Food Labels and School Lunches

For the past month or so, Ben has had an obsession with reading food labels.

Lately, he’s been checking every package he gets his hands on.  I’ve caught him going through our cupboards, rummaging through the refrigerator, checking cans, packages, boxes and bags.  Even at the store, he will examine the labels on packaged foods to determine if it’s too close or past the expiry date.

This annoys the living crap out of Jerry and me.  We’d like to think that we are being careful, and, supposedly, checking the food is our job anyway, but no; it doesn’t seem that we exercise enough discretion (according to Ben).

Interestingly enough, he does this at school too, and has caught lunchroom people trying to pass off expired food at the lunch line.   As a matter of fact, Ben got so irritated this past Friday that he didn’t even eat lunch at school.  He told me Friday night that he was never eating a school lunch again.

This is odd for him, strangely enough.  Ben has never been a very picky eater.  As a baby, he pretty much ate everything I fed him.  Of course he had his favorite things, but was pretty much happy with whatever we stuck in front of him.  Just as a rule, I served him foods that I liked, bypassing those things that I didn’t care for.  My mother chimed in and said that it wasn’t fair to him; he might like lima beans, cauliflower and eggplant.  So, I gave a broader range of choices hoping that my son would be a little more open-minded than me about foods like those.

Nope, not even close…

Now, it’s never really a fight at dinner time, except when it comes to vegetables; although sautéed onions, baked potatoes, and canned green beans are not seemingly controversial.  Those items are not in the “icky vegetable category”.  In addition, carrot sticks and sliced cucumbers also rank as being acceptable vegetables.  That pretty much leaves everything else on the icky list.  In addition, according to Ben, ketchup qualifies as a serving of vegetables, tomatoes does not.  Reasoning won’t help.  I tell him that ketchup is made from tomatoes.  He looks at me, incredulously, wrinkles his nose and says "EWWW... GROSS!!!"

Mind you, this is a kid that, until about a year ago, wouldn’t even eat French fries.

So I suppose there may be hope for him after all.