Eat the food I give you or starve

I don't understand why my children won't eat the food I give them. Last night, before heading off to a women's book group, my wife made turkey sandwiches with pita bread and pepper-jack cheese. In the context of the sandwich, the cheese wasn't spicy, but Dec and Sul wouldn't touch the sandwiches on the chance that it might be disgusting. Mad's encouragement that it wasn't so bad, didn't even phase them. Of course, Can didn't eat the waffle and syrup that was offered him either. He got waffle because he eats little else, when he does eat, and we have no way to coerce him into eating anyway. With the bigs, at least we can threaten the loss of video games or no dessert. I tried the "nothing else to eat for the rest of the night" line and they jumped at the chance to avoid the pita, perhaps thinking that I would forget before the night was through. Without Mom's support for battle and given the rapidity with which they accepted my initial terms, I could see that there was no way I would prevail in getting the food down their throats, so I ended up throwing away the pita sandwiches (and the waffle). I briefly considered giving them a "we'll put them in the fridge and you can have them for breakfast" but I knew that I would not be around when they were pouring big bowls of sugar coated cereal and mocking me for my tyranical statements, so I just let the food go to waste. Later, as we were doing the dishes for the meal that we didn't really eat, I came across Mad's lunch box and realized that it still had food in it. Upon opening it I found an untouched ham sandwich, on regular bread, and a container of fruit. As expected, there were no cookies, donuts, granola bars or pretzels left. Unfortunately, the ham sandwich had been sitting around all day and so I didn't feel it was safe to save it for tomorrow's lunch. Another meal in the trash. By this time I was pretty fed up, so I left it on the counter for Mom to discover and I decreed that he would get only a sandwich and fruit tomorrow for lunch. I just don't understand why it is so hard to get kids to eat. I bet that if they went a week without food, they would love a little pita and pepper jack. Of course, then they would be living with foster parents when the state took my kids away for trying to teach them not to waste food.