I spent three weeks blending things into other things.
Cauliflower into mac and cheese. Spinach into fruit smoothies. Butternut squash into pasta sauce. Zucchini into muffins. I bought a good stick blender. I watched YouTube videos about how to make the color undetectable. I felt, briefly, like I was winning.
I was not winning.
My son ate the mac and cheese twice before announcing it tasted “weird” and pushing the bowl away. The muffins he ate for four days running, which felt like a triumph, until I remembered that the zucchini content per muffin was roughly one molecule and I was basically celebrating that my kid ate a muffin. He was never not going to eat a muffin. The smoothies he drank, but he’s always downed smoothies like it was hist job, so no change there.
The tomato sauce was the real defeat. I’d made a big batch, frozen it in portions, felt very organized about the whole thing. He took one look at the color - ever so slightly more orange than usual - said “that’s not right,” and wouldn’t touch it. I hadn’t even brought out the pasta yet. Rejected on appearance alone.
My daughter was different, and somehow worse. She’d peer at her plate like a little detective. “What’s this piece of salad?” “I can see an onion.” The second she spotted something she recognized, that was it. Plate pushed away.
So I tried getting her involved. Let her hold the stick blender, which she actually loved - she was delighted by this. Then she sat down, inspected her bowl for evidence of what she knew we’d put in it, found some, and refused to eat it.
I know why hiding vegetables is appealing. It feels like a workaround - a way to sidestep the battle entirely and quietly get nutrition into your kids without anyone suffering. A lot of parents swear by it in the picky eating groups. “My daughter has no idea there’s kale in these pancakes!” Cool. My son can detect a foreign ingredient by smell, and my daughter will cross-examine her dinner like she’s building a case. And besides - if we’re liquifying the vegetables until they’re completely undetectable, are we even getting the full benefit?
But even setting aside whether it works logistically, I’ve started to have doubts about whether it’s actually solving anything. The goal isn’t just to get vegetables into them - it’s to eventually have kids who will eat vegetables. Who will sit at a dinner table as teenagers, as adults, and not be the people who can only eat plain pasta noodles. If they never know they’re eating spinach, they never learn that spinach is something they can eat. The list of acceptable foods stays exactly as short as it is now.
Pediatric feeding specialists generally aren’t fans of the hiding approach for exactly this reason - it doesn’t build any new food acceptance, it just works around the problem. And when the hiding stops (kids get older, they notice things, some of them apparently start that at a young age), you’re back to square one.
So I’ve stopped with the blender experiments. Mostly - the smoothies I’m keeping because both of them actually drink them and it’s an easy yes.