People ask me all the time: How do you get your kids to eat like that?
We're talking about children who will pull a raw oyster straight from the Adriatic and eat it without hesitation. Who order the fish whole — head on, eyes included — and think nothing of it. Who sat down to a properly rare Florentine steak and understood immediately that they were in the presence of something extraordinary.
The answer is simpler than most people want it to be: we never let them be picky.
The rule in our house
From the time they were small, the rule was this: you have to try it before you decide you don't want it. That's it. No negotiations, no substitutions, no separate plate of something safer.
We also never let them order from the kids' menu at restaurants. If you've looked at a kids' menu recently, you know why — they're almost universally the same rotation of chicken fingers, plain pasta, and pizza. Nutritional beige. We'd order from the regular menu and share, portioning things out for small hands and small stomachs, but always from the real food the kitchen was actually proud of.
If a child has a genuine allergy or food intolerance, that's an entirely different conversation — of course we would accommodate that. Our kids, thankfully, have none. So there was no reason to eat like they did.
What this built over time
Children are capable of so much more than we give them credit for at the table. They can handle complexity, bitterness, richness, heat — flavors that adults assume will be rejected. But if we preemptively narrow their world down to the blandest possible options, that's the world they'll come to expect.
What we built instead were eaters who are genuinely curious. Who lean in rather than pull back when something unfamiliar arrives. Who ask what something is rather than whether they have to eat it. That curiosity has paid off a thousandfold in our travels.
It also makes travel a whole lot easier. When a chef hands you something to taste, you taste it. When someone cooks for you in their home, you eat it. Our kids have never been the problem at the table — they're usually the ones going back for seconds.
Our kids have always been ready to receive that gift.
What travel deepens
There's a difference between a child who will try anything and a child who genuinely understands food. Travel is where the second thing develops.
When you eat a dish in the place it comes from — made by the hands that have always made it, from the ingredients that grow there — you taste something that no restaurant elsewhere can fully replicate. Our kids have experienced this great gift. They've come home from trips and cooked differently, tasted more carefully, asked better questions about where things come from and why they taste the way they do.
That's the education no textbook delivers. And it started at the table, long before we ever boarded a plane.
The show is built around this
Every episode of Fork in the Road puts our family in the kitchen with someone who knows their region's food from the inside out. We cook together. We taste together. We learn why things are done the way they are.
Our companion cookbook, Fork in the Road: Hungry for Adventure, brings those recipes home so your family can cook them too — with the history and heart behind every dish.
Because food isn't just fuel. It's story. It's memory. It's one of the most generous things one person can offer another. Start them early. Don't underestimate them. Skip the kids' menu.
Fork in the Road premieres May 18 on EWTN and EWTN+.
