I’d like to welcome my friend, Kerina, as my guest for this next post.
Kerina and I met in a Philosophy 1A lecture at the University of Adelaide and bonded over a shared love of indie music and girl bands that could rock out. The next year we both started writing for On Dit, the Adelaide University students’ newspaper. We were appointed Music Editors with another friend in 1995, and then elected Editors in 1996. It was when we were laying out the weekly, 80-page A3 newspaper that Kerina realised that she loved design more than words; she later retrained as a graphic designer.
Ten months ago, Kerina and her fiancé welcomed a baby boy to their family and I blogged about the importance of feeding new parents.
Here’s what Kerina has to share about her son learning how to eat.
Imagine, for a moment, an alien lands on your doorstep.
As part of explaining life on our humble planet, you introduce them to our concept of food. They’ve never felt the joy of sinking their teeth/gums/tentacles into a ripe peach. They’ve never winced at the sourness of lemon, or experienced the fire of chilli. They don’t know that bananas taste better peeled.
How do you begin to introduce the vast scope of flavours and textures for the first time, to somone for whom food is a new concept?
Ten months ago we welcomed R into our family, and five months ago we started on this journey together.
Tasting those first single-ingredient purees was a surprising experience for both of us. As adults, we take for granted the taste of most fresh produce: we see the carrot on our plate, and know how it tastes before it reaches our mouth. The expectation is well-established.
Removing these foods from their familiar state and reducing them to purees, flavours are intensified and rediscovered. Who knew zucchini coud be so sweet?
For R, hot, cold, sweet, sour and bitter are all amazing discoveries. It’s a joy to watch his expressions change as he considers each new flavour, awakening and challenging his palate. Potato is an early rejection, possibly due to the gluggy texture of the dutch creams I’ve pulverised. His biggest smiles are reserved for pears and peaches, the sweet fruits a firm favourite.
Once a week we head off to the Adelaide Central Market, where R learns about the colours, shapes and textures of food. Once home, he loves a close encounter with the harvest: examining the broccoli from every angle, gnawing his way into a banana, and shaking the carrots.
From those early purees we’ve moved on to mashed and chopped foods, as R develops the skills to deal with these new textures. His little fingers carefully corral zucchini batons and slices of apricot into his mouth… mostly. My back gets a workout retrieving errant scraps and I wonder whether we should get a dog.
Pasta, rice, meat, chicken and fish join the menu, and we begin to share meal times. He seems happiest when we eat together, although I’ve come close to swapping our meals in my sleep-deprived moments.
Wanting him to have a broad food education, it’s been a challenge incorporating foods into his diet that I’m not so keen on, like avocado. I want him to develop his own preferences and not inherit my biases.
There are many challenges still to come, for both of us. He’s yet to meet chocolate, cake and ice-cream, foods his mother is all too fond of. He’s never heard of fast food. He doesn’t know that children aren’t “supposed” to like green vegetables.
So many fantastic food experiences await. For me it is a privilege to begin this journey with him.
Kerina West is an Adelaide-based graphic designer, currently trading typography for teething rings. She believes in always reading the dessert menu first.
