| Brow Beat Dinner vs. Child: Peas, Please! By Nicholas Day
Posted Friday, May 24, 2013, at 01:02 PM ET  Dinner vs. Child is a biweekly column about cooking for children, and with children, and despite children, originally published in Food52 and now appearing on Brow Beat. You can read previous installments of Dinner vs. Child here. You can read Day's Slate blog about infancy, How Babies Work, here. This week: How peas got a bad rap. Why do children have to eat their peas? As in: eat your peas. There is, after all, no vegetable that requires less inducement to eat than peas.
I have a clear memory of Isaiah, at almost three, mowing down a row of sweet peas with the methodical rigor of someone who has stumbled upon something good and is determined to extract every last bit of pleasure from it: snap, chew, step. I remember being worried that he would eat all the sweet peas. (I am a horrible, selfish parent.) I remember that he basically did.
This wasn't because he was an especially good eater, or because he especially liked to eat vegetables out of the garden. It was because he'd discovered we were growing dessert. Sweet peas are the original county-fair, outer-space, Dippin-Dots ice cream. So why is eating peas a chore? Because during the age of canned goods, peas became less vegetable and more metaphor. This made sense: they actually were less vegetable. As Alan Davidson writes, dryly, "Most kinds of canned peas bear little resemblance to the fresh vegetable and may be considered a separate food item."
Peas ... To continue reading, click here.
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