Food experiments and Parental influences on food

As you may recall from yesterday, I was looking for recipes using carrots and I had located one for a sweet carrot relish. I had already made up some cabbage and tomato and since those are both ingredients in the relish, I thought "Oh, I'll just add some carrot." This worked very well. I added two medium carrots and some more vinegar and some sugar. The result was lovely but a bit too much like a relish. I was hoping that I had not added too much of the vinegar and sugar. So,the flavor is just a bit too strong for eating with rice or just as a side dish (although, it would be fantastic on a hot dog!).

I'm eating it as part of my lunch today with brown rice because I needed an extra something and didn't have time this morning to fix something else. But it made me think about how much I will be willing to experiment if I know that I'm not willing or able to stretch my food budget to cover failures. In this case, I know I have enough food at home so that I can put this dish aside and use it in a different way. But, it could have gone terribly wrong and been completely inedible too. Then where would I be?

I can see how easy it is to slip into the same routine because it's safe and predictable and there is a much smaller chance of wasting food because it's been rendered inedible.

This is really the mind set of many people who lived through the Depression or WWII. They were taught not to waste and not to take or try food they might not like in case they hated it. My housemate's father is extremely cautious.

I can understand it for people who lived through really trying times. But I've also found that parents easily pass those attitudes on to their children. My housemate grew up with a very limited diet and is unwilling to try anything new. Even when I lived alone, I had to fight the urge to save the "good stuff" for company

Although a recent study suggests hat Parents influence in their children's eating habits is small, I have a hard time believing it. I need to read the full article to see what I think . I can see where parental control over teenagers might be limited. But I wonder what happens when the child grows older. I know that when I was at the end of my teens and into my twenties, I didn't eat anything like a well balanced diet so the correlation between how I was raised and how I was eating would have been really small. But, as I got older and started realizing how diet affected my body and health, my habits became much more like my parents.

Now, I eat a much wider variety of food than they do. But ultimately, they came me a taste for well balanced and interesting foods. I'd like to see the above study go further to see the parental influences into adult life.