Kristen, the author of the viral Twitter thread, shared her thoughts about quality, humorous content.
"I'm an editor for humor publication The Belladonna and I always tell our writers that the secret to quality humor is being super specific and super universal at the same time," she noted that relatability is key.
"I think that's especially true for tweets. If you can paint the funny scene, that's great, but it really takes off when people can relate to it and have their own funny scene they're eager to share, too."
According to Kristen, 'bribing' one's kids is one of the main ways how parents can convince their kids to try eating something new. Another powerful tactic is making things playful.
"My three kids take some convincing with vegetables, but they'll fall for the 'you're a dinosaur and this broccoli is a tree' bit every time," she told Bored Panda.
"Asparagus is an easy one because I can turn it into a science experiment. They'll shovel asparagus into their mouths after I tell them it makes your pee smell funny."
As for the apple cores that led to the genesis of the Twitter thread itself, Kristen believes her pooch may have gotten to them.
"I suspect that my dog solved the mystery of the missing apple cores before I did. I hope that's what's going on. I haven't seen a single fruit fly around the house, so fingers crossed," she said.
Based in a small town near Boston, Kristen is the winner of the 2022 Erma Bombeck Humorist-in-Residence program. Meanwhile, her writing has been featured in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, House Beautiful, The Weekly Humorist, Popular Science, and elsewhere.
What’s more, she’s also an editor and contributor at The Belladonna, a satire and humor site. Kristen is also a published writer, having co-written the bestseller Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook. Her writing also appears in the humor anthology, Embrace the Merciless Joy: The McSweeney’s Internet Tendency Guide to Rearing Small, Medium, and Large Children.
Humorist Kristen’s tweets are hi-la-ri-ous. If you enjoyed this thread, then you’ll probably like her other posts as well. Obviously, you’ll find the freshest comments on her Twitter account. However, if you want to read the best of the best, she shares them on her Instagram.
It’s incredibly relatable humor (especially what she noted about drinking more water), and we spent the better part of the morning laughing.
What Kristen and all the other parents on Twitter are getting at is that, when it comes to food, things are way more difficult than they ought to be. Whether we’re talking about hiding scraps or avoiding eating their veggies like it's bedtime. Yours truly was an incredibly picky eater who'd avoid practically everything during the day and would wake up at midnight to eat chicken drumsticks in the dark.
A while back, Bored Panda had a lovely chat with pie artist Jessica Leigh Clark Bojin about picky eaters and what parents can do to get their children to at least try new dishes. Creativity (and a smidgen of bribery when that does) goes a long way.
“My mum was occasionally successful in getting us to eat things we didn’t like by hiding the ingredients in other more innocuous foods. I refused to eat eggs in any form as a child. But I loved French toast, and never questioned the suspiciously-thick omelet-like covering on my syrup-drenched toast (I didn’t know that French toast involved eggs!),” Jessica shared her thoughts with Bored Panda during an interview, previously.
“She would also trick us by telling us the food we were served was actually a different dish—one that she knew we tolerated. For example, my brother and I hated salmon but loved tuna fish. It never struck us as odd that sometimes we were served ‘pink tuna fish’ because it turned out we were actually totally fine with salmon, we just didn’t like the idea of salmon for some reason,” the baking and cooking expert told us.
“Of course, when we were in our late teens our mum eventually fessed up and let us know that we had been eating eggs and salmon for decades and we might as well accept the fact that we like them now!” Jessica said.
Alas, not every ingredient can be disguised as something else or hidden in mashed potatoes. Besides, kids are pretty insightful: some of them quickly catch on that you’re trying to broaden their palates. Though it’s not just kids who are wary of new dishes. Grown-ups have plenty of food-related hangups, too.
“I am ashamed to admit it, but I didn’t try a shocking number of different foods until I was in my late teens,” pie artist Jessica told Bored Panda that she barely ate any “vegetable that wasn’t a carrot.” Things changed as she grew older, though.
