No pressure, lunchbox-packing parents. But if your little ones happen to go to school with Bella, Maya and Violet Smith, they might start turning up their noses at your meals.
The Smith girls, ages 6 to 9, sit down to lunch at St. Francis of Assisi School in Northeast Baltimore with the likes of homemade sushi, made-from-scratch soup or a "grilled" cheese sandwich made with toasted sourdough and a triple-crème cheese that melts at room temperature.
Not that the daughters of two chefs — their father, Scott, is co-owner of Big, Bad Wolf's House of Barbecue and their mother, Irene, is about to launch a locavore lunch truck called Souper Freak — know how good they've got it.
"Half the time, they come home from school and say, 'Why can't we have Lunchables like the other kids?'" Scott Smith said. "You sit there and say, 'Oh my God. I just spent all that time.' A couple times a year, I'll cave and say, 'OK, I'll let you have Lunchables.'"
Parents from all walks of life wrestle with what to put in their kids' lunchboxes these days, given the growing concern about childhood obesity, not to mention the rise in peanut allergies, which has banned the old standby PB&J from many school cafeterias. But for chefs, who consider raising a mini-gourmand on par with bagging a James Beard Award, professional pride also rides on what's inside those insulated Dora and Diego sacks.
"She ate foie gras when she was almost 2," Chameleon Cafe chef-owner Jeff Smith said of his daughter, Gertie. Her first food after breast milk? Demi-glace.
But chefs still spawn plenty of picky eaters — and struggle like the rest of us with how to keep the kids fueled through the school day. That precocious foie gras and demi-glace eater is 6 now and toting nothing of the sort to the Waldorf School, where she's in kindergarten.
"She is the pickiest kid in the world," Jeff Smith said. "She only eats one thing: We put in half of a turkey sandwich with mayonnaise — and no cheese.
"I think I pushed her a little too hard when she was too young," he added. "She was eating stuff like that [foie gras], and then it slowly faded away."
It's a fate that has befallen even celebrity chef Bryan Voltaggio, who owns the acclaimed Volt restaurant in Frederick and was "Top Chef" runner-up to his brother, Michael. The molecular gastronomy magician might know how to turn a hearty potato into foam, but he can't morph his finicky 3-year-old into an omnivore.
"He eats terrible. My husband's terribly embarrassed by it," Jennifer Voltaggio said of their son, Thacher, 3, who swore off even pizza and mac-and-cheese after starting out as a great eater.
"Thacher ate everything," Jennifer said. "We were giving him edamame. Bryan ground it up with peas, and he was eating it all. Now — nothing."
Thacher is a supertaster, his pediatrician has told the Voltaggios, meaning he has more taste buds than most people and is more sensitive to flavors and textures. Perhaps that will help him become a great chef someday.
"But for now," his father grumbled, "he doesn't like anything."
Thacher does like peanut butter and jelly, but his preschool is peanut-free. So in his lunchbox, he gets cheese and bread — packaged separately, not together, thank you very much. The bread must be Pepperidge Farm (white, thin-sliced), the cheese white, not yellow. He'll eat yogurt, so long as it's Yoplait. He's good, too, with chicken noodle soup in a thermos, so long as it's not made by the resident James Beard finalist. He wants Lipton, so there's no danger of having pieces of real chicken in there.
It can be a blow to any mom or dad's ego to have the lunchbox come back home with barely nibbled food, but parent-chefs can take that especially hard.
"I got him these sweet-potato chips the other day," said Winston Blick of Clementine in Northeast Baltimore, referring to his kindergartner, Zeke. "They're awesome. He hates them. And it's incredibly disappointing. It's even worse if I make it."
Blick took it as a badge of honor when Zeke was a good eater.
"He used to eat sushi, raw sushi. He used to eat Thai food. He used to eat pate. He used to eat everything," he said. "It was awesome. I thought I was doing it. I thought because of my adventurous eating, he was a chip off the old block. He wasn't."
Blick believes that his son's narrowing palate is a natural part of maturation and that eventually he'll become more adventurous again.
"You've seen children when they're like, 2, and they're at the ocean, they run toward the water because they think it's amazing," he said. "And when they're, like, 4, they're afraid of it."
Which doesn't mean Blick isn't pulling his hair out trying to find something to feed Zeke in the meantime.
"He goes through phases, three-day phases," Blick said. "He tries something, and he's into it, and you're, like, 'Yeah!' And you go to Costco and buy a case of it, and by the time you get home, he's over it."
