Food is so much more for humans than just sustenance providing a means to stay alive. We centre so many things around it. People don’t leave a function until after the cake’s been cut. Events are carefully scheduled around the courses of a meal.
Dates and catch-ups with friends are usually enjoyed over lunch or dinner. New restaurants are busiest in their opening week, as everyone rushes to sample the new fare in town.
If food isn’t already a love language, it should be.
I used to enjoy cooking a lot more than I do these days though. Motivation kind of wanes within the territory of having multiple children. You can’t please all the people all of the time, so they say.
But closer to home (so close it’s inside it), I can’t seem to even please four people at the same time. It doesn’t matter what I cook, there will be one of us that doesn’t like it.
Quite often that someone is me, because I just give in and cook what I know my three will eat, but cannot be bothered (or often can’t spare the time) cooking a second separate meal for myself.
And the difference between them and me, is that I will eat it all regardless of not enjoying it. (Yes, I am aware the fact I pay for it is more incentive to do so for myself than it could be for any child who didn’t pay for it.)
When I was little, my mum, who was a childhood educator at the time, would occasionally make up taste-testing trays for us kids to beat moments of boredom. She’d blindfold us and feed us tiny spoonfuls of different herbs, spices, condiments and other food, getting us to guess what each might be.
They weren’t always pleasant-tasting and, in retrospect, it was kind of like playing that BeanBoozled jellybean game where you choose a coloured jellybean, let’s just say a yellow one, and you either get a buttered popcorn or rotten egg-flavoured taste ‘sensation’ in your mouth (there are also actual vomit-flavoured ones, if you’re game to try it).
When my kids were little, I carried on Mum’s tradition and made up these taste-testing trays for them, too. There were also other food activities we made fun in an attempt to get a fussy eater to eat a little more.
For instance, one day, we chose to eat and drink only green things.
Of course, the kids would’ve cottoned on if I’d just fed them salads and steamed veggies all day with a side of spinach and cucumber juice, so we started with green pancakes for breakfast.
As they grew older and could read, I would occasionally buy fortune cookies for the fun of the words inside.
Now they’re all almost teens, our fascination with quirky and novelty food still exists.
So much so that sometimes when we’ve got nothing better to do on an empty weekend, we’ll head to an Asian grocery store and select a whole bunch of weird and wonderful things we’ve never tried before.
Sometimes we find new faves, and sometimes we waste $12 on a box of iced confection no-one will eat more than a single bite from. We dare each other to sample first and watch closely to spy true reactions through poker face attempts before the rest of us dive in.
We don’t get as adventurous as we could because I suppose there are some things you already know by the pictures or the descriptions you are not going to be able to bring yourself to eat.
The lot of us are sweet-tooths anyway, so we lean toward desserts and sweet drinks over the savoury offerings.
On a recent visit to Melbourne Museum I very nearly bought the kids a scorpion lollipop each, but the $12 price tag wasn’t very encouraging to multiply by three and I wasn’t going to let them take turns at licking the same one. So I bought some freeze-dried ice-cream and ant candy instead, which was made with literal ants set in hard-boiled confectionery.
We also ducked into a Japanese grocer and purchased a couple of little novelty food kits (that the kids had seen on TikTok), which were made up of sachets filled with flavoured powder.
We brought them home and Googled the kits to try to find instructions in English, but fumbled our way through using the picture diagrams instead. We added water to each sachet of powder and ended up with miniature burgers, cheese and buns, ‘ice-creams’, cakes and cups of cola, which all shockingly had a taste that actually did resemble the real things.
I wouldn’t say they were delicious, nor consumed fully, and who knows how they were made or what they contained? But the activity inspired imagination and filled in time.
If you find yourself with nothing better to do on an empty weekend, I dare you to grab a bag full of weird and wonderful goodies from an Asian grocer for the fam to try.
If you’re game.