Here's something you probably wouldn't expect to hear from a 2-year-old.

"I want more kale, mama," Luca Giuffrida said at the dinner table.

Luca's mother, Denise Giuffrida, is a St. Louis University-trained actress who attended the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York City while pursuing her acting career. (Theater fans in St. Louis might remember her as Denise Roemerman from her work with Metro Theater Company, the New Theatre, the Black Rep and other local companies in the 1980s and '90s.)

Like many actresses, she also worked in restaurants. That's where she met her husband, Steve, who was a chef at Isabella's on Manhattan's Upper West Side when Denise was working there as a waitress.

About a year after Luca was born — and in part because the restaurant where Steve Giuffrida was working burned down — the couple moved to St. Louis to be close to Denise's family.

"He's a native New Yorker," she says. "I think there's been a bit of culture shock."

Steve Giuffrida got a job as a chef for Compass Group, a corporate foodservice company. He oversees the executive dining room, employee cafes and in-house catering at Wells Fargo in midtown St. Louis.

Denise Giuffrida's nutritional training helped to nurture Luca's precocious eating preferences.

"I made all his baby food when he was an infant," she says. "Instead of toys, I'd sometimes give him an orange or a sweet potato to try to get him to think about it as the fruit or vegetable of the day."

Luca soon could help with kneading bread and other simple cooking tasks.

"Lately he's gotten into cracking eggs — almost on his own, although I keep a hand in there just in case," Giuffrida says. "He also likes to count the number of spoonfuls we put into things. It's really quite educational."

On the grow-your-own front, the family started a small garden on their deck.

"He's been so excited to help Daddy with the tomato plants and strawberry plants," Giuffrida says. "I want him to understand that we can eat the food we grow on the deck — it doesn't have to come from a box or a can."

She also insists on healthy snacks. One of their favorites is a muffin recipe that's adaptable to the ingredients she has on hand.

"We just went to Eckert's to go peach picking, so when we came back, we made peach muffins," she says.

That really doesn't explain, however, why a 2-year-old would ask for more kale.

"I'm passionate about how we feed our kids," Denise says. "From the time he started eating solid food, I fed him a wide variety of food so he'd get used to a wide range of flavors and textures. I guess it worked — he'll eat just about anything."