'Treats are lawless. They don’t even have to be unhealthy to be fun; it’s just nice to do something different.'
Illustration: Hannah Buckman I get a lot of emails from people asking me to write about the crowded world of kid-food influencers and their power over the stressed parents of picky eaters. I will never write about kid-food influencers. To do so would be to rob myself of the joy of writing this column. I don’t care about that shit. I don’t care about feeding children the rainbow. I did my time in that life stage, and I didn’t like it.
What can you truly vacate when you’re traveling with young children? You stop doing your job for a bit, which is nice. You leave your disgusting home, which contains all your useful things, so it’s a mixed bag. You are still waking up early and caregiving all day. You are still middle-aged, and the creeping feeling of humiliation that trails middle-aged parents will follow you on vacation, too. But there is something you can truly leave behind: the usual foods you eat.
Treats in art and life In Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, Leave the World Behind, a family of four arrives at an Airbnb in the Hamptons, and all kinds of things transpire. But before anything unexpected happens, the mom character, Amanda, goes to the store to stock the house with groceries. If you’ve ever done the vacation-rental shopping, you know the trancelike frenzy of stocking up.
“Don’t you feel like every family has its holiday rites and there’s a certain permissiveness around food?” he wrote. “Lemonade at dinner … potato chips for no reason … one of the reasons I was so gung ho about food in the kids’ babyhood was to cultivate this sense that food could offer pleasure!” “We love potato chips on vacation and give ourselves free rein to eat a lot of them. Our baby, almost 1, hasn’t had them yet, but I look forward to that moment. I drink a lot of cans of seltzer. Big jars of cold pickles. Dark, hard, salty big pretzels. My partner loves ice cream, so wherever we are, she looks for ‘best ice cream’ of a town.” —Nico
“My husband’s family is from Chile, where, instead of having a heavy meal at dinnertime, they have what they call ‘oncesita’ . It’s sandwiches and black tea. Maybe coffee, maybe cake. Maaaaaybe some scrambled eggs. It’s light. And the bread is amazing. Sometimes just toasted fresh bread with smashed avocado on top. It sounds like nothing special, but it’s so freaking good. That’s what I think of when I think of vacation food.