I think I met this woman about 5 years ago.
My son had a feeding tube because of aspiration issues. He loved to eat, desperately wanted to eat, but it wasn't safe to allow him to do so. So for almost 2 years he got about 95% of his calories by tube, and cried whenever he saw someone eat something.
To make matters worse, his feeding team kept changing the few things he was allowed to eat -- so I'd get him used to (and excited to) eat something like say mango slices and he'd get pneumonia and they'd say "no fruit". Or he'd start refluxing and they'd say "maybe it's gluten, stop giving him that".
At one point the list of foods he was allowed to eat were things that had zero fat, zero protein, didn't contain any liquid that might come out when he chewed (so no fruit except for berries and bananas, no vegetables) didn't break into little hard to manage pieces (so no cracker type things), didn't have gluten in them, and weren't pureed texture. If you really think about it the list of things that leaves is very very short.
One day we were at the drug store, he was almost 2 (but looked maybe 13 or 14 months until you saw him move or heard him talk), and I picked up a packet of Skittles for myself (yeah, I know, not healthy -- 100 times worse than pudding!) and realized that it was a safe food (insert major irony here)! Yay, so I bought it and we had the experience of sharing a food -- I could hold it in my hand, let him pick one, smile at each other because it tasted good, talk about it etc . . . As you can appreciate this was a pretty powerful thing -- sharing food like that, even if it was pure junk.
Anyway, another mother walked by -- looked over and saw what we were doing and said, loudly, to no one, "Well, she's certainly not going to win mother of the year!"
