We were wary when we first saw Jessica “Mrs. Jerry” Seinfeld on Oprah last week, heralding the benefits of steaming and pureeing the shit out of vegetables and then “hiding” them in kid-friendly foods so that kids will stop throwing temper tantrums at the dinner table and actually eat their vegetables. Because if you steam and puree the shit out of a vegetable, does it have any nutritious value left in it? Especially when it’s hidden in a brownie? We turned to Sarah Sliwa, a graduate student at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and all-around sassy chick, to help us unravel Seinfeld’s “deception” and its potential for any and all deliciousness.
In the tepid throes of veganism, a friend of mine once tried to tell me that avocados were the same as cheese. I like avocado and I like cheese, but the two are not equivalent. Apparently, one man’s bullshit is another’s inspiration: Jessica Seinfeld has anchored her new cookbook Deceptively Delicious in precisely this school of culinary trickery: Broccoli puree and flaxmeal-coated chicken nuggets. Beet puree enriches chocolate cake. Spinach and chocolate get it on. Gross.
Picky eating is not unusual. Food jags — children’s desire to eat only a few types of food — often set in around age two and can continue until a child is four or five. For this reason, experts recommend that parents introduce, and reintroduce and reintroduce, as many foods as possible when children are young, so that when the jags set in, odds are higher that children will fixate on at least some of the foods that parents want to be serving, which is why Seinfeld’s approach of sneaking veggies into brownies doesn’t sound quite right. Green, broccoli-coated chicken nuggets don’t help kids like broccoli. They help kids eat green nuggets. This is exactly the point raised in a recent New York Times article about picky eaters.
Making healthier versions of popular foods isn’t a bad idea. Substituting homemade foods for fast foods is appealing when the recipe is quick, involves few ingredients, and tastes good. But cooking vegetables to puree them in order to trick kids is less convenient. And there’s something even more troublesome about using dessert, a meal accessory, as a vehicle for vegetables, a diet staple. If this is the point, Seinfeld’s brownies are a Yugo at best: the half-cup of spinach and half-cup of carrots required for the recipe amount to a whopping 1/12 of a cup of vegetables per serving. When the recipe was analyzed using NutriCalc 2.0 it appears that each brownie yields 156 calories, 57% of which came from carbohydrates, 9% from protein, and 34% from fat. This is lower in fat and calories than a traditional brownie, but higher in both than most methods of preparing carrots or spinach. But does it taste like a brownie?