George H.W. Bush Famously Hated This Food
Eating is a distinctly individual thing. People have their own preferences, and what tastes delicious to one person might taste awful to another. Trying to balance meals around an entire family's wants is the stuff of nightmares for many parents. There are a ton of suggestions on how to get kids to eat their vegetables, as suggested by Children's Health. While that advice is well-meaning, oftentimes when one complains, the usual refrain is "Try it... you might like it!" There might also be mention of starving children in other countries who would love to eat what is right there on the table. Usually that or a stern glare is enough to get the complainer to at least put a morsel in their mouth. It works, unless a public figure does something that undercuts the whole thing. Like maybe the leader of the free world at the time.
That's exactly what happened here. Forget any foreign or domestic policy issues — President George H.W. Bush made life a great more difficult for families at dinnertime when he loudly eschewed eating a certain food that, while technically extremely healthy, was not the greatest-tasting to many. Yes, he threw broccoli under the bus.
Barbara Bush liked broccoli
President George H.W. Bush was not shy about his dislike for this cruciferous vegetable, per The Washington Post. He told the press and they ran with it. People who are old enough to remember can visualize him saying this and even commenting, "I am the president of the United States and I am not going to eat any more broccoli!" Imagine the horror on the face of any parent with a forkful of it in front of their child when he said that. "If the president doesn't like it, then I definitely don't want it!"
His wife, Barbara Bush, was on the other side, though. When farmers sent a lot of broccoli to the White House to protest the president's statements, the first lady said she was going to make a lot of different broccoli dishes. Their disagreement didn't seem to affect their relationship, since they stayed married until her death in 2018, per Biography.
The former president kept his sense of humor about the whole thing, even playfully tweaking a 5-year-old on Twitter, per CNN. Overall, his dislike of broccoli didn't impact his health as he lived to be 94, per Britannica. Perhaps he substituted other healthy foods in its place.