Parenting & Family Quote by Marian Burros

“Fish sticks and beef stew that millions of children love to hate” is a journalist’s neat little trap: it sounds like a throwaway gag, but it’s really a cultural diagnosis smuggled in as a punchline. Burros leans on a sly paradox - “love to hate” - to capture how institutional food becomes a shared ritual of complaint. Kids aren’t just rejecting taste; they’re participating in a kind of low-stakes civic identity. Everyone knows the script: the tray, the steam-table smell, the mushy carrots, the rubbery breading. Disgust becomes bonding.

The specific intent is to describe familiar cafeteria fare, but the line’s real engine is its mass scale. “Millions” turns private pickiness into a national pattern, implying these dishes aren’t merely unpopular; they’re icons of a system designed for efficiency, cost, and compliance rather than pleasure. Fish sticks and beef stew aren’t chosen because they delight children, but because they survive freezing, reheating, and bureaucracy. The food is engineered for logistics, and the kids’ reaction is the predictable backlash.

There’s also a soft critique of nostalgia. Adults often romanticize “the way we ate,” yet the quote suggests that some of the most remembered foods are remembered precisely because they were endured. Burros isn’t sentimental; she’s pointing at how public institutions normalize mediocrity, then act surprised when the audience learns to perform its dissatisfaction.