Crust or No Crust?

I suppose I'm starting another theme pertaining to hypothetical questions, but this one has come up recently as a model of the slightly different parenting styles of my wife and I. It concerns a question that has been plaguing kids for centuries.

Why does bread have crust and why do I have to eat it?

The answer I explained to my daughter. The crust is the outside of the bread that gets the most heat when it gets baked, therefore it's darker. That's it. It doesn't taste different than the rest of the bread. However, kids don't choose food on taste alone. Texture, specifically whether it smells/feels/looks yucky determines whether they eat food. So with boiled whole potatoes, I take off the skin. With broccoli, only the crowns are eaten, not the stems. When I made my daughter her first peanut butter sandwich, she didn't want the crust, so I politely cut them off for her. When my wife made a peanut butter sandwich, my daughter asked for crust removal and my wife refused. I had set a bad precedent. Now we give her the whole sandwich, but she eats everything but the crust. Either way it gets wasted.

To me, you have to pick your battles with kids. It takes all of five seconds to cut the crusts off, and if I remember right I didn't like them when I was a kid either, so my Mom cut them off for me, too. After a while, I got over my "crusts are yucky" phase and learned to enjoy them. I would rather battle with my daughter about not hitting her brother and going to bed on time. My wife, on the other hand, views it annoying that she is asked to do this in effort to encourage our daughter to get over her reticence about certain foods. She's already a picky enough eater that we don't have to indulge this as well.

I suppose this comes down to the difference between my wife's personality and mine; I'm easygoing and she's pragmatic, though not harsh. However, she can also be easygoing and funloving with the kids, and I can be pretty stern with them as well. I'm a heavy-thinking person, I always have a lot of mental gravitas on my plate and need to do something simple for my kids to get me out of that. I think kids like a little indulgence, but in the long run it may catch up with me. Next my teenaged daughter is going to ask whether she can stay out late with her friends, to which I'd respond 'no', and she'll say: "But you used to be nice to me and cut the crust off my bread!"