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Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

I must say, I never understood kids not liking vegetables as a meme. When my brothers and I were kids, we'd quickly demolish a casserole dish full of shanghai-style bok choi, broccoli, yellow and/or pink onions, and potatoes baked with some oil, salt, and pepper. You can also fry them with some seasoned soy sauce and a savoury fermented sauce like fish sauce or oyster sauce.

I think maybe many parents do a disservice to vegetables by being a bit too sparing with the oil and salt, but that's just been my guess. What's your intuition about this phenomenon?

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I think you have never had a proper midwestern bag of frozen mixed vegetables, boiled or microwaved to squishy tenderness.

IMO, american food doesn't have great vegetable dishes. They're never a main course item and either bland and under/overcooked or loaded with oil/fat.

I think it's because the American style of home cooking is having a meat, veggies, and potatoes all as their own separate thing. Meanwhile most other cuisines tend to mix them together, making it more palatable to kids and everyone.

Vegetables are absolutely delicious when fresh and cooked properly however many children grow up eating overcooked vegetables that come from a freezerburned bag that has been sitting in the freezer for months or from similarly aged cans.

So yes, it is definitely partially due to poor cooking but it also can come from generally low quality of vegetables. This is unfortunately very common in the US. The same unfortunately is applicable to fish for a lot of people.

Not always. The whole system of Indian cooking exists to deliver dishes that can utilise non-fresh or dried ingredients and stabilize them for long hours in Indian summer conditions.

That is why our system of cooking revolves around spices which both disguise the fact that the vegetables are not fresh as well as act as natural preservatives.

The best cuisine to utilise frozen vegetables is Indian - I do not know of any other cuisine that will pass them off as edible.

There are a fair number of vegetables where frozen are better than all but the best fresh vegetables.

Broccoli, beans, stuff like that.

They are picked closer to the ideal time and don't suffer from the shipping time. And then they aren't cooked like canned vegetables.

And of course there are lots of vegetables that don't take freezing well and nothing will stand up to an excessive number of defrost cycles. But frozen vegetable doesn't automatically mean bad.

My three year old demolishes veggies but does have preferences which can be gamed with combo eating. The "cut them smaller and mix with other stuff" strategy is a winner. Another is stronger sauces eg. balsamic or mustard in salads. Or mix with strong interesting components like nuts, cheese, pickled gherkins or less spicy preserved cabbage/kimchi. My daughter loves vinegar so much she often drinks the left-over salad dressing!

Children are more sensitive to bitter, probably as an evolutionary tactic to prevent unknown harmful substances from being ingested. As we grow older, we distinguish more between good bitter and bad bitter and are socialized to enjoy various bitter things.

However, individual variance swamps large group trends so it's easy to find children who love vegetables from an early age and adults who are hyper sensitive and hate the taste.

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