When Food Isn't the Final Frontier (Calgary Herald Article Dec. 15, 2008)

Getting kids to eat exotic foods might just be a case of playingfollow-the-leader
Iwas torn. Should I fork out the $25 for the seafood main the nine-yearold was contemplating for lunch? After all, children can be a fickle crowd. They order, push the food around, crawl under the table, complain the food is gross and then spend the next 48 hours living off the cracker crumbs they find in the creases of their car seat.

Yet, there sat my son’s friend, trying to decide between the mussels and the crab legs.
This was one of our favourite restaurants, a Greek place close to the Natural Science Museum in Houston, and I’d had the $8 souvlaki in mind: a pita sandwich with pork smothered in tahini sauce and sliced cucumbers and onions. But Alejandro was hungry for something from the sea . . .
Of course, I knew this boy would be adventurous. Alejandro Lorente Jordan is my son Charlie’s Spanish friend, whom we’d met because our families are transient residents, together temporarily in the same city in the southern states.
Initially, I’d worried about my two boys succumbing to the pervasive fast food culture here, yet — happily — they instead clung tighter to their upbringing, labelling lunches “Canadian food” whenever their classmates recoiled in horror.
But take a back seat, Canadian food. You pale in comparison to the Spanish lunches Alejandro packs.
This little ray of Spanish sunshine sauntered into my life with a half-grin, unlaced sneakers and a tolerance for mussels, eel, lamb and caviar, all of which he tucks back with a devil-may-care attitude. So developed is his palate that he was able to identify Grand Marnier as the flavour in my Thanksgiving sugar cookies.
Of course, Charlie doesn’t adore this friend for his surprising taste in food. He likes Alejandro for his playful spirit. The two of them work up their appetite by sword fighting or creating new worlds from Lego — but it is Alejandro’s appetite, and how he feeds it, that thrills me.
My desire to feed my own family well has always included others, both young and old, and I often take it personally if I fail in nourishing everyone at the table. I come by this honestly.
My own mother, an excellent cook with Eastern European roots, demonstrates her love through cooking and will actually lose a night’s sleep if dinner guests don’t completely lick their plates clean. (Don’t they know it’s not the extra calories but her love they are rejecting?)
Thus, I hold strong affection for this young man because he not only eats without issue, he’s leading my son into a whole new culinary world.
After we spent our afternoon at the science museum, the boys regained their strength by sharing a box of sour-creamflavoured crickets from the vending machine.
This is not an unusual leap for a boy who routinely eats escargot, electric eel and, for breakfast, smoked salmon with extra-virgin olive oil, lemon and sea salt.
After a decade of trying to please the under-10 crowd with the right kind of cheese (sliced, not grated), apples (red, then peeled), bread (no seeds), tacos (yes, but deconstructed) — and failing miserably time and time again — this kind of adventure fills me with glee.
Recently, we joined Alejandro’s mother, Alexandra Jordan, and his younger sister, Andrea, at one of their favourite Japanese restaurants. It was well after 10 p.m. and our two families sat languidly around the table with bits of sushi, pickled ginger and wasabi left on otherwise empty plates. The children had ordered and eaten eel, tofu and cucumber rolls and were entertaining themselves noisily as nine-year-olds do while we finished our wine.
“This is the European way of eating,” Alexandra tells me. “Where children are part of the affair, where the late-night hour doesn’t matter, but where food, wine and friendship does.”
Yes, but how do you get him to eat such exotic fare?
Seafood is the norm in Spain, she explains, and Spanish culture embraces good, healthy food.
In the schools, lunches are hearty and lunch breaks run 2½ hours. There, the students eat three-course lunches: soup, followed by a main dish that’s often paella or lamb with a vegetable, and then fruit.
As the years progress, I imagine Charlie and Alejandro’s love of sword fighting will wane, but I hope their love of sharing good food grows.
There are plans to meet again in their hometown of Madrid and also in the bodega of Alejandro’s grandparents in the city of Tarija, Bolivia, where the boys’ friendship will continue with the promise of more good food.
In the meantime, we’re grateful for the follow-theleader example Alejandro and his family have given ours. In celebration, Alejandro’s mom offers the recipe above, for garlic shrimp. It’s Alejandro’s favourite hot lunch.