Vegging Out
Written By Ann Hodgman
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Your kids — who barely eat what's on their plate normally — decide they want to be vegetarians. Time to explore "greener" pastures.
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"What's this?" my 5-year-old niece Melanie asked at the dinner table a couple of years ago, holding up a chicken bone for her parents to see.
Like those where-do-babies-come-from questions your kids ask in the supermarket checkout line, this came out of nowhere. Melanie had been eating chicken for — well — most of her life without noticing the bones. And although you can sort of finesse the "babies" question, there's no way to do that with a chicken bone. On hearing the origins of her drumstick, Melanie burst into tears. "I don't want to eat anything that's been killed!" she wailed. From that meal on, she's been a vegetarian.
Back in my olden-days childhood, parents would never have let a kindergartener convert to vegetarianism. Parents in those days tended to believe that only meat counted as real protein, and children weren't supposed to dictate the terms of what was served at meals. (Whether they actually ate the food on their plates is another question, as we all know.) But things are different now, and I'm glad. So if a child, even a young child, decides to boycott "food with a face," many parents will support her choice. My sister-in-law (Melanie's mom), for instance, had been trying for years to get her Midwest-raised, barbecue-basted husband to cut down on meat. Now, she felt, she'd been handed a great way to do it.
Each of my own kids became a temporary vegetarian at about the age of 4. My daughter was an animal lover seemingly from birth and resisted eating meat from the instant she learned its source. Her younger brother, I suspect, kept her example in mind and pulled it out a couple of years later on a night he didn't like whatever main course was on the table. Both times, I made only one rule: They couldn't be tyrants about it. I told my kids they couldn't refuse meat when they were guests at friends' or relatives' houses. No staring down at a plate and saying, "I won't eat this!" at someone else's table. They didn't have to eat meat, but they couldn't talk about not eating it. It's rude enough when adults do this; it's intolerable when a small child tries it.
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