eat your vegetables

When my oldest daughter was an infant, before she even had her first tooth, I started telling her to eat her vegetables. It's wasn't that I believed in that whole vegetarian lifestyle, or jumping on the healthy-living bandwagon, it was just me spouting the same parental wisdom that I had been force-fed during my formitive years.

You see, with your first infant, you tend to believe that the job is too big for you or your wife so you fall back on the only training you ever had. You find yourself channeling the 'wisdom' that was repeated over and over by your own parents. I am willing to admit, for the first time in public, that I even used the old "here comes the airplane" trick to get her to eat something healthy.

When she started making her own choices at the dinner table, I was happy to see her choose a variety of foods including meats. So, she had a fairly common childhood culinary experience. Lots of chicken nuggets, fingers, dinosaurs, and whatever other shapes they make out of breaded chicken. I can remember her enjoying steaks, burgers and bar-b-que ribs. She had other things too, including as many vegetables as we could coax into her.

Now that she has become a teenage vegetarian, I don't know why she has made such a dramatic change in her diet and forsaken all that I revere. Maybe it just took her a while to make that beef-cow connection.

I also blame Chik-fil-a. Their bovine-centric promotional engine is beginning to disturb the sacred tenets of our fast food culture. Sure the cows are fun, a little bit in your face, and from a marketing point of view, I like how they present their message. However benign they may appear, these cows and their radical ideas have the kids all confused on the issue of proper nutrition.

Just for fun, I'd like to see Ronald McDonald take the gloves off and come out swinging at those Chik-fil-a cows. (Theme from Rocky; up and under) Ronald throws his white clown gloves to the ground and pulls the headpiece from a giant chicken costume over his clown hair.

Next we see Ronald bust down the doors of a neighborhood Chick-fil-a store. There's a crazed look in his eye and he's weilding a slaughterhouse-grade chainsaw. "I SAY IT'S TIME FOR MORE BEEF!"

(Boy that was a sidebar out of control. That's on the house folks. No extra charge.)

I don't know what my daughter's motivation is, but she has spent the past few months living as a vegetarian. My understanding is, if she decides to make this a permanent change, there are renegade vegan doctors who will do back-alley sugery to remove all of her remaining taste buds thus completing the transformation.

I am not opposed to this new cult she has joined. I even support her by trying to pick up vegetarian entrees at the grocery. On a recent trip I selected a box of something from the vegetarian section of the frozen food aisle. I don't know what it was because it seems that all of these dishes can only be labeled with foreign words. Masalababba Stew, Kee Moa Tofu, Couscous Papoose. None of that sounded American to me and there was no one to translate for me.

In the real food world, the package photography is created to entice you to purchase. It is supposed to appeal to your sense of taste. In the vegan world, all of the product shots look like pigeon puke on a sidewalk. I don't know if that imagery appeals to vegetarians or if the producers don't spend enough on professional product photography.

My daughter is sensible so I'm not too worried about her. In a little more than a year, she'll be starting to pack for college. Like it or not, I have to get used to her making her own decisions.

Just so there's no confusion, I am a meat and potatoes guy. I think I was probably thirty-five before I first visited a salad bar. I have nothing against vegetables, but to me, they are little more than a colorful decoration over on the far side of the plate.

Like a reformed smoker, my daughter tries to encourage me to develop a taste for hummus. For my part, I try not to watch her eat "burgers" shaped from vegetable matter. I just have one question. If it's so good, why do they try so hard to make it look like meat?