Melanie Rehak

Melanie Rehak and her son, Jules

Shortly after giving birth to her son, Jules, Park Slope author and foodie Melanie Rehak went to work in the kitchen of Applewood, a famously locavore restaurant in her neighborhood. She spent a year educating herself about food—where it comes from, how it gets to our plates and, perhaps most important, what she wanted to feed her child. We e-mailed with her about her findings, which she shares in her new book, Eating for Beginners.

How did becoming a mom change the way you think about food?
It made me think about it a lot more, because I had to start feeding someone who couldn't make any decisions for himself—or so I thought! I was also suddenly aware of the weirdness of giving someone his first bite of all these foods I'd been eating for years, which was both wonderful and odd. It made me appreciate foods I love even more, because I took the time to think about what they taste like again. It also made me realize that I had all of these assumptions about how a child of mine would eat—basically, that he'd eat what we eat. And they weren't right. Of course, this is the No. 1 rule of parenting: The opposite of what you think will happen is usually what happens!

There’s a lot of information out there about how to feed our children—how can parents navigate it all?
For me, especially after writing Eating for Beginners, a lot of it has come down to using common sense. There are times when you're going to feed your kids something "bad" because you're either stuck in an airport, or it's something you loved as a child and you want to see the pleasure on your own child's face (for me this tends to be cookies), or some other reason.

Sure, it’s important to be aware of the various issues surrounding antibiotics and hormones in meat and milk—and organic produce and all of the things I write about in the book—and whenever possible, to choose the best options available to you. But it's also important to be realistic about what it means to feed children in everyday life, and to not beat yourself up about it if they don't eat perfectly.

So how can parents avoid feeling guilty when they fail to live up to the standards they’ve set for their family?
I don't think guilt serves any real function when it comes to feeding your kids. Every kid has days of bad eating, but they're usually followed by days of good eating, and a lot of the things we think of as bad now aren't as bad as we imagine them to be, like letting your kid eat nothing but bread for dinner. There's been a shift in that we all expect children to eat the way we do, and that's really not that realistic for most kids. Part of it, at least for me, has to do with the fact that there's so much food marketed to kids now that didn't exist when I was a child, and I feel this incredible desire to fight against that because I don't want my kids to think of themselves as some special class of citizens for whom everything should have a cartoon character on it. But the flip side of that is that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that no, most four-year-olds are not going to eat ratatouille, and that's okay.

Aside from Applewood, what other NYC restaurants get it right, especially for families?
I love Savoy, which is kind of the original Greenmarket restaurant. It’s not for little kids, though for lunch it would be fine for slightly older ones—they have great French fries. In Brooklyn, the Farm on Adderley is a great family place that sources locally. I guess we're slightly old-fashioned, in the sense that we tend to eat out more without Jules than with him. There are a few local places, like the 12th Street Bar and Grill, where we go with him regularly. But if I'm eating one of David's fantastic meals at Applewood, I'd rather not be wrangling a four-year-old!

Melanie Rehak reads at Greenlight Bookstore on Friday, July 9, at 7:30pm (686 Fulton St at South Portland Ave, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 718-246-0200, greenlightbookstore.com).

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