Seán Moncrieff: Any meal that doesn’t involve pasta with red stuff sparks a battle with my daughter

If you have the hubris to tell me your fabulous pea recipe will change my mind, you’re wrong. I hate peas, and everything about them: the colour, the taste, the texture, the smell. Even the name. Pea. That’s a stupid name. If a pea accidentally rolls on to my plate, I have to scoop it off, just to continue eating. If I find a pea secreted inside some other foodstuff, it is equally dead to me. Consorting with the enemy is unforgivable.

Some sort of pea-based trauma probably caused this: one of those tortuous meals where a parent insisted I finish what was on the plate, no matter how long it took; where forcing in those foul green balls brought me to the edge of throwing up.

I suspect that I hated peas before I ever tasted one; and that being forced to eat them made me hate them all the more. I’ve witnessed this with all the kids. Daughter Number Three survived largely on ketchup for some years, and we’re in the middle of the Meal Wars with Daughter Number Four.

Every evening she asks me: what’s for dinner? Not because she’s hungry, but suspicious. Any meal that doesn’t involve pasta with red stuff sparks a battle. She won’t sit straight at the table, somehow tortured by the sight of what’s on her plate. Or she’ll develop a sudden cough or claim her eyes are sore. Or she’ll talk, to distract us from noticing that she’s just moving the food around.

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We’ve tried all the various methods: involving her in preparing the meal, placing a spoon of vegetables on the plate, just to get her used to it being there. Promising a treat afterwards. Most pointless of all, talking about it. How do you know you won’t like it if you haven’t tried it? She can’t give an answer to that because she doesn’t know: just that she has a visceral objection to the food we’re placing before her.

There is some science to explain this. Kids prefer sweet things and avoid vegetables because, back when we were living in caves and inventing fire, an aversion to bitter tastes protected us from eating anything poisonous. That changes in adulthood, not because of a change in our internal wiring, but because of socialisation. We gradually come to like – or at least tolerate – vegetables and salads because we see other adults eating them too.

That’s the theory. But it’s no more than that. Psychologists who study this kind of thing admit that they don’t really know why people like certain foods and dislike others, other than it’s probably a complicated set of reasons peculiar to each individual. You can ignore those annoying parents who explain how they got little Tommy to wolf down the broccoli. They don’t really know either.

By extension, it’s not entirely clear why we like or dislike anything. You could love camogie but hate hurling or like musicals and hate reggae. And any rationale for that is only partial, even if we don’t want to admit it: because there’s always that fear that we have less agency than we like to think; that we are the way we are because everyone around us is the same.

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Expectation must have something to do with it. We react more positively if things are as we anticipate them to be; as our life experience tells us they should be. Recently, the three of us ate in a local Italian restaurant. (We knew Daughter Number Four would accept pizza.) We ordered a bottle of red wine, but when it arrived, myself and Herself were slightly disgusted. Rather than the usual opaque green colour, the bottle was clear glass. Neither of us had seen such a thing before. It looked like a bottle of vinegar.

We hate waste, so we did manage to drink it. But still: it was weird.