10 Ridiculous Excuses Kids Have Given for Not Eating Their Food

A preschooler’s delicacy

Food must meet at least one of three important criteria before my three-year-old daughter will agree to let it pass her lips:  1)  It must be packaged in a bag adorned with cartoon characters; and/or 2)  It must be drowning in ketchup; and/or 3)  It must be ketchup.  Seriously, just spoonfuls upon spoonfuls of ketchup.

Some parents buy Happy Meals for their kids at McDonald’s.  Suckers.  All I have to do is grab a handful of ketchup packets from the condiments bar and yell, “LUNCH IS SERVED!”

If I have the audacity to serve food that does not meet these requirements, my daughter offers any number of excuses for not consuming it — and the less sense they make, the better.  It doesn’t matter if she LOVED macaroni last week.  Now it’s touching the blue part of her plate; therefore, it is inedible.  The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches she’s always devoured?  Today, “it has bread on it” and you know what that means:  SHE WILL NOT TOUCH IT WITH A TEN-FOOT POLE.

Meanwhile, my 14-month-old son will eat her macaroni, bread and ten-foot-pole.  Then he’ll ask what the main course is.  But that’s another story altogether.

So I asked friends and readers what ridiculous excuses their children, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc. have provided for not eating their otherwise perfectly fine food.  Here’s a sampling of what those crazy — er, I mean, creative — kids of yours have come up with (thanks for the laughs, guys!):

10 Ridiculous Excuses Kids Have Given for Not Eating Their Food

10. “I can’t eat dinner tonight, because I have to drink my milk. If I have both, I will throw up and since you work way too hard, it’s hard for you to clean up the mess.”

9.  “I can’t eat vegetables hot.”

8.  “Vegetables are not for boys.”

7. “I can’t, it’s not sausage!”

6. “I only like the tree part of the broccoli because it tickles me in my belly. I can’t have the bark part of the broccoli because it gets stuck going down.”

5.  “When one of my cousins was about 6 years old, she claimed she didn’t want to eat her ice cream because it was too cold.”

4.  “I won’t eat that mac-n-cheese. Nothing that looks like puke goes in these lips…”

3.  “My baby sister came up with the family winner for not eating her carrots: ‘If I eat it, what will the starving kids in Africa eat?!”

2.  Another one from my daughter:  SKYE:  “Uh-uh.  I don’t like it.”  ME:  “How do you know if you’ve never tried it?”  SKYE:  “I never tried it because I don’t like it.”  ME:  Who’s on first?  SKYE:  Huh?

1.  “I’m full of my peas, but I’m hungry for Oreos.”  (I have to admit, I’ve used this one myself.)