Is tricking picky eaters right?

Their reaction was utter disgust. The cauliflower puree I’d hoped I could pass off as mashed potatoes was met with faces twisted beyond recognition. No amount of chopped chives or pats of butter tipped the scales in my favor.

“Ewww!” screeched my daughter, age 8.

“This tastes funny!” added my five-year-old son, eyes squinting and teeth gritted from the horror of it all. My two-year-old’s spoonful forced his tongue to protrude and his head to shake back and forth violently.

I listened to my own dopey reaction.

“C’mon! It’s good! It tastes just like mashed potatoes. It’s just cauliflower, and we like cauliflower.”

That, of course, was the problem. We don’t like cauliflower, especially when it’s posing. I had let myself subscribe to a school of thought among parents that you can get children to eat the foods they normally won’t through a culinary bait-and-switch, and it had flopped. But the trend is growing in popularity. The best-selling Sneaky Chef cookbook series, for example, weaves healthy purees concocted from so-called yucky foods like spinach, beets and sweet potatoes into palatable forms like muffins and cupcakes.

But shouldn’t we aim a little higher? In hindsight, foisting cauliflower in the spirit of trickery was a terrible idea that resulted in me tainting my children’s opinion of both cauliflower and mashed potatoes. About the spuds, I felt particularly bad. I’d taken a beloved substance worshipped by adults and children alike and introduced something awful into it: doubt.

Not heeding my own advice, I tricked them again, successfully this time. I used an Ellie Krieger recipe that integrates butternut squash into macaroni and cheese, which yielded a vibrant orange, creamy version that was loads healthier. They lapped it up, and though I was delighted to see them get so many nutrients, I questioned my integrity once again. They might have actually eaten butternut squash if I’d fed it to them directly.

Children need better diets, there’s no debating that. And a picky eater can cause real problems for busy parents. But is the solution to make the foods they consider gross disappear, or did we mess up early on, assuming they wouldn’t enjoy them?