Foodie: One who has an ardent or refined interest in food

Our child loves a good meal! Sonora tasted her first solid food (and I use the term solid loosely because there is nothing solid about runny rice cereal) at five months old and had absolutely no use for it so we waited until she was six months old and then started introducing yellow and orange vegetables into her diet per our pediatrician's counsel. She is a big fan of real food, not the runny fake stuff. She loved vegetables from the beginning. We waited a week between introducing each new food to make sure that she would not have any food allergies and then between seven and eight months old we turned her loose. She loves new food, the normal and the exotic. The only food that she really did not take to at first was mushed green beans and smashed peas. She made terrible faces and gagged on each spoonful. However, remembering what a doctor in Abilene said, who was also a specialist on childhood obesity, I continued to introduced the aforementioned nasty green stuff. This doctor said that you cannot and should not determine whether or not a child likes a certain food until it has been introduced to them at least eighteen times. That is a lot of times, I'm betting that most people give up after two or three. Anyway after seven or eight meals of the mushed greens she forgot that she wasn't a fan and gulped them down with everything else. Now, our little foodie enjoys avocado, eggplant, papaya, bean sprouts, you name it! I'm hoping that she will be like her eight year old Uncle Alec and eat whole cucumbers and tomatoes during movies (instead of popcorn), and turn down a cheeseburger for a chicken caesar salad!