“I will taste garbage, not food”

Toxins per Second (TPS) – The rate by which a child is absorbing toxic elements from putting something nasty in his or her mouth.

 

Rejection Spit Out Reflex (RSOR) – The time it takes for the muscle firing explosion to occur when your child goes into gag mode when about to taste a new food. This, of course, happens before the food enters her mouth.

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Our daughter is still subsisting on mostly white and tan foods. We have accepted this fact to some degree given we are trying to feed three other people, ourselves, and two geriatric dogs. If she wants to eat bland food, it makes our life simple. Put pasta in boiling water, wait 8 minutes and add butter. One of our geriatric dogs could make dinner for our daughter. Life is good.

It does frustrate us from time to time when we dare to introduce new foods to her. Loosely, we try and add one new food a week. A new taste, a new fruit, something to slowly expand her non-existent pallet. Interestingly enough, she will reject simple stuff like eggs or mango, but will go for what we don’t introduce that we swore would have been seen as a form of poison, like seaweed sheets and edamame. It is probably because we did not “sell” those foods to her. She was empowered to choose on her own. Good for her.

 

Her diet of bacon, seaweed, and buttered white toast makes us wonder about the food groups she is missing, but she dabbles just enough to slip in a red pepper, so I believe over time, she will be a fantastically healthy eater. This will happen, once she is out of our house, however. Therein lies our problem.

 

Just when I reached down into my gut and found the patience to not make food a war with her, I had a moment when it all came together. We took the kids to track practice and there was our bland food eater picking up random trash. That was not unusual given she loves to pick up trash and carry it home, but on this occasion I put it together that a decent percentage of that trash enters her mouth. Gleefully so. She tastes garbage as a matter of assessing its recyclability, so I told myself. She, of course, does not have the skill, so it is downright disgusting.

 

Then, days later, we asked her to try a bite of a yam, she first acted like we were putting her head in a guillotine, then, she slowly brought the “bite” sized morsel to her mouth. The velocity of her hand to her mouth was so slow that I literally saw the next day pass by. I saw my own body enter a pair of pajamas at midnight, then I woke up to a 7am alarm clock. I thought 12 hours had just elapsed, but it was only 10 seconds. 

 

Keep in mind the size of this bite rivaled the size of a dust particle falling from the overhead chandelier. Only one living creature on Earth’s planet would have registered taste from this sized bite. You guessed it. Plankton. 

 

Of course, from my guess, it was about .2 seconds BEFORE the food hit her lips that her entire face contorted like a solar flare from the sun made a direct hit on her lower jaw. The melting face, the constricting airways would have made a Salvador Dali painting look calm, wintery and predictable. 

 

But now, armed with my knowledge that this same person has repeatedly placed trash between her teeth, chewing on used scrunchies she found on the side of the football field after a solid rain, I now reject her food limitations out of mouth. 

 

I am now waiting patiently to lovingly remind her, that if you can eat directly off of the pre-school parking lot, you can take a full bite of green beans without the drama. Trust me on this one and if you do, I will sign you up for drama class. Action!

 

- Doug Glanville