Carnivore?

A couple of weeks ago I became cautiously optimistic that Miles was becoming less of a picky eater. After all of the agonizing that I had had in the last few years about what my kids eat, he has suddenly (with no urging from me) started eating three things that he always rejected-- hard boiled eggs, dried fruit and turkey cold cuts.

But at the same time, he's also asking more questions about food.

We have a board book called "A Train Ride with Monet," which is basically ten stunning paintings very loosely woven into a story about a train ride. It isn't a very compelling text, but as someone who learned most of what she knows about art from the '70s board game "Masterpiece," I like to delude myself that I am exposing my kids to great art.

One of the pages shows an oil paiting of turkeys, and reads "pass a flock of turkeys, feathery white." Last week, when we were reading it, Miles suddenly said, "hey Mom, does turkey come from turkeys?" I was surprised. It had never occured to me that he didn't connect the chicken on his plate with the chicken on Old MacDonald's farm.

And ever since he's realized that we eat the pretty, fluffy white birds that he's seen a million times in the picture book, he's had a lot of questions about what we eat.

"Does chicken come from chickens?" (Yep, you can't pull the wool over my son's eyes.)
"Ham comes from pig, right?"

And here was the kicker - "What are horses for?" Basically meaning, do we eat those beautiful creatures that we were feeding watermelon rinds to last weekend in Tahoe.

Let me get something straight. I'm not a vegetarian. I don't eat liver or scrapple or even dark meat turkey, but we have meatloaf from time to time and every now and then I really, really, really want a hamburger. But still, I found it strangely difficult to explain to my child why we eat some animals and we don't eat others.

And then yesterday, when he was playing with his little plastic animals, he asked, "Mom, what comes from giraffes?"

"Poop!" I answered brightly, since it was that time of day.

"No, Mom, what comes from giraffes?"

And I realized that he was wondering whether we ate giraffes. Which seemed kind of horrifying to me. So I started to explain again what the difference is, and realized that in his mind there probably isn't much difference between the soulful big eyes of the giraffe he sees at our zoo's African Savannah, and the big brown eyes of the cow he sees at the children's section. Or - for that matter - the big brown eyes that sees when he looks in the mirror.

If I really thought about it, I might rethink some of my own food choices. But I'm probably too old for that at this point. But my neice - who is now fourteen - has been a vegetarian for political reasons for a decade now. (Yes, she made that decision when she was the same age that Miles is now.) And it will be interesting to see where Miles goes with this.