Parents, don’t give your kids the good stuff. Stick to junk food. Otherwise, this could happen to you.

Last night I was rereading a great little essay by Lucian K. Truscott IV about pancakes. It appears in Best Food Writing 2003. Basically the piece is just about Truscott making pancakes for his daughter and son, but it has many charming bits, such as the fact that he calls his son Five.

I resolved that I would make pancakes for Iris this morning. I woke up with a 101 fever and generally feeling like a pancake myself. But dammit, we were going to have pancakes even if I had to order them from the hospital cafeteria. Iris woke up at 7:30, and I went in and said, “Hey, Iris, how would you like some pancakes this morning? And some bacon?”

“Nueske’s,” said Iris.

“We don’t have any Nueske’s today, just Farmland.”

I tried to change the subject by telling Iris I was feeling sick but that I’d taken some medicine. “So you’re all better now,” she said.

So I made the pancakes and a few strips of bacon. Inevitably, Iris ate a whole pancake, but she took a couple bites of bacon and said, “Dada, this bacon doesn’t taste good.”

Maybe I could teach her to recognize a dozen types of bacon by taste, and she could be the spokeskid for the Bacon of the Month Club.