If feeding picky eaters weren’t my job I’d say there’s a crisis brewing in the Friedman household: one of my kids is ending his love affair with pasta.

No, pasta’s not the most nutritious food in the world, but versatile? Convenient? It’s up there.

Which is why I loved this parent question👇🏼

Food chaining is a GREAT idea, and it shouldn’t be your only focus when introducing new foods.

A Dietitian’s 3-Step Approach to Helping Extreme Picky Eaters Try New Foods

Here’s my 3-step approach that you can use to help your picky eater get closer to eating any new food, including pasta and noodles.

1. Exposure, Exposure, Exposure

(Because Exposure = Familiarity = Comfort → Eating!)

Meals are not always the best place to introduce new foods, even if you’re offering them with a “you don’t have to eat it.”

Instead of battling it out at the table or pretending you don’t care if they take a bite (when really that’s all you can think about), bring pasta into their world outside of mealtimes.

This is a core strategy I use almost universally because it allows your child to engage with the food (which prepares their body for eating) without any pressure or expectation to actually eat in the moment.

Here are 5 simple ways to introduce pasta outside of mealtimes:

📌 Scavenger Hunt – Challenge them to find crazy shapes at the grocery store or let them pick out whatever catches their eye (bow ties? wheels? dinosaurs?).
📌 Pasta Art – Make necklaces or collages with cooked and uncooked pasta. Color on lasagna with markers.
📌 Pasta Sensory Bin – Play with cooked or dry pasta using cool tools and their favorite toys.
📌 Story Time – Read a pasta-themed book together (recommendation #1 and #2).
📌 Color & Chat– Use a pasta coloring book to spark conversation and answer questions.

2. Make Pasta the Natural Next Step with a Food Bridge

Food bridging is like a stepping stone path—each step is familiar to the one before and leads your child closer to the new food.

You can learn my full step-by-step method with the *free* Foolproof Food Bridging Guide, but here’s how I’d go about food bridging carbs like bread or bagels to pasta:

Bread or bagel 👉🏻 tortilla 👉🏻 lasagna noodles 👉🏻 linguine 👉🏻 pasta shape of their choice

You could also incorporate cheese at any stage of the above or try something else like:

Grilled cheese 👉🏻 cheesy toast 👉🏻 melted cheese over lasagna 👉🏻 mac n cheese

Building successful food bridges is all about incremental, familiar changes, and when coupled with other strategies, they can ease the transition to new foods (while simultaneously boosting your child’s flexibility with new foods — it’s so cool).

3. Get Hands-On (No Pressure, Just Play!)

Here’s the thing: before a food ever makes it to your child’s mouth, it has to feel safe. And for kids who are hesitant about new textures and flavors, safety is the ultimate step of a steep learning curve .

The way to build up to comfortable eating? Get your child touching, squishing, stacking, smelling, and even wearing pasta—no pressure to eat, just pure child-led fun.

Try things like:

✨ Pasta Rainbows – Sort cooked pasta by color and make creative designs (spinach, tomato, and traditional).
✨ Pasta Patterns – Make murals with different shapes.
✨ Toot Your Own Horn – Blow through ziti or rigatoni like a horn or wear them as extra long fingers.
✨ Wearable Spaghetti – Drape cooked spaghetti like jewelry—necklaces, bracelets—or even a mustache.

Why this works: When kids play with a food, their brain gets to know it (it literally builds pathways of recognition) and registers it as safe. And once a food feels safe, it’s more likely to make it into their mouth on their terms. This is how we build the motivation to eat without pressure.

Recap

With the right approach, even the most averse kids can take their first (or second, or tenth) step toward eating noodles (or any new food!).

(And as for my former pasta fanatic? We’re working on it, one pressure-free exposure at a time.)

What’s Next?

If you want to go even deeper into these principles so you can finally get your kid comfortably trying nutritious new foods, I’ve created a free masterclass where I walk you through my full process for getting picky eaters to accept new foods—without battles, bribes, or meltdowns.

Grab it here → Peace OUT Picky Eating