If you have a child with food issues, or if you just like good food writing, check out this essay by Dara Moskowitz Grundahl in Minnesota Monthly. It's from last year but somehow I've missed it till now.
Dara M. G. is the best food critic in the Twin Cities, hands down. She used to write for the free weekly City Pages and now writes for Minnesota Monthly. Her reviews are always more than just a review -- I look forward to them every week. Anyway, her essay is about what happens when a food critic has children with, er, different priorities about food.
I’ve based most of my professional identity on this idea, that if you want to know what the best doughnut in town is, you simply go to 12 or 20 of the likeliest places and find the best. And you want the best, don’t you? That’s self-evident, right? Everyone wants the best. I do. Or I did. Before I got pregnant, before I had kids. Now I’ve got a one-year-old who will eat anything—shabu shabu, red curry, sand—and a three-and-a-half-year-old who will eat almost nothing. Conseqently, this food critic has learned a few things about food.
...If you read the foodie press, you’ll know it’s a point of pride among today’s parents to brag about what arcane foods their child delights in: Japanese nori paper, capers, Roquefort cheese. Ideally, the sentence you want to drop at the playground runs something like this: “Little Gabriel is such a snob, he won’t eat cassoulet with truffle oil—only real truffles. I’m going to go bankrupt!”
Not us.
This is painful. As a food critic, it destroys the dream I had when I first got pregnant, that of running around to obscure taco holes and barbecue dives with my little sidekick. More urgently, as a parent, it means I have no way to bribe him.
Read the whole thing, which includes some reviews of children's picture books about doughnuts:
Perhaps what I like so much about [children's book] Who Needs Donuts is that, aside from imagining a world in which children are unafraid of the city, it features the only professional doughnut-gatherer I’ve ever run across—besides myself.
Dara and her son-who-won't-eat take a trip through the Twin Cities in search of the best doughnut, a journey which (of course) functions beautifully as a food-critic's column. Read it -- and tell me what you think.
What a beautiful column! Thanks for mentioning it - I would have never found it on my own.
Posted by: Sheila | 06 October 2010 at 08:23 PM