More blanket pronunciations from everyone’s favorite local news rag 
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I’ve told this story before but its hopefully worth repeating
One of my nephews is half Spanish and spent in his early years in that country. When he’d visit us, aged around four, we’d take him to the supermarket and say he could have any one thing to take home to eat. Not expecting him to head straight for the fish counter and ask for whitebait (which he’s eat with ketchup - cos he was four after all). And, back in Mallorca, if the family went out to a restaurant, these were places that didnt have “kids menus”, so he’d be eating a small portion of whatever from the menu. And, now, as an adult, he’s always enjoyed a wide range of foods or, at least, is willing to try them.
Such a contrast to my niece, who spent her early teen years living in the States, eating the sort of food described in the article. And it’s stuck with her into adulthood.
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Ima sound like the proverbial old lady telling kids to get off my lawn (I don’t — I actually installed a ginormous neon sign in front of our house instead) but BACK IN THE DAY, i.e. 70s & 80s in Germany there was no such thing as a kids menu at restaurants. “Kids food” was McDonald’s maybe, for the very occasional indulgence, which may inform my view of the food there still 
My divorced mom working FT made dinner at night, and it was et. Helps that she was a decent cook, and I was willing to try pretty much anything at least once.
I discovered my love for various seafoods during summer vacations in Greece well before finding out about sweetbreads at my first fancy restaurant meal at the age of 12. Still a favorite.
I get that parents just want their kids to be fed, and often don’t have the patience for endless arguments over dinner. I certainly wouldn’t, but my lack of patience is a major reason for remaining blissfully childless.
But can’t we give the people-in-the-making a little more credit with regard to their innocent palates and go beyond chicken fingers, fries, mac & cheese, etc?
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this wasn’t a thing in my family as i was growing up. being a picky eater often times equated to hunger. one family meal was prepared for all in the house… you either ate it or didn’t, but there were no arguments over dinner.
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I grew up with a father used to trying different cultural foods in his extensive film travels (as well as him having been born and living in China for the first 18 years of his life).
So he always brought home ideas to try new things from those trips if he could get the ingredients to make a dish (not always likely in suburban northern NJ in the 60s and 70s), he’d make a reasonable facsimile of what he had eaten while traveling. Perhaps what we tried was not as culturally broad as is available now, but we had to at least TRY new things (as long as they weren’t blazingly spicy-hot). Sometimes they clicked, sometimes they didn’t…but we tried them. Satay was my favorite. No one I knew growing up in white bread NJ had even heard of it much less tried it. Still a favorite, even though I know the recipe is a good bit less authentic to what I’d be served in Indonesia.
Same thing for eating out in restaurants. We chose from a single menu, often going for something we’d never had before (or tasting a bite from Dad’s plate, such as squid or octopus). The idea of chicken fingers and fries was foreign to me growing up…unless we went to a fast food restaurant (which almost NEVER happened!).
We did have snacks and sweets at home, but not an overwhelming lot of processed foods.
Ours was a “take all you want, but eat all you take” family-style meal presentation. And if you didn’t like it? Well, you still had to eat it so it didn’t go to waste.
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i grew up in poverty - very, very, very little food was wasted. my mind boggles when i hear how much edible food gets wasted here in the USA nowadays.
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It’s absolutely stunning. TBH I’ve still not gotten over our Thxgiving hosts wanting to toss the turkey carcass in the garbage 
I’m so glad I rescued it, and it made for wonderful stock for many meals to come.
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i know talking about food waste is sorta sidetracking the topic, but…
i did a work gig from 2015-2020 at a big box store - first keeping all the electronics working, then managing the front end (cashiers and customer service), and finally working the cash office. the management job was the worst because i was expected to treat the folks who reported to me like shit so that profits could be maximized
anyway, in the back of the store they had this area called “the hole” which was an industrial sized trash compactor. soooooooo much perfectly good food was put in it daily… on the books it was called shrink & written off as the cost of doing business. corporate would not allow the food to be donated & would not allow employees to have it, even for $$. hundreds to thousands of dollars of food wasted each and every day. it was sickening.
OK, stupid question, perhaps, but… why was there so much food in “the hole,” this being an electronics store? Was it all lunch leftovers or?
It hurts my heart. I’m a singleton, but I often cook as if I’m feeding 3-4. I feed my freezer for easy(ier) meals at a later date. If I make something with a sauce and don’t eat it all or it’s too much for the leftovers? I freeze it on its own for later use for a single dinner. I currently have 1.25 cups of extra cacciatore sauce that didn’t go into the Chicken Cacciatore container I packed up for my sister and BIL, 2 half cup containers of fresh tomato sauce, 1 cup each of chicken and lamb gravies, 1 cup of mashed sweet potatoes, 4 half cups of pork stock, Parm-Reg rinds for sauce or soups, small 2 Tbsp containers of pesto, caramelized onions, roasted garlic…
I know leftovers, know how to use them and I gladly eat them.
Sorry this got off track, @linguafood .
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Thread drift. It happens. Just like natural flow in a convo.
Also my PIC is eternally amused at my saving leftovers that I move into successively smaller dishes 
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it wasn’t just an electronic store… it was a “big box” - think Walmart like in size & functionality. Walmart sell more groceries than any other grocer in the USA. the folks i worked for were regional, not international, but the business model is the same.
re: electronics in the store - yes they had an electronic department, but my job in systems covered all of the computers & networking needed to run the place, plus checkout lanes (self-checkout & human staffed), plus all the stuff in the pharmacy needed to keep them connected, plus the multiscreen 8K advertising thingie they had in the middle of the store, etc., etc.
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Gotcha. Reread your comment and missed the big box part. I don’t tend to shop at these places if I can avoid it.
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I worked in fast food as a teen, and leftover food was supposed to be thrown out at the end of the shift. The official reason was that management didn’t want us making a lot of burgers five minutes before closing, knowing they would not be sold, with the intent of taking them home.
