Eat That Junior Asparagus

Food as a Gift, Not a Torment

We required our toddler to swallow at least one tiny bit of vegetable per dinner. Eating two green beans wasn’t a big deal. But one day it was asparagus. One spear of asparagus.

“It’s just like Junior Asparagus in Veggie Tales,” I said, cheering him on.

But still the little guy struggled and gagged, and a limp green stem dangled from his bottom lip down his chin. When he’d finished, he said sadly, “Junior Asparagus jumped right out of my mouth.”

A vegetable per day is a great idea in theory, but that was probably the worst vegetable to insist on. The stalks can be tough, stringy and choke-able for adult throats, never mind tiny child throats.

Nonetheless, I didn’t regret cajoling him about food until the night I bugged him to finish his meatloaf so we could bike to the ice cream store. By now, he was seven years old. He’d always been an easygoing, cooperative child. So, he forced the meatloaf down and promptly puked.

I rushed to him and threw my arms around him, filled with regret.

Then a little lisp from my tiny daughter: “That wuth totally gross.” Her face was spattered with her brother’s half-digested potato, broccoli, and meatloaf.

Understandably, my son couldn’t bear to eat meatloaf afterward, so we made a new rule. Each child could pick two things they didn’t have to eat. And when they couldn’t finish their food, we shut up about it. It saved so many idiotic wrestling matches.

It was absurd that it took me so long. As adults, we’d long enjoyed the liberty of forgoing certain foods. I refused to eat hotdogs and pizza. My husband found a way to be out of town when I cooked lentils for dinner. And my dad, of the WWII-and-tulip-bulb-eating era, wouldn’t go near yogurt, ketchup, or mayonnaise.

As an adult, some days I'm ravenous while other days I feel painfully full on half the amount. Sometimes, I’ll save the leftovers for my next meal, but if it’s a bowl of soggy cereal, I would never force myself to eat it hours later.

So why do I put burdens on children that are more than they can bear?

Sabbath

Jesus created so many loaves and fishes that there were twelve baskets of leftovers. He offers abundance, more than we need. It’s hard to imagine him shoving those leftovers down people’s throats.

Food was made for man, not man for food. Like the Sabbath, it’s a gift. It’s tragic to make legalistic rules that strangle all the joy out of Sabbath or out of our family mealtimes. An ox can be pulled from a well on the Sabbath. A leper can be healed on the Sabbath. And Dad can finish the meatloaf that the poor kid can’t finish.

I believed it was a terrible sin to leave food on one’s plate. But it’s not in the Ten Commandments. There’s not a command in the whole Bible that says, “Thou shalt finish every bite of thy dinner.”

Insisting my child not waste food was hypocritical anyway. As a free adult, I pitched corn bread that I’d left to grow furry with mold. I gave away a water purifier I decided I didn’t need after all. I wasted gas when I'd forgotten something from the grocery store. And I donated clothes that didn’t look good on me the way they’d looked at the mall.

Grace to Laugh

One morning, I woke up and found two packages of raw chicken I'd left on the workbench beside the freezer twenty-four hours earlier. I texted my sister: “Do you think we'd get sick if I made chicken soup and boiled it for five hours?”

“I wouldn’t,” she replied. “I suggest you leave it on the workbench for another three or four days. Then you won’t feel so guilty throwing it out.”

If only we could laugh at ourselves and not be harsh. Yes, we must do a lot better cutting back our horrific consumer waste. We must be frugal and live simpler lives. But we also need grace for being human. God has compassion on us, “for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.”

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