Project Broccoli Succeeds With Ant-sized Gains

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The other day I sat at the kitchen counter as my son grabbed a bag of broccoli florets from the freezer and dumped them into a pot to start his dinner. Broccoli is one of his go-to veggies. Then I recalled how it used to be with him and broccoli.

“Do you remember shunning broccoli as a kid?” I asked him.

“I did?”

It’s funny how the parent holds the gift of memory of the child that the child will never see. It’s an irony of blindness that sometimes does a 180 flip one day down the line.

“You want to know how you started eating it?” I asked. He nodded.

Then I began the story of Bit by Bit.

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My son was like I was as a kid — picky about food, namely vegetables. After having gone through the angst of that as a kid, I knew I wanted to be chill with my son as we navigated this childhood hurdle. Since I eventually grew into someone who likes every single food except olives — ick — I figured the same could happen with him. I decided to have patience and accept where he was, which at the time was in the land of beige foods.

One day I was listening to an interview on the radio. A psychologist was talking about how to help a child desensitize to foods they don’t like. In a nutshell — slowly, by small pieces, with no pressure. I’ve since learned there are many reasons why a child might reject food, but back then I was simply game to give the technique a whirl.

My main concern with my son’s self-chosen diet was the veggies non grata. I thought if we could find one vegetable to add to his repertoire it would be better than the status quo.

I chose broccoli because it’s a nutrient powerhouse. If we only had one shot at nutrition, broccoli was a decent choice. I didn’t know then that broccoli was commonly loathed by kids. Good thing I also fully accepted the experiment could fail.

The interesting thing is that I heard the radio interview while I was driving to an ultrarunning event. When you run for a long time, you learn down to your bone marrow that success can come from the long haul. You just stick with it, step by step. This wisdom was at the heart of my experiment, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Before long, I initiated Project Broccoli. Dinner was on the table in serving bowls. Customarily, I’d serve a small amount of broccoli to my son which he’d bypass. Then I’d dump the poor, unwanted green florets into the trash where they’d lament their unrealized potential with the rest of the rejected food scraps. Very sad.

Except for that night. That night things made an infinitesimal shift to greener, vegetative days.

Food was spooned onto plates. The three of us took what we wanted. Then I said to my son, “Honey, tonight I’ll give you a small bit of broccoli. If you can eat it, that'd be great.”

I’d not thought out what I was going to do next. I assumed I'd serve him a single piece of broccoli.

But as I took a large floret onto my plate to cut it in half, inspiration hit me. I took the tip of my fork tine and carved off a minuscule bit of broccoli. It was the size of a small ant — not kidding. Part of me thought this was funny, but the other part of me thought it was brilliant. This was standing at the start line of a very long race, knowing the only thing I had to do was make one step forward. I had all the time in the world.

My son looked down at the ant broccoli sitting on his plate as though he was staring at a pebble sitting on the moon.

Is she serious? This is all I have to eat?

The green ant was absurd, but I maintained matter-of-fact composure.

Then, the mini broccoli non grata went from plate to tongue without more than a moment’s hesitation. Did the tongue even taste it? Hard to say.

“Great job, honey. So, how was soccer?”

And so, it went like this for another maybe five ant portions at five subsequent dinners. I’d serve a tiny dot of green to him. He’d eat it swiftly. End of story.

Then the experiment began to shift. The next broccoli dinner I told my son he could serve himself. I was still winging this experiment, going with intuition and nothing more. Without hesitating, my son served himself a small floret, popped it in his mouth, and continued with dinner as if nothing had happened. I pretended it was normal and said nothing, but inside I was stunned.

It hardly took anything other than patience and starting not with the first step, but the .0001st step. To this day, I cherish this small piece of our history. For me, it was about love and acceptance. It was about the willingness to be the tiniest inchworm inching along the great highway of possibility.

For my son, it was something within his control, of his own volition, and doable. It was also the gateway to his favorite vegetable.

That’s the story of Bit by Bit.