Did my parents miss a trick?

Suzi and I hadn’t been dating very long when we went out to dinner with my father and brother.

Even in that relatively early stage in our relationship, she knew that it was a requirement to comment on my distaste for vegetables and salads Every. Single. Time.

So when I moved or refused whatever greenery was on offer, she said something to my father, and he replied that if he really wanted to, he could still make me eat it.

I, in my late 20s at the time, didn’t dare say anything.

I loved dinosaurs from the time I learned about them in (maybe) first grade. I read everything I could find about them, and it was a major score when my grandparents produced a bag of small dinosaur toys that had belonged to my uncle.

And to be honest, if I see dinosaur skeletons at a museum, I’m going to be 6 years old all over again.

So it got my attention when I saw this while reading a joking thread on how to get people vaccinated.

A friend instilled a fervent love of broccoli in his 3-year-old twins by calling broccoli stalks "trees" and appealing to their inborn fantasy of being dinosaurs.

They weren't being forced to eat icky green vegetables, they were brontosauruses chomping forests.

— Chris (@MWConcertVideo) August 23, 2021

We didn’t eat broccoli in our house, but could my parents have convinced me to enjoy my peas, green beans, beets and fried squash (ick, ick, ick) by convincing me I was a dinosaur?

I don’t know … I like to think was pretty slick even at that age where I would have seen through it. It’s like the time — although I was a little older by this point — my mother wanted to talk about lunch with my grandmother without me knowing about the S-p-a-g-h-e-t-t-i-O-s.

Didn’t work.

Plus I don’t think they would have ever felt the need, given that the “You’re not going to be allowed to get down from the table until you eat your vegetables” method seemed to work pretty well.

But while they could make me eat my vegetables, they could never make me like it.

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