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One of my constant parental fears is that my child will become one of those kids, the picky eaters who refuse to eat any food other than one particular brand of chicken fingers (bathed, of course, in ketchup), graham crackers and gum. I’m not sure if this is just my paranoia that he would starve to death in the event of an apocalypse, my vanity in wanting to look like a good parent through the exemplary behaviour of my child, or simply my impatience with the kind of high maintenance parenting required by such restrictions. Probably a bit of all of the above.

Experts on kids and nutrition know that the best way to get kids to eat a healthy and varied menu is to involve them hands-on in the process of food preparation, and to expose them to lots of wholesome options instead of just junk.

To this end, at home we (and by we I mean my husband, who does almost all of the meal planning, grocery shopping and meal preparation) try to involve Jack in the food process. When Stephen takes him to the grocery store, he often takes time to point out various fruits and vegetables and invites him to examine the more interesting and unusual varieties. Junior loves to get his hands all over the produce at the No Frills, pointing out that ginger root and avocados are “Bumpy!” and that a pineapple feels “Sharp!” and that lemons taste “Sour!” This is a good reason why you should always wash your produce.

Whenever one of us is cooking dinner, Junior just can't keep out of the kitchen. He’s always underfoot, demanding to “Take a ‘ook! Want to see it!” We usually pick him up and show him the pot of rice, or cut-up vegetables, or whatever’s on the stove, along with a little cooking show explanation. Few meals get made in our house without his supervision.

Whether by luck or parental effort, Jack seems to be a pretty good eater, knock on wood, eating pretty much anything and everything we put on his plate. Breakfast can be a little bit touch and go, where he’ll either eat everything on his plate as well as some from ours, or he won’t touch a thing. With lunch and dinner, however, he’s game for basically anything, and often surprises me with how much he’ll pack away.

Junior also seems to have developed a healthy taste for spicy, salty, and sour things, eating curry, lemons and capers. He will literally beg if he sees olives. This makes things very easy when we go out to a restaurant, not having to worry about what he will or will not eat.

Perhaps because of this, I was a bit disappointed when we went to the Pickle Barrel in the Atrium on Bay for lunch a few weeks ago. They have a giant sign at the front door boasting special menu items developed by high-end caterer Rose Reisman to provide more healthy alternatives and use local ingredients. Great idea.

Their kids menu, however, features nothing but the same old fattening and deep fried standards: chicken fingers, grilled cheese, mac and cheese and hamburgers. There is an option of substituting a fruit kebob for the fries that normally accompany almost all of the dishes, but that's not much comfort when paired with a grilled cheese sandwich consisting of processed cheese on white bread.

Would Rose Reisman feed that to her own children?

According to the regular menu descriptions, the Pickle Barrel is proud to serve their other sandwiches on a wide variety of breads, and offer different types of cheeses. Why the double standard? Do the vast majority of children really only eat bland, greasy, colourless food? Maybe the better question is, Does our society really think that kids will only eat the cheapest and least healthy food available and therefore that’s all we’ll offer them?

I keep threatening to send an email to the Pickle Barrel, and ask them to consider providing some different options for their smallest diners. At the very least, they need to modify the ingredients in the “children’s classics,” but what about offering half-sized portions of regular menu items? Jack would happily eat almost anything on the menu, and in fact did eat a fair bit of my spinach salad and smoked salmon with cream cheese and capers on rye. I’m not willing to purchase him an entire adult entrée if he’ll only eat a third to half of it, but I would happily order a half-size portion.

This is partly why we love eating at Indian restaurants. In most cases, Indian buffet is free for kids under 2, so we can load up his plate with a healthy variety of vegetables, meat and rice in sensible portions and just pay for ourselves. Jack also gets to make a mess of himself and appreciate another culture.

Attempting to give our “vegetable appreciation” efforts a little local focus, I showed Junior the chives that came up in our yard and asked him to give them a sniff and see if they smelled like onions. He gleefully yanked one out of the ground and vigorously smelled it, agreeing it was “‘ike a onion.”

Although I should have known better, I was still taken by surprise when a few days later, he came inside from being out in the garden with his dad and sneezed out a half-inch long green shoot, which he promptly sniffed back up his nose without even noticing. After about five minutes of concerted effort, I did manage to get him to blow it, and now we try to sniff garden items from a little bit further away.

I feel good about our efforts to raise a healthy eater, but I do realize that there will come a time, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, when most of Junior’s waking hours will be devoted to finding and eating candy. We’ll do our best to put it all in perspective, and hope that his early tastes for colourful, textured and flavourful food will help to keep that in check. At the very least, I hope that he’ll share his candy with me.