Trojan Veggies

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"The apples stewed with prunes are excellent, except for the prunes. I won't eat prunes myself. Well, there was one time when Hobb chopped them up with chestnuts and carrots and hid them in a hen. Never trust a cook, my lord. They'll prune you when you least expect it."

— Dolorous Edd, A Dance with Dragons

Every parent ever knows the struggle of trying to get their kid to eat a healthy amount of vegetables at the dinner table. The problem is that most vegetables are naturally bitter, and kids hate bitter flavors (scientifically, their tastebuds are more sensitive to bitterness than adults). But there are foods that kids do like to eat: macaroni, pizza, chicken nuggets, etc. The solution? Hide the vegetables inside a more appealing food, usually meat- or sweets-based, so the flavor of the preferred food will cover up the bitterness, or the kid sees their favorite food, goes "Score!" and shovels it down without thinking too hard about what went into it. This is usually done by chopping the vegetables into very small, fine pieces, grinding them up, or blending them into a liquid or a purée, and then mixing them up into another dish (for example, a soup or stew) as it's being cooked.

Variations:

• The parents don't hide the food in anything but call it a different name that sounds more appealing to get the child to eat it. However, this usually only works with very young children, not that it stops some adults from trying it with older children anyway.
• The same trick is used to cover the taste of Foul Medicine or anything else that needs to be ingested but tastes bad. Pets are especially resistant to taking medicine and often have to be tricked into eating it.
• This trope can be Played for Laughs if the parent is really bad at hiding the vegetables — for example, sticking an entire, intact head of broccoli into a bread roll.
• The veggie-hater is an adult instead of a child and someone resorts to hiding vegetables in their food, characterizing them as a manchild.
• A vegetarian/vegan character tries to prove that not all veggies are Disgusting Vegetarian Food by preparing "regular" food for someone and then revealing it was vegetarian after they've finished eating it. (Please do not try this in real life, because there is a risk that you may accidentally give someone food with an ingredient they're allergic to. Wheat, soy, and nuts, three of the most common vegetarian staples, are also common allergies.)

This trope and Greens Precede Sweets are related sub-tropes of Kids Hate Vegetables. Also compare Slipping a Mickey and Tampering with Food and Drink for more dramatic tropes about sneaking things into food and drink. Contrast Discreet Dining Disposal, if a child attempts to pretend to eat veggies while trying to dispose of them. If the child is told about what they ate afterwards or discovers the deception on their own, they may react with a Spit Take, "Et Tu, Brute?" or "I Ate WHAT?!."

And no, kids. This "Trojan" is neither about a computer virus added in those vegetables, nor those rubber balloons your parents talk about before they "wrestle" in their bedroom.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In one commercial for Sara Lee Bread, a mom is taking her son's "restaurant order" and he requests a sandwich with no veggies. She gives a knowing look to the camera before making him a sandwich with Sara Lee White Bread Made with Veggies, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. As he doesn't know the bread has vegetables in it, he loves the sandwich.
• A set of commercials for Chef Boyardee has a boy's mother trying to silence someone else (in one, the boy's father; in another, a store sample clerk), preventing them from letting slip that the can of ravioli contains a full serving of vegetables (i.e. to allow her son to enjoy the pasta without being disgusted).
• One ad made by Tesco for their Food Love Stories series shows a middle-aged woman preparing a meal for her grandson, cutting up vegetables and mentioning his dislike for each one, before making a soup from them and saying that the grandson does love "Nana's Magic Soup," and when she brings the soup into the dining room, he immediately thanks her and takes it without hesitation.

Anime & Manga

• Discussed in Good Luck Girl!. Momiji's method for giving Ichiko a magic necklace to stop her from absorbing other people's happiness energy is compared to this trope.
• The second half of Ojamajo Doremi's third season involves this in order to break the vegetable-hating curse cast on Hana.
• In Chapter 6 of Sweetness & Lightning (Episode 4 of the anime adaptation), Kohei receives a lot of vegetables from his coworker and grandmother that he wishes to incorporate into his dishes, including bell peppers. His daughter Tsumugi hates them (much like Kohei did in his youth), which Kohei knows about but doesn't want to waste the veggies. Kotori then decides to incorporate them into a baked gratin, where the diced veggies will have their taste covered by a béchamel sauce, cheese, and cherry tomatoes (Tsumugi's favorite food). The gratin is able to make her eat at least some of the bell peppers, though when Tsumugi offers a bite of her portion to Kohei, he immediately recognizes that Tsumugi hid a lot of them under the cheese. He notes that it's at least a step and they'll go at it slowly.
• In Yume no Crayon Oukoku, the Princess Silver's favorite food, her mother's vegetable rolls, include one of the vegetables she hates the most (asparagus) in it as a secret ingredient. As Silver is a staunch hater of any green food, it's implied that the Queen did this to not only give her a good snack but also to make her eat her vegetables properly.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: Because Calvin is an extremely picky eater, his parents lying about the ingredients of dinner to get him interested in eating it is a Running Gag.
  • In one strip, a disgusted Calvin asks what his mom is cooking for dinner. While the dish is actually stuffed peppers, Calvin's mom says that she's stewing monkey heads to get Calvin to be interested in trying them. It works but unfortunately Calvin's dad has now been put off his food.
  • In another one, Calvin refuses to eat a plate of "green stuff." His dad sneakily says that it's a plate of toxic waste that will turn him into a mutant if he eats it. He gobbles it all up in a single panel.
    Calvin's Mom: There has got to be a better way to make him eat!
    Calvin: Ahhhh...I can feel it working...
• Garfield: In one Sunday strip, Jon disguises a dish of liver for Garfield by covering it with ice cream and calling it "Sweet Surprise." Unfortunately, the Genre Savvy fat cat realizes what's going on and gives Jon a surprise of his own by hurling the liver at his head.

Fanfiction

• In the Pokémon fanfic "I Will Touch the Skies - A Pokemon Fanfiction", Grace has purchased some vitamins to help get her Pokémon stronger. However, her Togetic is a Picky Eater, preferring to eat only Oran Berries, so she has to crush up the berries and hide the powder within to get her Togetic to eat it. It's noted that Togetic was eyeing the food suspiciously, but ate it anyway, helped by the fact that vitamins don't taste like anything in this fanfic.

Films — Live-Action

• Po from A Boy Called Po is autistic and won't eat anything but mac 'n' cheese, so his dad secretly mixes vegetables into the macaroni.

Literature

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • Dog Days reveals that Rowley's mom is, according to Greg, "one of those moms who sneaks healthy food into your snacks". She puts spinach in her brownies, but she doesn't hide them very well, as Greg can immediately tell they have spinach in them when he takes a bite. The first time Rowley had a regular brownie was at Greg's house, and he spits it out in surprise.
  • In Cabin Fever, the middle school replaces the unhealthy food in the cafeteria with healthier food. The French fries are replaced with something called "Extreme Sports Stix," but everyone quickly realizes they're just sliced carrots.
  • In "Old School", Greg and Rowley try to sell ordinary water by calling it "NRG Fitness Water".
• Gregory, the Terrible Eater: When Gregory the goat refuses to eat trash and only wants to eat human food, Dr. Ram recommends to his parents that they start small and give him a new food each day. Over the next few days, Gregory's mom makes spaghetti with a shoelace, string beans mixed with a rubber heel cut into small pieces, vegetable soup in a can (but he also has to eat the can) and ice cream (but he also has to eat the carton).
• Invoked in the kid's lit novella Liver Cookies. The deuteragonists decide that if healthy food tastes awful, and junk food tastes good, the solution is to hide the dreadful tasting health food in great-tasting junk food, coming up with the "company name" of HJ (short for "Healthy Junk"). The male half of the pairing comes up with the idea after having to eat liver and onions for supper and being given a cookie for dessert. The resultant cookies taste alright at first, but have liver's distinctive aftertaste.
• Ramona Quimby:
  • In Ramona and Her Father, after Picky-picky the cat eats the family's Halloween jack-o-lantern, Mrs. Quimby saves the remains of the pumpkin for next week's dinners. The family soon gets sick of pumpkin pie and pumpkin custard; Beezus confesses to Ramona that she thinks their mother tried to hide pumpkin in the meatloaf, but she wasn't sure because everything was all mixed together.
  • In "Ramona and Her Mother", the Quimby sisters get served tongue, which they hate. The next morning, their parents grind up the leftovers and put them into sandwiches for the girls, trying to trick them by adding pickle relish. The girls aren't fooled, but they eat the sandwiches anyway in an attempt to evade punishment by being "extra good".
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Dolorous Edd, a steward of the Night's Watch, hates prunes and recalls one meal where Three-Finger Hobb chopped up some prunes and hid them in a hen with chestnuts and carrots.
• Warrior Cats: According to Secrets of the Clans, Brambleberry, a RiverClan medicine cat, came up with a way to hide bitter-tasting medicinal herbs inside the bodies of freshly killed prey in order to get sick kits to eat them.
• Elderly male goblins in Snuff were dying of rabbit starvation until their wives began hiding fruit and veg in the rabbit stew. The males thought their improved health was due to magic.
  • Another Discworld book, Making Money, has an inversion, both that it's being done by the kid and that the veggies are hiding something else: Moist hated liver and other offal, and always hid it under his vegetable or potato so his parents wouldn't know he wasn't eating it.
• In Stupid Carrots, a young rabbit girl named Betty is sick of carrots but at the same time very hungry, so she's in a bad mood. Her parents blend the carrots into a soup to get her to eat them, which they call "Yummy Soup".

Live-Action TV

• Good Eats:
  • In "Undercover Veggies," Alton makes three dishes with parsnips hidden in them to win a bet against his veggie-averse, but highly perceptive, niece that he could get her to ask for seconds of vegetables before her visit with him was over.
  • In "Give Peas a Chance," Alton disguises some peas as a hamburger patty, but then also advises against disguising vegetables on general principle because kids won't go on to eat them regularly if they don't know that they're eating them.
• Modern Family: In the episode "Arrested", Cam, who recently took a vegan cooking class, makes Alex and Luke "faux-con", bacon made out of soy, for breakfast in an effort to prove to Mitch (who hates faux-con and was easily able to tell the difference between it and real bacon) that it's just as good as real bacon. While the kids initially enjoy it and don't notice the difference until Cam tells them, Luke, unfortunately, turns out to be highly allergic to soy and has to be taken to the hospital.
• Parks and Recreation:
  • A deleted scene reveals Leslie and Ben use this on their children, such as putting broccoli into their mac and cheese. Ben also reveals in that same scene he does the same to Leslie, prompting her to send the kids to (playfully) attack him.
  • Ron's Trademark Favorite Food is steak and is practically the embodiment of the Real Men Eat Meat trope. Thus, when he tries to eat a banana, he's barely able to stomach it until he slices it up and puts it into a hamburger.

Video Games

• Shining Resonance: Kirika (a grown woman, by the by) absolutely despises carrots. Agnum makes it a lifelong mission to get her to eat them somehow, resorting to cutting them up smaller and smaller. However, Kirika is extremely sensitive to the taste of carrot, and even magicks the extremely fine chopped carrot out of a plate of stew at one point.

Web Animation

• Fizzy's Lunch Lab: In one episode, Professor Fizzy is visited by a food critic named Nelly Nitpick who doesn't like vegetables. He gives her a burger and she likes it. Fizzy then tells Nelly that it was a black bean burger. At first she is disgusted, but Nelly really likes the black bean burger anyway.

Web Comics

• The "Angery" one-shot comic, originally posted on Facebook in 2016, begins with Meme Man receiving an order of a "steank with NO VEGETALS." When he is just about to take a bite of meat, Green de la Bean (an anthropomorphic green bean) appears saying "did someone said NO VEGETALS?" and takes a running leap into Meme Man's mouth. Meme Man then says "i taste a VEGETAL" and, in the final panel, "ANGERY" with Glowing Eyes of Doom and a fiery background.
• Vegan Artbook: In this◊ strip, Brie/Plausibel tricks some non-vegans into eating vegan food by pretending some unknown vegan dish is chicken.

Web Original

• On this Aha Parenting article, a woman named Lisa has a daughter who she's trying to wean. The owner of the website suggests making the milk in the cup special by dyeing it blue and calling it her "special milk"... however, when Lisa tries it, the girl realises that the dyed milk tastes no different from normal milk and refuses to drink it.
• Neopets: The description of the Pea and Carrot-Stuffed Turkey is "If your Neopet won't eat their veggies, you might want to try this dish."

Western Animation

• Angela Anaconda: In the episode "Broccoli-Fest", when Angela's friends are trying to get her to like broccoli, Johnny goes first. He gives Angela a slice of pepperoni pizza, which Angela is excited to eat until she sees the piece of broccoli that Johnny hid in it.
• Arthur: In "D.W. the Picky Eater", Arthur and Buster give D.W. a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and she eats it. D.W. learns that the boys tricked her by putting spinach in the sandwich to get her to like it, only for her to spit it out. At the end of the episode, D.W. eats a Little Bo Peep Pot Pie and she loves it. It is revealed that the pie has spinach in it, which she admits that she now loves.
• Big City Greens: In “Tilly Style”, after growing too much zucchini, Bill can’t sell it all and is forcing his family to eat the surplus. After nearly a full week of this Cricket refuses to eat anymore and goes on a hunger strike. Bill tries to get him to cave by offering him a burger, fries, and a cake… made entirely out of zucchini. Cricket, of course, isn’t fooled for a moment since all three are bright green.
• Charlie and Lola: In "I Will Not Ever, Never, Eat a Tomato", Lola refuses to eat any of the foods on her plate, so Charlie tricks her into eating it by pretending it comes from silly places like outer space or the clouds and giving it wacky names.
• Dexter's Laboratory: In "Dexter's Lab: A Story", Dexter adopts a dog and invents a pill that will allow it to talk. He hides it in the bottom of the dog's food bowl, but the dog eats all of the food without touching the pill, so Dexter forces him to swallow it.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): A self-inflicted example in "Beat Your Greens". The children of Townsville are fighting an alien invasion of Broccoloids, which are broccoli-like aliens that can only be destroyed by eating them. When the Broccoloids invade the town, the children pour giant vats of melted cheese all over them before devouring them alive.
• The Simpsons:
  • Inverted in the episode "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge", in which Marge reveals that she secretly adds meat juices to the vegetables she cooks for Lisa (who is vegetarian).
  • In the tie-in book The Marge Book, Marge discusses how she makes her children eat their vegetables. One method is the "sneak attack when they get a snack attack" — namely by replacing the peanuts in Snickers bars with celery and green peppers, alternating the candy in PEZ dispensers with jicama cubes, and coloring soybeans and hiding them in bags of M&Ms.
  • In "She Used to Be My Girl", Marge tries to help Bart administer a pill to Santa's Little Helper the dog by wrapping it in cheese, but Homer eats the "free cheese" instead.
• In one episode of The World of David the Gnome, Lisa reveals that David refuses to eat dandelion greens despite their health benefits, so she sometimes hides them in other foods.

Real Life

• The cookbook Deceptively Delicious is a guide to getting your children to eat vegetables like this. They are basically kid-friendly recipes with vegetable purées mixed in — enough to be healthy and add more nutrients, but not enough to overpower the more familiar, easy-to-eat flavors. The author, Jessica Seinfeld (wife of Jerry Seinfeld), came up with the idea one day when she was puréeing butternut squash for her then-infant son, Shepherd, and making mac and cheese for the rest of the family. After noticing the two dishes were a similar shade of yellow, she had the idea to stir a small amount of the puréed squash into the mac and cheese, which her older two children happily ate without noticing.
• This article talks about the potential benefits and drawbacks of hiding vegetables in your child's food. On one hand, it helps them eat more nutritious food and reduces stress for parents by preventing arguments at the dinner table about having to eat vegetables. On the other, hiding vegetables in food is more effort for the parents, doesn't teach kids to actually like the vegetables themselves, and may cause trust issues if the kid finds out their parents have been tricking them into eating vegetables they hate.
• This sippy cup is designed to help small children take medicine. It is designed with a secret compartment under the lid, so that when a child drinks from it, the medicine goes down first, followed by their favorite juice.
• Donald Trump is notorious for his hatred of vegetables, which created some concerns during his Presidency, as Presidents are supposed to meet a certain standard of fitness. At least one of his former physicians has admitted that they had to resort to hiding vegetables in his food to try and bring his weight under control. There was also considerable concern during his trip to India in 2020, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a vegetarian and Trump's favorite foods, like steak and burgers, are hard to come by in a country where cows are revered.
• This story on Reddit tells about a parent who made strawberry smoothies for breakfast, only for one of the children to get upset because he dislikes strawberries (despite apparently eating them all the time), and instead wants a blueberry smoothie. The parent claimed that the smoothies were actually blueberry smoothies despite them not actually being any different from the strawberry smoothies, and the child enjoyed the smoothies until being told that he was tricked. The parent "fixed" the smoothies by adding blueberries (which were actually blackberries) to the smoothie, and the child enjoyed the smoothies once again.
• In the 1970s, American Kitchen came out with a line of French-fry/vegetable hybrids called "I Hate _________" (Peas, Corn, Carrots, etc.). They weren’t around very long.
• Brandon Sanderson tells anecdotes about his wife hiding veggies in his children’s smoothies and enticing them to drink them because, "They're green, like boogers!"
• "Pill pocket" treats are designed to get pets to take pills by hiding them in the hollow center. Even without customized treats, it's common to hide pills from pets by placing them in a slice of hot dog, wrapping them in cheese, coating them in peanut butter, or some other way of disguising the flavor. There are also plenty of examples of the dog finding the pill and spitting it out anyway.
• In this story from FMyLife.com, someone fed their husband a vegan beef burger without telling him what it was so they could show him that it tasted exactly the same as a real beef burger. It did not work; after taking a single bite, he spat it across the kitchen because he thought the meat had expired.
• Supposedly, this is the origin of Kongen af Danmark (lit. "King of Denmark"), an aniseed-flavored Danish hard candy. One day, King Christian V had throat pains, and was prescribed aniseed oil by his doctor. He didn't like the taste, so the doctor blended it with sugar and a small amount of beetroot juice.

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