Give peas a chance

It was tiny and green and it sat there on the plate being studiously ignored. Miss Five could hardly bring herself to look at it, such was its hideousness. Poor pea, it was being ostracised for being a vegetable.

I watched with enthralled horror as she carefully made a moat around the pile of peas, lest they contaminate the rest of her food by stealth. Truly, I wanted to look away but just couldn’t, her fastidiousness was fascinating.

I could just imagine David Attenborough’s voiceover: ‘‘And here we see Miss Five, a particularly fussy example of her species. An omnivore by birth, this young human will do all she can to avoid eating a vegetable, in fact anything healthy is met with suspicion and her guard is rarely down. Left to it’s own devices, this fledgling adult may develop scurvy or a variety of vitamin deficiencies.’’

You may be familiar with a painting by Edvard Munch called The Scream. This is the face my daughter pulls at the mere mention of a vegetable.

She will eat potatoes, carrots and broccoli but insists they are not vegetables, just food. Throw in something more daring, say a green bean or a floret of cauliflower and she looks at me like I killed Bambi. Throwing a wobbly doesn’t achieve much in our house and Miss Five has learned that the hard way. Cue the trembling bottom lip, teary eyes and a beseeching expression geared to melt the hardest of hearts, to no avail.

For the record, her big brother was more cunning at her age and used to tip his vegetables out of his bedroom window the moment my back was turned.

My bargaining skills would give the UN Secretary-General a run for his money. Start by aiming ridiculously high. ‘‘if you eat 100 peas you can have dessert’’ is a good opening gambit. By the time she has eaten 50 peas, she is happy as she thinks she got one over on me and I’m in smug parent mode, congratulating myself on my parenting skills.

Ahhh, there’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of duping your young child into eating little balls of vitamin K goodness. Scurvy averted - at least for now. Now, on to the capsicum.