The Sneaky Chef, or, How to Raise a Paranoid Personality: The Secret Life of Press Releases

Daniel Boulud! She's telling you to put spinach and blueberries in brownies and you, apparently, are doing it. Are you that much of a ladies' man?

The cutie in question is The Sneaky Chef, aka Missy Chase Lapine, who's on a mission to rescue the American public from picky eaters. Or, as her press release puts it:

"The Sneaky Chef is here to rescue the picky eater from obesity, bad health and bad moods!... The Sneaky Chef brand is a series of books, foods, housewares and other products created by Missy Chase Lapine to enable home cooks to 'sneak' healthy ingredients into a wide variety of dishes with seemingly decadent yet utterly delicious and healthy results. "

Yikes. Anyway, Missy is the former publisher of Eating Well magazine, she's creating baby food recipes for Beech-Nut and she's also behind something called BabySpa. She wants to be the kinder, gentler, brunette Martha Stewart and God bless.

As a recovered picky eater, I think the Sneaky Chef is a creepy and probably ineffective concept.

Picky Eaters know they're picky. Some part of their brains knows it's indefensible -- just enough to make them (and their tastebuds) defensive to well-meaning attempts to "try it, you'll like it."

So unless those Brainy Brownies are flawless (and they taste exactly like a Picky Eater thinks they should taste -- and that probably means Betty Crocker), you've done worse than cook yet another thing your kid won't eat. You've pushed the eater one step further into paranoia, ensuring that said kid will be poking and prodding everything that comes out of the kitchen in search of the blueberries, spinach, zucchini, avocado or other suspect food that he/she knows is lurking somewhere beneath the surface.

Suddenly, your picky eater is J. Edgar Hoover. As if a mom's job isn't hard enough.

Comments

[Big Bomb]

this is like the great creamy vegetable soups that don't rely on cream, or the mashed potatoes that are really cauliflower ...

[LA OC Foodie]

I am not so fast to call this a failure yet -- as you noted, it depends on whether healthy veggies/fruits can be successfully "snuck" in w/o altering the food's flavor/texture profile. Hopefully she's a bit sneakier than just hiding peas under mashed potatoes (I still remember the horror of that as a kid.)

[Dana]

My criticism was tongue in cheek -- I don't really think the Sneaky Chef will inspire a nation of closeted blackmailing crossdressers and we do have a nation of fat kids. However, I wasn't kidding about my intimate knowledge of picky eating (I don't know how my mom survived it) and how recipes like these represent a kind of risk. At the least, I'd recommend moms make a point of not telling kids what's in the Sneaky dishes. If the kids like it, you don't want to give reason to change their minds; if they don't, they'll never let you hear the end of it.

[MaMaSan]

I attest to this blog author's knowledge of picky eating. She and I survived it, however, and so will others. I didn't do "sneaky" except one time when I made tongue (I was trying cheap alternative cuts) and when she asked, "What's this?", I told her "beef meat" and she ate it with relish.