Headline from the Daily Mail

Three different meals in one night? This cannot be true. Doesn’t anybody remember the days of “eat that Swedish meatball/fish pie/liver and onion surprise, or go to bed hungry”? We all survived it — well maybe that’s a stretch. I’m sure someone was done in by Rumaki at some point in human history, and certainly more than one innocent child has been forever emotionally scarred by a plate of organ meats, but still, can it really be that there are parents out there who are actually going through the hell of getting three different meals on the table at once after cocktail hour has begun? How can this be? I mean really, making one decent meal  a night is freakin’ hard enough, but three different ones? And if this is going on in the UK, where people are far more practical than over here in the land of Everybody’s Special, can you imagine what’s happening in kitchens across the US? Are Americans making five meals a night?

Cheerios: breakfast, lunch and dinner of champions. Via Wikimedia commons.

Now, I’m not entirely sure how I stumbled upon this article, but I can tell you this: There is absolutely no way anyone should be making multiple meals at any time or for any reason. That’s why God, in His infinite wisdom, invented cereal. Now, is Cheerios  an adequate, nutritious meal? Not every night of the week, but it can easily be prepared by even the most the recalcitrant four year-old, it does not create much in the way of extra clean up, and as an occasional dinner it probably will neither kill nor traumatize even the spleeniest, most specialest child.

I’ve got to say that this article has really rocked my world. It may have been some time since I grappled with a finicky child, but I can certainly recall occasions when the little Slattern’s dinner consisted exclusively of rice and salt. On nights like that the only way peas made it into her body was through her nose, and let me tell you extracting them took some little effort. But whatever, the next morning she’d wake up hungry and happily tuck into scrambled eggs and apple slices for breakfast and no one was any the worse for wear. Unless of course we’d had to perform some nasal fracking the night before. (By the way, I have found that a little black pepper on the upper lip consistently produces a sneeze strong enough to dislodge event the most deeply impacted produce.)

Acceptable only after four double vodkas, never as the result of multiple meals.
Via myhealthyprespectives.com.