Help Your Daughter to Cultivate a Healthy Relationship with Food
Resolve your own issues, encourage good habits, and introduce her to the joys of growing, cooking, and eating food without guilt.
For me, food has never been just a means to an end. Even if scientists invent the perfect food in capsule form, I will always crave various flavors, textures, and appearances of different kinds of food. In fact, I gasped in shock when I first read of Silicon Valley techies chugging liquid meals because they were too busy to eat real food. Horrifying!
As a child, I was fascinated with the food I saw on TV. Instead of home-cooked Chinese food, which my immigrant mother made fresh for us, I saw that kids on TV were happily chowing down on bowls of cereal swimming in milk and Chef Boyardee’s Spaghetti-Os. I begged my mom to buy those for me. I can’t say I was impressed once I tried them, but that was the start of my lifelong passion for trying new foods.
When I started pre-school, I was introduced to other novel foods. Peanut butter had a strange stickiness to it. Sliced American cheese had a slippery texture to it. Tuna fish salad sandwiches smelled funny. But I happily indulged in new foods whenever friends offered them. By elementary school, some called me the human garbage disposal — I happily ate kids’ leftover lunches after eating my own and thought it…
