From the category archives:

Brainy

Food literacy, culture and history

Sweet on maple sugaring

March 2, 2011

Fake maple syrup bums me out. And not only because it rarely contains real maple. (Most brands are a mix of high-fructose corn syrup, preservatives and artificial flavors.) It’s because maple syrup is perfect just the way it is. Naturally sweet, it also retains trace vitamins and minerals, even antioxidants. It’s still a sugar, so let’s [...]

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Want kids to eat better?
Stop calling them “picky eaters.”

February 23, 2011

Spend even a few minutes online and you’ll find blogs devoted to sneaky vegetables, artful bento boxes and countless other tricks to make kids eat spinach. Turn on the news, pick up a paper, check Facebook, and you can’t escape talk of school food, Happy Meal toys and the travesty of chocolate milk. Everyone is [...]

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School food with legs: FoodCorps recruiting now

February 11, 2011

Who doesn’t want better school food? (Well, besides these people?) If there’s one food topic that gets heads nodding, it’s that most school kids are being fed government-subsidized junk under the guise of “nutrition.” It’s why we’ve seen such a swell of activism, both grassroots and mainstream. But too often there’s a missing piece. We can’t just give kids better [...]

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Stop reading labels and start reading ingredients

January 29, 2011

All week I’ve been seeing stories about Walmart-style food reform and food manufacturers’ self-serving nutrition labels, about fake meat, fake blueberries and fake maple syrup. Stories about all the ways the food industry tricks us, and all the ways people get mad about the food industry tricking us.  So here’s a thought: Let’s stop playing the game. Ignore the labels. Don’t look at numbers. Don’t believe [...]

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Food donations revisited: Dealing with the junk

January 14, 2011

Just saw an interesting NPR story called Overburdened food banks can’t say no to junk. And that brought to mind a Spoonfed discussion from November: Would you feed your own kid the same food you donate to food pantries?  The NPR piece notes that most of the unhealthy food given to food banks comes from grocery [...]

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Daily (Show) dose of funny. With fries.

January 13, 2011

This bit on banning Happy Meal toys aired last week, but I couldn’t pass on a chance to cite The Daily Show and tweak McDonald’s at the same time. Because, really, while Comedy Central is poking fun at those of us who think food companies ought to lay off our kids (while we parents also parent), McDonald’s doesn’t exactly [...]

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Five ways my daughter’s teacher rocks food IQ

December 7, 2010

School and food is such a loaded, wearying combination that it’s easy to miss the small things that boost our kids’ food literacy every day. So, in the spirit of giving thanks and honoring allies on the front lines, I present five ways my daughter’s first-grade teacher rocks her classroom’s food IQ: 1. She read Rosemary [...]

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Would you feed your own kid the same food you donate to food pantries?

November 24, 2010

Last year at about this time, my daughter and I were in the grocery store, buying items for a local food drive. After I threw a few bags of brown rice in the cart, Tess asked me why brown and not white. “Because it’s healthier,” I answered, “and it’s what we eat.” Then I told [...]

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Smart kids with video cameras

October 30, 2010

OK, so ignore the fact that I said I was taking a video hiatus. As we enter Halloween weekend, having thoroughly discussed the candy onslaught, I leave you with three (yes, three) videos from Elysian Charter School in Hoboken, N.J. The first one shows kids hip-hopping their way through a junk-food exchange that trades Halloween candy for [...]

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Stealth veggies: Yes or no?

October 12, 2010

Last week, out with friends at a new restaurant (a place I wrote about here), my 6-year-old ordered chocolate mousse for dessert. Actually, chocolate avocado mousse. But my daughter didn’t know that. She’s a beginning reader and “avocado” is not yet in her repertoire (though “chocolate” is), so I let her order the mousse without mentioning its secret green [...]

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