, green beans, broccoli, freshly hulled peas, a colorful array of rainbow chard. He ate beans: smashed favas, white and black and cranberry. He ate a full range of root vegetables: carrots , beets, yams, potatoes. He ate butternut and delicata squashes. Corn was nearly as good as dessert to him, and when berries came into season, I couldn’t keep enough in the house—golden and red raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, olallieberries, blueberries. The same could be said for any fruit: bananas, oranges, and apples, which he ate with such fervor they might as well have been candy. He progressed easily from purees, to mashes, to soft solid foods. Unlike many other children, he had no aversions to texture. Our family food culture is a rich and healthy one, and our location in the world makes it almost embarrassingly easy to sustain. Feeding Finn 5 We live in northern California, where the culture at large is mildly food obsessed. Every third person seems to write a food blog, or know someone who does, or reads one or two regularly. Many people cook regularly and well. Going to a restaurant can be an event, and we have as many excellent mom-and-pop joints as we do meccas of fine dining. It’s possible to get all kinds of international ingredients in our big-box markets as well as in the specialty stores that proliferate in our area. It’s not New York City, but within a fifteen-minute drive of our suburban home, we can easily source authentic Japanese, Indian, Arab, Mexican, Chinese, Latin, Hawaiian, and even the more obscure Mediterranean ingredients. And, most important to...