Mother’s Day Special: Eating, Love and a Little Loss of Control

What is it like raising a fussy eater? When a child won’t eat properly, what exactly are mothers so anxious about?

In this Mother’s Day special, we start with fussy eaters, but our conversation quickly moves beyond pickiness, feeding routines, and menu planning to explore intergenerational memories, women’s labour, intimate relationships, and self-identity. Three mothers share everything from childhood trauma over only eating dumpling wrappers, to breaking down over a single rice ball, to the binge-eating rebound of a teenager, as we unpack the complex emotions behind something as simple as a family meal. Perhaps the issue has never really been about whether the child eats, but how we learn to navigate uncertainty, failure, and expectation in the journey of raising them.

This goes beyond a story of honing cooking skills; it is a deep conversation about the pressures of motherhood and women supporting one another. You will hear how mothers play the role of ‘anthropologists’ conducting fieldwork in restaurants, how they navigate the anxiety sparked by social media and expert advice, and, most importantly, how to make sure they are fed themselves before catering to the fussy eater.

01:26 Why are we talking about “fussy eaters” on Mother’s Day?

02:35 A child who only eats dumpling wrappers uncovers a thirty-year-old memory and its lingering scars.

03:44 When a child turns their nose up at food, is it sheer stubbornness, or a heightened sensitivity to “good flavours”?

09:25 Dual-income parenting in Singapore: when the “rice ball trial” falls flat and meets a hands-off husband, a mother’s breaking point is only a hair’s breadth away.

13:41 Will it just get better as they grow up? Not really! The sweet burden of a teen “eating dinner three times a day”.

19:14 Cooking is far from just physical labour; it’s also invisible emotional labour and the management of expectations.

22:52 How does “scientific” feeding create anxiety? The fear of being governed by growth charts: that handheld food scale, and the plummeting percentages.

34:06 Passing the torch: why my mother wouldn’t let me in the kitchen, yet still expected me to carry on her cooking skills.

42:00 A mother’s quiet selfishness: when the children are away, we can finally have a meal with a proper kick of spice.

51:53 Why do modern tomatoes taste like rubber? How industrialised ingredients affect a child’s appetite.

62:09 Perhaps the point of cooking isn’t to coax an extra bite out of a child, but to convey a sense of being loved.

63:45 Even Lu Xun used to sneak his children’s pastries! You need to eat well yourself first, to be a good mother.