The eating patterns of young kids are like snowstorm forecasts: unreliable and prone to changing from hour to hour. For a short period of time when my oldest son was a toddler, I could smugly say things like, “Well my toddler likes roasted Brussels sprouts.” Then he reached preschool, and Brussels sprouts? Ha! White rice? Might as well be asking him to consume liver tartare. My second kid had a similar shrinking palate. I tried a lot of the usual recommendations — having the kids help prep meals, preparing little sandwiches that somewhat resembled owls, begging. But nothing worked all that well and dinner often felt like I was on Top Chef, except the judges were small, unreasonable, and only wanted dino nuggets.
A couple of years into this struggle, when my kids were aged 3 and 5, I was indulging in one of my favorite pastimes (Googling “picky eating ideas kids”), and I stumbled on these Genuine Fred Dinner Winner Kids dinner plates. The cheery themed plates offer a Candyland-like path for different foods and a dessert prize at the end that can be hidden under a lid. I was skeptical that the plates would help, but they had several positive reviews and I thought my Mario Kart–playing kids might like the gamification of mealtime, so I bought two. To my surprise, it worked. The plates got both of my kids to eat and sit at the table for longer than two minutes.
The plates worked where others hadn’t, as they offered small portions that didn’t feel overwhelming to my selective eaters, and perhaps more importantly, the different sections didn’t violate the first rule of the picky-kid eating club: You do not eat different food items that touch each other. The dessert prize at the end also doesn’t hurt. I learned to put a mix of foods that I knew my kids would eat (like watermelon and bits of chicken) in with just one or two unfamiliar items (like edamame and leftover noodles). I also realized that burying the new items somewhere in the middle of the plate worked better than placing them in the first position. If I was going to get my preschooler to try kale, he first required an amuse-bouche of fish-shaped crackers.
There have been some mishaps along the way. I once placed ranch dressing in a section of the plate for my youngest to dip his carrots into, because he had previously eaten ranch. But unbeknownst to me, some sort of ranch-dressing-related trauma had recently befallen him and he refused to eat anything on the plate, so we had to wash it off and start again. The superhero and pirate-themed plates I initially bought also structured the paths so that the dessert prize was at opposite ends, so I would often accidentally place the dessert in the starting spot of one of them. But that problem was remedied when I bought a third dinosaur-themed plate that mirrored the same path as the superhero one. It’s been six years since I first bought these plates, and though we’ve long since lost the dessert lids to the black hole that is our kitchen cabinet, my kids (aged 9 and 11, now) still ask for the path plates (as we have come to call them) for lunch sometimes. Sometimes they even eat Brussels sprouts.
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