Hunter-Gatherer Gene

It is very difficult to entice Ethan to try food that isn't apple sauce or cheese based. Ethan loves mac n cheese, yogurt, grilled cheese, apple sauce, bananas, cheerios, and pears, but that's it. Trying to get him to eat a vegetable is torture for all. Try to get him to eat meat and he just scrapes it off his tongue. Soup with vegetables gets the mouth clamped shut and head turned aside. He's got all sorts of methods to avoid the food he doesn't like and we have a couple of tricks to get him to eat.

The bizarre thing is is that he will eat food off the floor that he tossed there in an attempt to study gravity and/or feed Aida. For example, today I tried to feed him carrots, green beans, corn, chicken, and noodles (better known as chicken noodle soup). I even mixed his beloved cheerios in on his tray in the hopes that the vegetables would find a way into his mouth. No way. He picked out the offending food items and dropped them onto the floor. Not even Aida was willing to eat the carrots that fell. So we struggled through lunch. I then cleaned him up and put him on the floor, so that I could begin to clean up the slop pit that was once my kitchen floor. The next thing I know he's picking up carrots and eating them off the floor. I let him, because I was just thrilled he was eating a vegetable.

As I watched him eat the food he discarded, all I could think is that the hunter-gatherer gene must be pretty strong, if it could cause a little 10 almost 11 month old boy to search and eat food generally considered to be gross by him. All I can say is thank you natural selection for leaving that gene in there!