Broccoli Is Good For You

Toodle was a remarkable boy. His teachers would always tell his mother how impressed they were by his brilliant study habits and quick wits when she came to pick him up from school every day. She would brag to the other parents of Toodle’s second grade class how her boy would come home from school and flip through the gauzy thin pages of the English dictionary until she had to pry him away for dinner. The other mothers would then marvel at what a perfect child she was raising, and she would respond with something like, “Oh, I know. Isn’t he just darling?”

What she always failed to mention, though, was the one thing Toodle embarrassed her about. Despite all of Toodle’s good behavior, he absolutely refused to eat his vegetables. Getting him to eat anything at all besides Ritz crackers and goldfish was a feat, but the amount of laxatives his parents had to buy for their son was truly a testament of how much he disliked eating greenery.

He hadn’t always been such a picky eater. His aversion to most foods only started after he read a book in the first grade about photosynthesis—that is, when he realized his vegetables could breathe.

His parents tried everything. They bribed him with sweets and promised him gifts. They told him he wouldn’t have to spend nearly so long sweating on the toilet if he just tried one green bean, but Toodle would have none of it. He was a brilliant child, and he had made up his mind.

“No thank you,” he said one night as his mother placed a plump slice of chocolate cake on the table in front of him. Thick frosting dripped onto the plate’s ceramic, and the sugar-sweet scent of chocolate pulled Toodle’s eyes greedily towards it. His mother sat in the chair next to him, watching hopefully, but Toodle looked back at the droopy pile of mixed vegetables on his dinner plate and shook his head.

“Just try one bite,” she pleaded, “and you can have this whole slice, okay baby?”

Toodle looked away. “No thank you,” he repeated, and his father sputtered with anger.

“See here, boy,” his father shouted, shoving a thick finger in Toodle’s face. “Your mother made this food for you, and if you don’t eat it, I will force it down your throat!”

His mother placed a calming hand on her husband’s arm, and he backed away, muttering to himself about his son’s streak of rebellion.

“We don’t want to force you, but we will if we have to, Toodle,” his mother said.

But Toodle just sat there.

She paused, pursing her lips as she watched her insubordinate son try to avoid looking at the cake. “Here,” she said. “Let’s try this.”

As his father fumed a couple paces away, his mother prepared her next strategy. She speared one of the broccoli pieces from Toodle’s vegetable pile with a silver fork and waved the saggy plant in his face, trying to make it look like an airplane. Toodle clamped his mouth shut, unable to picture anything but a bushel of broccoli pierced through its center like a limp, off-green corpse being carted to a slimy, dark grave.

“You like airplanes,” she told him, but he squeezed his eyes shut and turned away, disgusted. His mother sighed. “Okay,” she said, disheartened. They’d already tried hiding the greenery behind a fat piece of cornbread, but he just spat out the vegetable after swallowing the bread. They even tried blending everything together in a big cup of liquid dinner, but no disguise was sufficient. To his parents’ despair, Toodle would not eat his vegetables.

“We have to force him,” his father said. “There’s no other way. He can’t keep surviving off of MiraLAX.”

Again, his mother sighed, but she nodded. “Okay. Hold him down.”

Toodle’s eyes widened, and he squirmed as his father pinned him to the chair and pried his lips apart with thick, man-sized fingers.

“I’m sorry, baby,” his mother said, and she slipped the fork into her son’s mouth. Toodle let out an open-mouthed wail, but there was nothing he could do. The salty, steamed broccoli was forced onto his trembling tongue. His father clamped his mouth shut before he could spit it out.

Tears dripped from Toodle’s eyes, and he looked at his parents with terror. He couldn’t eat a vegetable. They were living, breathing beings, and Toodle didn’t want that kind of vegetable juice on his hands.

“Broccoli is good for you,” Mommy insisted. Father nodded, but Toodle could only see the way the broccoli had looked at him with sad, dead eyes before going into his mouth. The broccoli had still been breathing when Mommy put it in the steamer and cooked it alive.

Toodle tried to spit the broccoli out, but Father’s hand was firm against his mouth. Toodle had to protect the broccoli, but he knew the only free orifice left was his nose. Desperate, he knew there was only one thing to do. With a swallow and a snort, he forced the broccoli floret up through his nose cavity and out his slidy, slidy nostrils. The squishy mass landed on his father’s hand with a spurt.

“Ahh!” Father yelled, shaking the wet broccoli off his knuckle. Laughing and choking on the remnants of the vegetable in his nose, Toodle stepped away from the table.

“I have school in the morning,” he said, trying to come up with an excuse to leave before his distracted parents tried to force-feed him again. “I have to get ready for bed.”

Toodle wiped a green broccoli piece off his nose with the back of his hand and headed into the pantry to make himself a quick cup of Smooth Move tea before brushing his teeth. His parents looked at each other, lost for words. Their boy was too stubborn for his own good.

The next morning, as Toodle was spooning cereal into his mouth, his parents approached him. “Baby?” Mommy said, sounding timid. “We have something to tell you.” Toodle looked up from his cereal bowl. “We…” she glanced at her husband and he nodded supportingly. “We’ve decided that this family needs to try being vegetarian.”

Toodle took another bite of his Fruit Loops. “That’s ridiculous, I’m already practically a vegetarian,” Toodle said.

“You haven’t eaten any vegetables in—” his mother began to protest, but Toodle interrupted.

“I already don’t eat meat, Mommy. That's what vegetarian means, even if I don't eat vegetables. Animals are living creatures, too, so the only thing I’ll touch is processed four and dairy."

Mommy ignored him. “If you refuse to eat your vegetables, we have no choice but to go to extremes. None of us are going to eat anything but vegetables until you learn to like them.”

Toodle shook his head furiously. “You can’t do that,” he said, putting his spoon down to glare at his mother.

“I know you don’t like it when I cook them, so I prepared a little munchy plate,” she said and walked over to the fridge where she pulled out a party platter of raw carrots, cauliflower, and broccoli.

Toodle’s face went pale when he saw the platter. “How could you!?”

Mommy flinched, taking a step back. “You don’t like them cooked, so I thought it would be better to try—”

“You want me to eat them alive?”

Mommy, confused, tried to calm him down. “Now, I know you don’t want to, but you can grow to like vegetables if you try.”

“I already love them. That’s why I can’t stand how cruelly they’re treated!”

“They’re just plants, son,” Father said, and Toodle glared at him as well.

“It won’t be that bad, baby, I promise,” Mommy insisted. “It will help you when you have to go to the ba—”

“I won’t eat plants who can’t defend themselves!” Toodle wailed, slamming his fist against the table like he pictured Thomas Jefferson doing when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Father snorted a laugh, but Mommy blinked like she’d been slapped. She put her hand over Toodle’s and looked him in the eye.

“You really don’t want to eat them because you don’t want to kill them?” she asked in a whisper.

Toodle nodded. “They’re living beings, Mommy. I don’t want to be a vegetable killer.”

Slowly, Mommy nodded, though her face was grim. “I think I understand.” She sighed. “Well…” she muttered, her gaze drifting to the vegetable plate. Toodle followed her gaze and they stared at the plants for a moment. “Should we set them free, then?”

Father looked at his wife like he didn’t recognize her, but Toodle grinned, nodding. Father rolled his eyes and grabbed his keys. “I don’t have time for this. I’m off to work, honey,” he grumbled before heading out through the front, but Mommy didn’t hear him. She was outside, listening to her son tell her about vegetables’ inalienable rights as they released the captive plants back into the wild.

That night, before Father came back from work, Mommy and Toodle prepared supper. When Toodle came back from school, they went to the store to pick up ingredients, and they were waiting at the table for Father to come home when his car pulled into the driveway.

When he walked into the kitchen, Father froze. He took in the dinner table littered with goldfish, Little Debbie cakes, and other processed foods as Mommy and Toodle flashed him cautious smiles.

Father rubbed his temples. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”