I’ve also read that a toddler’s aversion to vegetables and fruits is actually a survival mechanism to avoid ingesting toxic plants.

I have come to the conclusion that taste is a matter of personality. My son has a sweet tooth and prefers foods that are sweeter and carbohydrates. I have had to learn to work with that. He doesn’t like different textures so instead of making him eat his spaghetti with noodles I put the sauce on a whole wheat bun and cut it up for him. He gobbles it up. His favorite thing to eat is homeade chicken fingers basted with broccoli, wheat germ and bread crumbs pan fried in olive oil (A favorite of my hubbies too!). He is a healthy two year old and I feel as long as I keep offering him the veggies and fruits in the raw form then one day he will accept them. For now, I hide the veggies and I know soon I will be able to use his sweet tooth against him. For example “you have to eat three more bites of supper before you get a brownie.” A brownie with hidden blueberries and spinach, I might add!

The things he refuses now are:
- All vegetables apart from chip-shop chips – even McDonalds can’t tempt him now
- All fruit, apart from puree
- All pasta and rice, apart from “instant” ramen style noodles which he devours
- All meat apart from chicken nuggets or other shop bought breaded poultry shapes – my homemade oven baked ones do not go past his lips either
- Any kind of sauce
- Cheese
And a whole host of other things. He will, however, gobble up a bowl of porridge, especially when his nutty father covers it in sprinkles and stirs in a couple of cubes of dark chocolate.

As the other parents have said here, I’ve tried everything anybody has suggested without success. Forcefeeding, reward charts, eat-one-bit-for-a-bit-of-chocolate, starvation, hiding (even I didn’t like the taste of texture of the things I cooked!) have all failed to achieve any real changes. He now considers anything HE will eat as “not food” because his grandmother told him “yes, well, you don’t like food do you.”

However, I have also given up providing any alternative to the meals I cook apart from bread and butter, which is also the policy now at his preschool, where he will have two slices of bread and butter, three pieces of cake and a large bowl of custard… or two. This policy seems to have started to work, as I’ve also taken on board the statistics about kids needing to taste foods x number of times to start accepting them. I’ve spent the last few weeks cajoling him to taste pasta around four times a week. This has moved from hiding his little face in his hands in terror at the sight of it to being able to play with it a bit, kiss it, and now he is able to bite bits of and shove it in his mouth almost carelessly before spitting it back onto his plate. So now, along with his bread and butter, I can also provide a small bowl of whatever pasta I’ve put in the dinner for the rest of us, and he knows what is expected and does it quite happily and without the retching of previous attempts. I’m hoping that within a couple more weeks of gentle encouragement he may be able to chew and swallow a little macaroni and then I will start adding smears of sauce to it.

The rather shocking outcome of this is that while cutting up cherries for his 20m old brother (a lover of all things dinnery) my son announced loudly “I like cherries” and shoved his hand into the bag and bit into a cherry. He then carried on biting into the cut up cherries and pulling faces while agreeing that they really did taste quite good. None actually went down, but who cares! Progress is progress.

I am very comforted though when I meet dieticians and nutritionists who have picky eaters at their tables. Helps me feel a little bit better about my parenting skills!

But all in all, I think my only advice is that I’ve never heard of this problem being terminal. Kids who don’t eat vegetables grow into relatively healthy adults who may or may not eat vegetables, and it really seems not to be a reflection of the way foods were introduced to them as babies or any other things parents may feel guilty about. In converse, my cousin’s children were given a diet almost solely consisting of fries, cola and takeaway curries, kebabs and burgers as toddlers at home, but always devoured huge roast dinners at their grandmother’s house and seemed to almost crave the healthy foods.

But it is a huge pain in the butt.

So my current plans are threefold:
1) Continue serving relatively child-friendly meals for my family along with a side of bread and butter and allowing him to eat whatever he wants from that offering
2) Continue with cajoling him to be disgusting with pasta in the hope that he will eventually agree to swallow some
3) Work on some hidden vegetable recipes to get at least some nutritious foods into his growing little body

Anybody who has any healthy cookie or cupcake recipes which they’ve tried and tested including zucchini or carrot, please let me know!

Our approach has been to continue to offer regular fruits and vegetables while still giving him the things he will eat. In my son’s case, he will eat pureed fruit and vegetables (baby food texture), so that is what I give him. But I also offer him what we are having at every meal and I do hide vegetables in foods that he will eat.

Pureed vegetables are the easiest thing to hide or things with similar textures to what your child is eating. I put squash in grilled cheese sandwiches. I put pureed carrot or other veggies into spaghetti sauce. Pureed cauliflower can be mixed easily with rice.

I have made wonderful french toast with pumpkin bread or zucchini bread. I often put fruit puree into pancakes (mashed banana works really well, but you can do others too).

There are several books (e.g. The Sneaky Chef) that have recipes for hiding fruits and veggies, but I used them more for ideas and then made up my own recipes that I knew would work for my child.

With time, I have been able to add some textures in here and there. I can make macaroni alfredo with bits of bacon and small chunks of roasted cauliflower. The texture of the pasta, colour of the sauce, and taste of the bacon completely mask the cauliflower.

Each child is different, so you just have to experiment with flavours he likes that can hide other flavours, textures and colours that are similar to what he will eat.

Good luck!