From the category archives:

Mindful

Food, health and behavior

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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The color of trouble

January 22, 2011

Before I started Spoonfed, I began collecting “kid food” advertisements with the intention of skewering them on a regular basis. But as those torn pages piled up, I realized they were all the same. Different products, different gimmicks: Lunchables give kids brain power! Pop-Tarts are the cornerstone of a balanced breakfast! McDonald’s is healthy for hipster moms and [...]

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Lesson at the bakery case. But who learned what?

December 17, 2010

We’d left school and were driving to a nearby art studio to pick up a print I’d won in a raffle. Tess was in the backseat, cranky, tired, whining about needing to pee, despite being asked that exact question at least four times before we’d left school. Not wanting to descend upon the artist with a crabby and incontinent child, I [...]

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This just in: Fast food is unhealthy

November 9, 2010

Hot on the heels of my post about McDonald’s “nutrition workshops” comes this satisfying but mostly sad piece of research from Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. Satisfying because it supports the common-sense contention (and my argument in the McEducation post) that fast food does not offer the healthful options it claims. Only 12 of 3,039 meal [...]

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Forget Happy Meal toys. Let’s ban McEducation.

November 5, 2010

I’ve been thinking all week that I need to write about San Francisco’s crackdown on Happy Meal toys. But what to say? News of the decision spread fast, generating the predictable “McDonald’s-is-evil” vs. “parents-get-a-backbone” debate. And, really, my opinion on fast-food marketing hasn’t changed since I wrote about the Retire Ronald campaign in April. I still think the [...]

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Halloween post-mortem. Candy recalls. And why teachers hate the day after.

November 3, 2010

Halloween night, Tess and her best buddy (aka the spider and the witch) went trick-or-treating in a cold rain, returning with a modest array of candy and snacks that they dumped on the carpet and fanned out like peacocks. The No. 1 thing they were hunting down: the popcorn (homemade, plain) that a neighbor had tossed in their bags.   [...]

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Candy insanity: Halloween here we come

October 20, 2010

When you blog about kids and food, people ask you questions. Especially this time of year, when sweets flow like lava and the sugar high carries you from trick-or-treats to Easter baskets. What do you do about the candy? So here it is. The post about the candy. Our Halloween night strategy is pretty simple. After trick-or-treating, costume [...]

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Junk food as kiddie heroin?

October 5, 2010

I’ve watched this video several times over several days, and I’m still not sure what I think. It’s unsettling. Intense. But is that chill in my spine because it goes too far? Or because it hits the mark? People argue over whether junk-food-fast-food-pseudo-food is addictive, but, really now. Of course it is. Former FDA commissioner David Kessler [...]

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My kind of carnival: Healthy kids. No fried dough.

July 21, 2010

A new Spoonfed post is coming very soon. (So much for stockpiling posts before vacation.) In the meantime, I’m participating in a new monthly blog carnival sponsored by Healthy Child Healthy World, a non-profit that is all about protecting kids from chemicals where they live, play and learn (food included). This month’s theme, “Splendor in the Grass,” explores [...]

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Clean food and dirty kids

June 30, 2010

There came a moment during strawberry-picking last week when the 6-year-olds decided they’d had enough. While the grown-ups continued busily picking a flat apiece, my daughter and her friend snuck off to the shade for a drink and a snack. Then the girls plopped themselves in the dirt and set to work, drawing roads and concocting [...]

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