The Girl Who Ate White Food

Once upon a time in Colombia I had a step-daughter who preferred to eat foods that were mostly white. She drank milk and ate quesito, which is a popular semi-soft cheese in Colombia; vanilla ice cream, and other dairy products; arepas, which are a tortilla-like staple of the Colombian diet; white bread; bananas; chicken white meat; potatoes; rice; pasta; mayonnaise; and fish. She wouldn't eat cauliflower because it was obviously from a plant, and plants were to be avoided at all costs. Avoiding plants, in ten-year-old logic, may have been her reason for eating only white food.

Yet she loved ketchup—for its sweetness, I'm sure. In Spanish the phrase for ketchup is salsa de tomate, sauce of tomato or tomato sauce, but not to be confused with the tomato purée that comes in cans and gets used in Italian cooking and meatloaf. Mentally, salsa de tomate serves as an integral word for what we call ketchup. By integral word I mean that we say it without picking it apart into its component parts—we don't hear sauce or tomato, we just hear a word like you hear ketchup.

I tried unsuccessfully for years to persuade my step-daughter to try a slice of tomato, for it seemed to me—tomatoes being so high on the evolutionary scale that they almost talk—if she tried one slice, she'd try another, for who could begin and end the inevitable enchantment of tomatoes in only one bite? This one particular night we were eating some meat that was appropriate for ketchup, so I asked her just from what she thought salsa de tomate was made. I pronounced each part of the world separately: Salsa. De. Tomate. I saw the penny drop in her face as she parsed the phrase... So of course that didn't persuade her to try tomato either, but it certainly dissuaded her from eating ketchup.

One night not much after that I peeled and sliced an eggplant. I dipped each slice in milk and egg then rolled it in corn meal and fried it. Deep-fried corn-meal-crusted things are irresistible to almost anyone, including my step-daughter. I lied and told her they were fish. She ate one. She didn't put ketchup on it, but she did ask for another slice.

By the way, I found a really good book about kids and picky eating. Its French attitude toward food might be helpful to adults as well. Somewhere in this book, for example, you'll find the answer to the so-called French paradox—how can French people eat the way they do without getting fat? Yet hidden here also is a wonderful bit of philosophy, for food lies near the center of happiness, so why not learn how the best epicureans in the world approach food for the greatest happiness. And