The Food Our Children Eat: How to Get Children to Like Good Food. Joanna Blythman
and ubiquitous. Food that does nothing to extend their horizons. Food that poses no new challenge whatsoever.
Most parents recognise that the food in such establishments is not that great – downright unhealthy even – but, under pressure to find a place that makes it easy to eat out with our children, we convince ourselves that it doesn’t really matter.
After all, children don’t live on restaurant food. Yes, we know that it is full of fat and sugar and heavily processed. As adults, we suspect that the raw materials are not exactly the finest around but, once in a while, what’s the problem? The food is affordable and even though there may be little or nothing we ourselves want to eat, these restaurants are convenient and children seem to like them and see visiting them as a treat.
But are they really such a treat for children? They may say they like eating out in this sort of place, even plead to be taken there, but we need to meet this almost inevitable positive response with a large element of scepticism. For many children, such establishments cannot help being anything but a treat simply because they are the only restaurants to which they are ever taken. Eating out – wherever it is and in whatever circumstances – is always going to be more exciting for a child than just another meal at home.
If we examine what the children actually eat when they visit these restaurants, their enthusiasm for the food may be illusory. A significant part of the meal may end up uneaten because the anticipation is more fulfilling than the reality. The food element may often be ignored in favour of more rewarding diversions, such as playing with the free toy, making endless trips to the toilet, playing in the ‘kiddie playpark’ outside, or watching the toddler at the next booth who has got his head stuck under the table.
We need to address not just the limitations of children’s experience in such restaurants but also the potential breadth of experience on which they are missing out. If this is the only kind of restaurant that children visit, they are getting no taste for the fascinating world of food that lies beyond their own homes. They are deprived of the opportunity of being seduced into trying something new just because it sounds, looks and smells fantastic – something different which extends their domestic food horizons.
When they are taken only to busy, fast-food outlets, they are also isolated from the stimulating sociability of sitting in a restaurant and the chance to enjoy the slower ritual which surrounds the delightful process of eating. Like keen readers stuck for ever on the same formula-book series, they are being denied the chance to discover something initially more demanding but ultimately much more fulfilling.
In fact, confining children only to formula ‘child-friendly’ restaurants is a huge missed opportunity. Handled well, most children can rise to the challenge of eating in a real restaurant serving real food. Even if a taste of real adult eating out is only a rare treat for a special occasion, it can nevertheless be one of the most effective ways of widening children’s food horizons and combating the ‘tunnel effect’ described on pages 71–3.
In the right restaurant, under the right circumstances, even the most conservative child can learn to eat more adventurously than anyone might expect, and the more open-minded child will relish the opportunity. Turn to pages 226–31, The Fascinating World of Restaurant Food, for ideas about how to make the most of eating out and ensure that restaurant-going is a happy experience all round.
When we decide that we aren’t going to give in to the prevailing defeatism that says children will eat only junk, we make an important commitment to feeding them well. But in a world where children are under constant pressure to eat badly, how can we carve out a different path?
One common approach is to continue with the structure of modern children’s food but try to change the content so that it is healthier and more acceptable. The idea is that children will think they are getting the undesirable things they want but, in reality, we are giving them something better.
The classic example here is the ‘healthy lollipop’. These are marketed as better for children because they are flavoured with fruit juice, tinted with natural rather than artificial colours and use artificial sweeteners instead of sugar. But are they really such an improvement? The proportion of fruit juice in them may be very small indeed and, as discussed on pages 6–7, although they do not attack tooth enamel it is questionable whether artificial sweeteners are desirable in wider health terms. But all that is irrelevant because even if these lollipops did have undisputed plus points over their conventional sugary, synthetic counterparts, there is a problem. We are still encouraging children to think that it’s all right to suck for long periods on something sweet and sticky. Do we really want to give them that message?
The same issue arises with popular foods that have had their original composition altered in line with modern ‘healthy-eating’ thinking. So now we have reduced-sugar baked beans, lower-fat crisps, ‘healthy’ sausages, oven chips, no-added-sugar yogurts, white bread with added fibre and so on. They purport to be better for children, though their merits are highly disputable. Although they might represent some improvement on the original junk food they still cannot measure up to the real thing (unadulterated yogurt, natural wholemeal bread etc.) in nutritional terms. The question remains, is this the kind of food we really want our children to eat or, at the end of the day, are we simply encouraging a slightly more acceptable face of the children’s diet ghetto?
If you analyse this approach, it is basically a slippery slope which attempts to hold the line against out-and-out junk food by curbing its worst excesses. It could produce very small benefits but it remains a defensive strategy, where adults attempt to draw a distinction between what’s not too bad and what’s worse. Now that’s a very difficult line to maintain.
What we need when we decide that we want our children to eat more nutritious food is a positive philosophy that challenges the assumptions on which children’s ghetto-food thinking rests and breaks away from its structures. We want to reverse the existing situation where ‘children’s food’ is shorthand for ‘worst food’. How do we make this happen?
Let’s begin by drawing up a profile of how we want our children to turn out eventually. We want them to:
• Enjoy food and delight in the pleasure of eating.
• Routinely eat a wide and varied range of foods from all food groups (excluding meat and fish if they are vegetarians).
• Select food that is good for them.
This is the opposite of the typical modern children’s diet where children appear to view food as fuel and tend to select a narrow range that is so imbalanced it may even defy the laws of nutrition.
So how should we set about seeing that the children we feed don’t go down this path? The single most important thing we’ll ever do as concerned adults is to adopt a ‘real-food’ approach. This means that we feed our children from as early an age as possible on food that is as fresh, whole and unprocessed as possible.
Of course there can be very few households in the land who are able to avoid processed food altogether. Very few of us have the time, energy or inclination to make all our own jam or bake our own bread, for example. A real-food policy doesn’t mean that we can never buy anything processed or take a short cut, just that the bulk of the food we eat is made up of fresh, unprocessed food that has been cooked at home – however quick and no-frills that cooking might be – and that we read the labels of any packaged foods we do buy to check that all the ingredients are wholesome, i.e. the sort we would use at home.
This doesn’t mean we have to be fanatical. There’s no need to feel a failure if you don’t roll your own pasta, squeeze your own lemonade or stuff your own sausages. It just means that, time and energy allowing, we favour home-made food. This needn’t be oppressively time-consuming. It takes very little more effort