CAMILA ALVES McCONAUGHEY
and ADAM MANSBACH

Serve Up a Picture Book for Picky Eaters

by Melissa Fales

Almost every parent has struggled to get their children to try new, healthy foods. Some parents resort to bribery, others pretend that a loaded fork is an airplane, and some just give up. In her debut picture book, Just Try One Bite, Camila Alves McConaughey offers a twist to this common household battle by making the kids the ones encouraging their parents to sample more nutritious fare. McConaughey teamed up on this project with Adam Mansbach, author of Go the F*** to Sleep, the premier book on another familiar parental problem. McConaughey says Mansbach provided the much-needed comic relief to Just Try One Bite. “Humor was such an important part of this book for me,” she says. “It had to be funny. I didn’t want it to be preachy.”

McConaughey is an actress, model, and the founder of the lifestyle website, Women of Today. Her upbringing in Brazil affected her dietary choices and her lifelong relationship with food in both good and bad ways. “I came from a family of farmers,” she says. “The understanding of food from seed to table was very strong for me. In some ways, we ate very clean.” However, sugar was plentiful. “There was soda on the table all the time,” she says. “We could eat as much dessert as we wanted. And what do I struggle with today? Sugar.” 

Additionally, McConaughey shares that in the past, she was close-minded about eating a certain food, mushrooms. “I couldn’t stand them,” she says. “I couldn’t be paid enough to eat them.” One trip to the Arlo Grey restaurant in Austin, Texas, run by chef Kristen Kish, changed her mind forever. “She made a dish that was so good, I ate the whole plate,” says McConaughey. “I asked her for the recipe, and she said it was basically mushrooms. I was like, ‘Excuse me?’ I learned that it’s not that I don’t like mushrooms, I’d just never had them prepared in a way I liked.”

Now that she’s a mother, McConaughey says she tries to help her children make better choices than she did at their age. “I try to talk them through their decisions,” she says. “My kids play sports, and they see the sports drinks and they want them. I tell them to look at the bottle and tell me what’s in it. Not the package, because that’s just the advertising and marketing. Look at the ingredient panel. Does ‘Red 40’ sound like the stuff we have in our kitchen? Do you even know what that is?”

Mansbach says he was attracted to the Just Try One Bite project because he can relate to the anxiety parents feel about what their kids are and aren’t eating. He has three daughters to feed and keeping up with their dietary requests can be challenging. “The Venn diagram of what everybody eats can get a little thin sometimes,” he says. “And no one’s refusing vegetables or only eating monochromatically, but sometimes something that was everyone’s favorite yesterday is no longer considered acceptable today.”

In 2011, Mansbach’s book, Go The F*** to Sleep hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. “That book was very, very personal,” he says. “I wrote it when my oldest daughter was two. Getting her to go to sleep was a nightly ordeal. I never knew how long it was going to take or what she was going to pull. It was grueling.”  Mansbach, who had a few novels published at the time, said he penned the first draft of Go the F*** to Sleep without any expectation that it would be published. “It was funny to me, and I thought a couple of my friends would appreciate it.” When the opportunity arose, Mansbach read the story at a big family dinner where everyone thought it was hysterical. He kept showing it to people and they kept telling him it was funny.

According to Mansbach, nothing could have prepared him for the book’s success. “Months before it was scheduled to be published, I read it at a museum to a few hundred people,” he says. “The next morning, I thought to check the book’s ranking on Amazon, and it was at number 125 for preorders. None of my novels had ever cracked four digits. By the end of the week, Go The F*** to Sleep was No. 1. Then Samuel Jackson did the audio book and the next thing I knew, I had a worldwide phenomenon.” Ten years later, the book is still being published.  

It was Mansbach who came up with the role reversal idea for Just Try One Bite. “No kid wants to read a book that tells them to eat healthy food, but maybe every kid wants to read a book where the kids harass the parents about how they eat,” he says. Young readers will be amused at how the children are portrayed as smart and authoritative while the parents are shown to have little self-control. “A well-balanced dinner really ought to be more than some French fries you found in your car on the floor,” reads one line the children use to plead with their parents.

Mansbach also worked out the rhymes for the text. “Anytime I get to write rhymes I’m happy,” he says. “My first passion was rapping. I’ve always had a love of word play. The challenge of being funny and trying to convey meaning behind it is exciting for me and it’s not something I get to do frequently.”

McConaughey says Mike Boldt’s illustrations of the multicultural family in Just Try One Bite are just as she’d hoped. They even suggest likenesses of McConaughey’s real-life family with herself, her husband, actor Matthew McConaughey, and their three children. “When you see them at the dinner table, you feel like you’re at the dinner table with them,” she says. “You want to be there with them.”

It’s clear that Just Try One Bite isn’t about eating perfectly balanced meals all the time. “This book isn’t about perfection,” says McConaughey. “I know that’s not ever happening in my household. It’s not saying you can only eat vegetables. In fact, this book tells kids that they can have ice cream. They can have donut holes, just not every day.”

For McConaughey, the fact that she’s co-written a children’s book is still satisfyingly shocking. “If you told me 20 years ago that I was going to have a kids’ book, I would have told you you were out of your mind,” she says. Now that she’s a mom, she sees things differently. “I wanted to write Just Try One Bite because it’s important to start this conversation about food early on,” she says. “If you start talking with your kids about what’s good for them and what’s not, most likely, you’re going to be setting them up for lifelong habits. Eventually we all learn about healthy foods. Why not set kids up with a good foundation to help them make better choices?”