I suspect that I am quite lucky.

Kat, although she has started doing the toddler food-controlling games, still loves real honest to God food.

Here, you can see her using a regular sized spoon to feed herself homemade Cajun red beans and rice. Hardly a bland dish, my vegetarian version is filled with onions, garlic, and both sweet and hot peppers, Thyme, rosemary and celery seeds add fragrance, and Kat adores it.

She still loves curries, mattar paneer is a favorite, but she also likes various chicken curries. The other day at Casa, she was scooping up refried beans and guacamole with a regular teaspoon and feeding herself quite handily. She even scooped up pieces of quesadilla from Zak’s plate–he’d tear off bits of his pork, rice and refrieds quesadilla and she’d use her spoon to scoop them up, instead of picking them up in her fingers. She is very into using a spoon these days.

Blueberries are a favorite, as are potatoes in any form. Cheese is beloved–although she has the toddler peculiarity of thinking that all cheese must be orange to be cheese. I have to convince her to try white cheeses, even though she used to eat them gladly a few months ago.

Eggs scrambled with cheese and herbs is a great quick lunch or breakfast for her, and she always eats it. Whole wheat toast with butter and sometimes strawberry jam are also favorites–the one time she was given white bread at my parents’ home, she spit it out. Instead, she chose to eat the pumpernickel bread that her grandfather was eating–bland foods just do not impress her at all.

She likes beef, mushrooms, carrots, green beans, Thai basil–we know this because Zak plucked a leaf from our deck garden for her to taste and her eyes lit up and she insisted on another leaf immediately. She even liked my Thai Basil Chicken, even though it was very hot with the first Thai chilies from the garden.

And she still loves fresh tomatoes, and has been keeping an eye out for ripe ones on our huge tomato plants up on the deck. Spaghetti with tomato and basil sauce and lots of freshly grated cheese is another perennial favorite, especially if there are some cut up olives or some chili flakes in it.

We still feed her so-called “kid foods–” meaning that she snacks on cereals and crackers, and now and again, she has macaroni and cheese or ramen noodles from a package for lunch, but then, so do the rest of us. She eats ice cream when we do (chocolate is her favorite) and when we have tortilla chips with salsa, she is right there with us.

And sometimes, she has cereal for lunch, just because that is all she is interested in eating.

But all in all, she eats what eat quite happily and cheerfully. She is a little more wary of new foods and flavors these days, but is still much more adventurous than a lot of kids are. We don’t cook separate meals for her when we are eating–we just make sure that there will be something in our meal that she will like and eat.

And there almost always is. (Especially when we are having Singapore Rice Noodles, which combine her favorite foods–noodles and curry–a meal made in heaven for Kat!)

So, I guess I am lucky.

I cannot help but wonder what sort of tastes she will grow up with, eating these sorts of foods. What will her childhood memories of dinner be like, since she has eaten a combination of Appalachian farm food, Indian and Thai curries, Chinese and Thai stir-fries and Mexican foods, as well as traditional and improvised pasta dishes? And she is still getting exposed to pizza, a few french fries and the occasional hot dog, just like most kids.

What food memories will she carry with her as an adult? What scents, flavors and textures take her back to her childhood and give her a sense of comfort and “home?”

I think about that often, and I think that more parents should, too. What we feed our kids early in their lives is what they will want to eat for the rest of their lives. I was lucky in that I was fed mostly homemade foods, most of them fresh and locally grown, with convenience items at a minimum, and fast foods as a special treat. And to this day, a plate of sliced tomatoes, well-salted and peppered, next to a platter of grilled or freshly boiled corn on the cob and a big bowl of ice-cold coleslaw makes me miss my Grandma. The smell of roast lamb and cauliflower with cheese sauce brings to mind my Gram, and a certain combination of tomatoes and herbs make me think of my Aunt Nancy’s spaghetti sauce. And the smell of beef and lentils cooking into a thick soup makes me think of Mom and Dad.

Will the scent of Indian spices and Thai basil, of sesame oil and Shao Hsing wine, of toasting chilies and warm tortillas fresh from the griddle do the same for Kat? Will curry call her home in her mind long after I am gone? Will the flavor of Singapore Rice Noodles in a restaurant remind her of her mother’s kitchen?

It is just something I think about.

Last year, the Times published an anti-vegan screed by Nina Planck in which she shrilly likens feeding children a vegan diet to child abuse in response to the widely publicized conviction of two supposedly vegan parents in Atlanta of murder, involuntary manslaughter and child cruelty for starving their baby to death.

Then, on Monday, in The Opinionator, they posted about a case in Scotland where a 12 year old girl who has been on a “strict meat and dairy free diet” for her entire life has developed a severe case of rickets. Officials in the UK are calling for charges to be brought against the parents because they believe that the parents’ choice of a vegan diet for their child is the ultimate cause of the degenerative bone disease.

Now, while it is possible that the cause of the severe case of rickets, which has resulted in her developing extreme curvature of the spine (she is described as having the spine of an 80 year old woman) and several bone fractures, is caused only by her parent’s choice of diet for her, it is not likely.

Rickets is generally caused by a vitamin D deficiency. The results of rickets are bone weakness as vitamin D is necessary for the human body to absorb calcium, which as we know, is the main building block that leads to strong bones and teeth. Rickets used to be very, very common in the western world, and entire families of children could be seen with the twisted spines, short stature, bowed legs and deformed pelvises which are characteristic of this serious disorder. Malnutrition was certainly a factor in these widespread cases of rickets, but the greatest causal factor of rickets tended to be lack of exposure to sunlight. This is one of the reasons why cases in rickets rose precipitously after the Industrial Revolution, when previously rural populations moved into urban environments and instead of working in the fields in the sunlight, they worked in dark factories for long hours, bereft of sunlight.

When it was discovered later that rickets was caused by lack of vitamin D in the form of sunlight, liver, or oily fish, enterprising health officials began calling for the addition of vitamin D to all cow milk sold in both the UK and the US. Since most children at that time drank large amounts of cow milk, it was considered to be an excellent preventative measure to enrich it. And, not surprisingly, after vitamin D because ubiquitous in milk, the incidence of rickets decreased to the point that it is now a very rare disorder in the developed nations of the west.

So, with this background information in mind, let us examine this current case of the twelve year old Scottish girl. Is it true that her parents’ insistence upon her eating a vegan diet the sole cause of her disease?

Now, depending on where in Scotland the girl lives, it is quite possible that she hasn’t had enough exposure to sunlight–the highlands, especially, tend to be fairly dark and drear in the weather department.

If that is the case, then it isn’t just the diet which is the cause of her rickets.

Now, it could be said that whether the rickets came about because of lack of sunlight or diet, it doesn’t matter. Rickets is not a sudden-onset sort of disorder–it happens over a span of time and to get to the point where the spine is curved dramatically and small fractures have occurred in the girl’s bones would take years. If this is a case of the parents “not noticing” the girl’s deformity or refusing to take her to doctors who would certainly notice and attempt to divine the cause of her disorder, then what we have here is not a case of a vegan diet being to blame, but neglectful parenting is to blame.

Parents who do not notice the gradual abnormal curvature of a child’s spine, or who ignore her pain (rickets is not asymptomatic–the bones hurt and are painful to the touch–and the fractures that occur often with the disease are also painful), or who do not take the child to a competent physician for regular checkups are neglectful and ignorant at best, uncaring and abusive at worst. What they feed their child or not feed her is beside the point once they reach this level of carelessness or neglect.

So, let me reiterate once again that just because some vegan parents are ignorant, lazy, misinformed, careless, neglectful or abusive, that does not mean that all vegan parents are like them!

Just as not every omnivorous parent feeds their children diets of junk food which result in childhood obesity and type II diabetes, not every vegan is causing malnourishing their children.

So, please, let us not be like some of the commentors on the NY Times blog or the Times of London website and instantly decry every vegan parent in the world because of this sad case, and recognize that human ignorance and carelessness comes in all shapes, sizes and philosophies.

A few months ago on his blog, Anthony Bourdain was musing with horrified dread on the subject of what he would feed his infant daughter when she started eating solid food.

A lot of foodie moms (myself included) posted with the hopefully helpful advice that babies and toddlers will eat what you feed them. That is to say, if they never get a taste of Chicken McNuggets in the the first place, they won’t insist on a diet that consists only of questionable chicken parts nuggetized and breaded with unknown substances and deep fried in half-degraded oil.

Watching Kat eat her own little bowl of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Spaghetti the other day made me realize that I hadn’t really talked about how toddler’s tastes change and how to guide those tastes toward healthy, delicious food choices.

So far, Kat still tends to prefer flavorful, healthy foods, although she does love her ice cream, chocolate preferably. She doesn’t get much in the way of cookies or cake or candy, simply because we generally don’t keep such foods around our house. She still most often shares our meals with us, although there are some foods she doesn’t seem to like much. Cow milk, except in the form of cheese, preferably sharp cheddar, cream, ice cream or yogurt lassi, is on her “I don’t consume it” list. Meat is a sometimes food as well: some days she will refuse it, while at other meals, she cannot get enough of it. I have noticed that she tends to prefer chicken and pork to beef, but what she seems to prefer above all meat is eggs. (Kat really digs Cilantro Chicken Stir Fry–she eats that chicken so fast I can barely keep up with shredding it into little bites for her.)

She likes scrambled eggs so much that Zak has taken to calling her “The Oviraptor.” She can power through one to two extra large farm fresh eggs from pastured hens in record time, gobbling them up using both a spoon and a hand, if the spoon method is too slow. She likes the way I cook them best–well beaten with a tiny bit of cream, a sprinkle of herbs and slowly cooked with a bit of butter–all local. At the end, I add a sprinkle of shredded sharp cheddar and serve it forth to her great appreciation.

Fruits and vegetables are a seesaw ride. One day she cannot get enough of oranges and tangerines, then two days later, they are the untouchables of the citrus world. Apples are beyond great one minute, and the next, she is tossing them to the cats as outcast unclean. Asparagus is viewed with suspicion when sauteed in butter, but let it be cut up in a creamy pasta dish and it is better than good and is pounced upon and gobbled up. Tomatoes are almost always the best beloved, although now and again they are given a fierce toddler glare that eloquently says, “I don’t think so.”

Noodles of all types, both Western and Asian, are a great hit, as is anything over or in rice. Pasta, especially long thin noodles, have the extra bonus of providing dinner time entertainment to Mommy, Daddy, Big Sister and any of the assorted dinner guests who happen to sit down with us. Tomato based sauces made with my home-canned tomatoes are greatly favored, but she also likes vegetable pastas with creamy cheese sauces too. Asparagus and spinach are great in her book if noodles are involved, and peas taste better when mixed into macaroni and cheese, a dish which we have renamed “Cheez n’ Peaz.” Kat loves her Cheez ‘n’ Peaz, although in typical toddler fashion, while she may eat peas with gusto one day, she may pick them out of her bowl and set them aside the next day.

That toddler tendency to eat a food one moment and refuse it the next is probably one of the must frustrating aspects to feeding a child of Kat’s age. Some kids grow out of it by three, others continue in this irritating and confounding behavior until they are eight or nine years old. I think that the best way to deal with it is to not make a fuss about it, and if a kid doesn’t eat one thing, offer something else–within reason–and then offer the once offensive food again in a day or so. Be laid back about it, though, because in my experience, the more attention paid to the behavior by a parent, whether positive, in the form of offering a dizzying array of food choices all of which the child may refuse just for the pleasure of feeling their own personal power, or negative, in the form of berating, cajoling, coercing or otherwise making a divisive issue of food, the more likely the child is to continue in the behavior, because they are rewarded by this attention.

When Kat refuses to eat something, I just shrug and offer something else. If she doesn’t eat that, I figure she probably isn’t really hungry. Most kids will not starve themselves, so I don’t worry–I just keep an eye on what she eats over a period of days, instead of looking at what she is eating or not eating this minute. When I look at it that way, I find that she does eat a varied, nutritive diet, it just may not seem so at every meal when she pulls the bizzaro toddler trick of only eating one specific food for a meal or two.

That is my best advice to parents–take the long view when it comes to what your kids eat. Pay attention to the big trends, not the momentary whims. I find that Kat’s appetite fluctuates depending on her growth patterns, her physical activity levels and her, uh, digestive status. (In other words, if she hasn’t had a bowel movement in several days, it stands to reason that she might not eat much. Little bellies can only hold so much, and sometimes room needs to be made before a meal can go down.)

And when the momentary whims get you down, try and shrug your shoulders and ignore them. Feed them a varied diet in as calm and matter-of-fact way possible, and while you are at it, let them taste what you are eating, even if you think it is too spicy and they won’t like it. (Within reason–no steak tartare or raw fish for babies, please!) They may surprise you and love it–Kat still adores all sorts of curries, and as you can see the allium-laden Kiss Kiss Bang Bang really was a big hit with my little highchair dweller.

Let toddlers see you and other adults and kids enjoying food, making appreciative noises and sounds. Let them experience laughter and conversation at the table, maybe even a tiny drop of wine from your fingertip, and offer a lick of garlic butter from your spoon. Start them on the sensual pleasures of food early and you will eventually have a life-long food lover on your hands.

In other words, make food fun, not a fight, not just for your kids’ sake, but for your own as well.

A reader named Sgt. Pepper replied to my statement that while I may, in the future, become vegetarian, I would never become a vegan, because I love dairy products and eggs a great deal, and I saw no real reason to give them up, since there are plenty of local farmers producing eggs ethically, and there are ethical dairies in existence. (One of which is even local!)

This is what Sgt. Pepper had to say:

This is a good example of how the subjectivity of experience causes omnis and vegos to clash and why it’s so hard for us to understand the other’s perspective. For me, I liked milk, cheese and eggs an awful lot when I ate them, but I don’t think I would have listed any of them in the top 100 pleasures of my life. Obviously, Barbara would. None of us can live completely cruelty free lives so we all draw our lines in different places. How can we get along?

It never occurred to me that it would must be inevitably impossible for vegans, vegetarians an omnivores to get along.

While some vegetarians and vegans may not recognize it, there are plenty of ethical omnivores in the world, and we are working toward some of the same goals they are: which is the treatment of domesticated animals with dignity, care and compassion. This statement is sometimes scoffed at by some vegetarians and vegans, because their definition of compassion means that animals must never be killed my humans for any reason, most certainly not to be eaten, but that does not render my statement false. Just because vegetarians and vegans may disagree with us, does not suddenly make ethical omnivores nonexistent–it merely makes our opinions marginalized in the discussions of ethical eating, animal welfare and environmental issues when there are militant vegetarians and vegans involved in the conversation.

This saddens me, because the truth is, in order to make the changes necessary in our society to secure the decent treatment of domesticated animals, and to lower the consumption of meat for collective human and environmental health, all people who believe in these goals, no matter what their personal philosophy, should work together to attain these goals.

In other words, instead of wasting time arguing with each other over who is more right than whom, and over which method of eating is more ethical than the other, we should be working together against the corporations and governmental lobbyists which favor industrialized agricultural practices which are dangerous to human, animal and environmental health.

How do we learn to shut the hell up and actually make alliances which will help attain our goals?

I think that if vegetarians, vegans and ethical omnivores of all dietary persuasions would try and adhere to a few simple “rules of engagement” when they talk with each other over the potentially heated subject of what we eat, we may make some headway in learning to come together, rather than driving ourselves apart.

I think that the first big step, which for some, may be a hurdle to surmount, is that we need to learn to view each other’s opinions with respect, even if we do not agree. In fact, I think it is essential to try to approach these conversations about what we eat and why with the honest and respectful understanding that each of us as ethical individuals who are trying to do the best we can for ourselves, our families, our environment, and other living beings.

In order to approach each other with this sort of honest respect, it means that we will all have to work hard to ditch our own ego-boosting feelings of self-righteousness. When we are certain that we are absolutely right, it often blinds us to the possibilities that while our decisions may be right for ourselves, they may not be right for everyone. Human beings are not all cookie-cutter-clones of each other. Our bodies are all unique and the diet that is healthful and beneficial to one person may be deadly to another. I am pretty certain that if I ate a diet mainly composed of blood, milk and meat, like a traditional Masai or fish, whale meat and blubber like a traditional Inuit, I’d probably not be very healthy, while these tribespeople thrive on their diets. And, nutritional studies have shown that when the Inuit, for example, eat a typical American style diet, they, too, become quite sick.

So, I think that in order to talk successfully with each other, rather than past each other, we need to loosen our grips on our deeply held, but divisive ideologies and focus instead on what we agree upon: that industrial agriculture is harmful to humans, animals and the environment, and then turn the conversation towards various strategies to combat the prevalence of corporate industrial farming practices.

We might also benefit from looking at each other as individuals, and not as stereotypes, and learning to let go of the bad experiences we may have had with individuals of various groups in the past.

In other words, let’s try and stop saying things like, “Meat-eaters are murderers!” or, “Vegans are a bunch of self-righteous freaks who abuse their kids!”

Neither statement is completely true. Yes, some meat-eaters are murderers–the cannibalistic Jeffrey Dahmer certainly counts as both a meat-eater and a murderer–a serial murderer, in fact. On the other hand, Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and while he may not have murdered anyone with his own hands, he did sign the orders for the extermination of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, Poles, homosexuals, political dissidents and religious dissidents. Since it was his idea to kill all of these folks, Hitler counts as a mass-murderer–and he was a vegetarian. (And he was an ardent animal-lover–he adored his canine companions, in particular, and hated hunting, saying he could never shoot a hare.)

So, clearly, one need neither be a meat-eater, nor a consumer of vegetables to be considered a murderer. Murderers eat any number of foods, as any rational or thoughtful person could tell you, and truly, eating any one thing or another is no pre-requisite for the sorts of mental instability that lead to murderous rampages. If the case that all meat eaters were murderers was truly based upon fact, I believe we would be up to our armpits in murderers.

But what about the assertion that vegans are self-righteous child-abusers? This one gets trotted out fairly often after the unfortunate case of the couple who starved their baby to death and use their vegan lifestyle as an excuse. After this couple’s case came to light in the media, Nina Planck wrote a shrill, fear-mongering screed in the New York Times bashing all vegan parents as child-abusers at worst and neglectful at best, which I countered here. Even Planck herself backed off a bit from her rather–ahem–ignorant–assertions in her later response to the vegans who responded to her essay.

Vegan parents are no more likely to abuse their children than any other parent. In fact, if you look at the sorts of parents who abuse and neglect their kids, you will see that they run across a cross-section of society as a whole, and there is no one connection between them, certainly not a dietary connection. (Actually, statistically speaking, since vegans are such a small percentage of the population in comparison to omnivores, it is more likely that there are more omnivores abusing their kids than vegans. That is just how math works, folks. Even I know that.)

So, let’s just drop those particular stereotypes, shall we? Meat eaters can be murders, but so can vegetable eaters. Vegan parents can be abusive parents, but then, so can omnivorous parents.

And while it is likely true that vegans have run across obnoxious omnivores, and omnivores have run across vexatious vegans, and vegetarians have probably gotten the sharp edge of both vegan and omnivore’s tongues over the years, we need to drop those experiences and move on, realizing that there are assholes all over the place, and we need not make blanket statements limiting their appearance to the camps of whichever dietary group we choose to vilify at any particular moment. The truth is, omnivores, vegetarians and vegans can all be insufferable at times, and have all made nasty, untrue, unhelpful and just plain uncivilized comments to and about those who chose to eat differently than they do. This is not only childish, it is also stupid, because it distracts us from the real issues concerning the health and safety of our food supply.

This has to stop, because it does nothing but alienate each other when we could instead be working together toward a common goal: a food supply that is tasty, safe to eat, healthy for humans, animals and our environment, and which is fair to consumers and farmers alike.

Look at it this way: every time a vegan snipes at an omnivore for being a meat-eating murderer or an omnivore points a finger at a vegan and calls her a child abuser, or a vegan and an omnivore both spit at a vegetarian for doing “not enough” and “going too far” at the same time, the board of directors at Cargill or Tyson grins with satisfaction as they make another million dollars, and another thousand feedlot cows goes to their death in a place like Westland-Hallmark.

So, which is more important to you? Feeling self-righteous, or banding together to do something positive about our food supply?

Salon has a good article up today about the man who went undercover and worked at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company slaughterhouse for six weeks where he continually witnessed acts of extreme animal cruelty. He also witnessed plenty of “downer” cows–cows too injured or sick to walk– enter the US food supply, most of them going to the Federal School Lunch Program.

The article is short, but to the point, and worth reading, if nothing else for the Humane Society’s reply to the frequent assertions by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Beef Industry Food Safety Council, that the sorts of cruelty and flagrant violation of food safety and animal protection laws shown in the video are just an isolated incident in one slaughterhouse, among “a few bad apples” among the workers. (Hey, isn’t that what the US military said was going on at Abu Ghraib? Isolated incidences of torture, perpetrated by a “few bad apples?” Upper management always tries to weasel out of getting blamed.)

When asked what he thought of these assertions, Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society was unconvinced:

The Humane Society, he attests, had not been tipped off to abuses at the plant. “This plant was selected at random,” he says. “There are 6,200 facilities across the country that USDA inspects. We chose this one and found egregious abuses. There is no way that these groups can say that everything is safe.”

I have to come down on the side of Wayne Pacelle and the unnamed undercover videographer on this one.

If the slaughterhouse was chosen at random, then there is absolutely no shred of evidence to support the industry’s official party line that this was an isolated incident. Americans should meet any such assertion with the skepticism it deserves, and should demand accountability.

And, while we are at it, let’s stop eating so damned much cheap beef. It just isn’t worth it.