There used to be three breakfasts in our house: my breakfast, my husband’s breakfast, and my daughter’s breakfast. I would have black coffee, something sophisticatedly bran-heavy and a potpourri of vitamin supplements. My husband leaves the house before he eats, so it’s probably a bacon bap with brown sauce. (Harmonious households aren’t built on judgement!) My daughter grazed waffle bits, finger-mashed banana and two flings of yoghurt. There was a certain equilibrium to the way our family ate, fueling ourselves for our respective days either sitting at a laptop or terrorising the socket plugs, the crayons, the cat. (My girl will, frankly, trouble anything below knee-level.)
Atop her toddler tower, my daughter—cursed as she is with the cruelly fleeting concentration span allotted to all 15-month-olds—was momentarily captivated by foraging food fragments from an “unbreakable” Mickey Mouse bowl. Initially I found myself stealing a bite, which is normal. We all know parents steal bites of their kid’s food; we can convince ourselves we’re Goldilocks-ing the temperature, checking it’s not arsenic. As the man responsible for stemming the terrorisation of the cat, stealing a bite of toddler ban-affle-gurt may be one of the only perks of early-morning parenthood left to me.
Yet as time progressed, and as my daughter’s mind turned to which of the antique rugs she could snot on, I slowly found myself gobbling up her leftovers. And then, two, maybe three weeks ago, I noticed I had stopped making a separate breakfast for myself completely. There was no daughter breakfast and daddy breakfast; the fibre and protein lay un-maxxed in the larder. I was stove-topping black coffee and turning to my own bowl of banana, waffle and yoghurt. Without registering the change, I had become the second toddler at the counter.
Which has led to me exclusively eating like my one-year-old daughter. Green peas. Fish fingers. Porridge. Hoops of pasta, tubes of pasta, strings of pasta. Shards of pancake and unassuming crumpet and little cubes of mild cheese. We get through more bananas than the London Zoo.
These are the things you eat after an upset stomach, as you coax back your normal appetite. These are things that come in little piles or coarse purées, or little piles I’ve mashed into coarse purées. Things that can be eaten with one hand, a spoon, sometimes a fork, never a knife. Things easily described as something to get in you, something to tide you over until the real meal.
You’d think that eating breakfast, lunch and dinner like a tot would feel regressive. But the strange thing is, I don’t feel infantilised; I feel like I have finally arrived somewhere. Or, more accurately, I feel like I have finally stopped trying to arrive anywhere.
As my daughter naps after mealtime, I scroll on Instagram. A girl in Tuscany eats a tomato the size of a human heart. Wedding guests shuck oysters on a boat. A £28 plate of potatoes is dressed with, well, dressing. People are herby, people are lemony, people are mustardy, bursting at the taste buds with umami. Yet I hear the gurgle of mac and mild cheese in my stomach and feel completely nourished. Not spiritually, nor aspirationally. I just mean fed, unhungry, done.
There is a certain satisfaction to eating something that has no interest in being interesting. No offence to the bajillion-dollar food industry, but my daughter has made me realise how much adult food is performance. We can’t just eat something—we have to curate it, photograph it, recommend it, locate its provenance. Opinions seem to outweigh satiation. I am exhausted by the whole thing. Just give me a waffle—a waffle has no agenda. A waffle does not culturally appropriate. It is not an elevated take; it does not arrive with a backstory. It is just a waffle, and I am a man with an appetite for waffles.
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