Posts tagged as:

kids and food

Picture this: Thankful

November 24, 2011

This week at school, my daughter’s class celebrated Thanksgiving with a simple feast: harvest veggie soup, cornbread, pumpkin bread, homemade butter. They’ve been studying flight this fall, so before the kids sat down to eat, they marched through the school with handmade balloon creatures, proudly staging their own version of the Macy’s parade. As I watched these little [...]

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Real food on the road

June 17, 2011

Summertime. When the living is easy, road trips entice, and that road is paved with fast food and greasy spoons. What to do, what to do. As a longtime vegetarian, I’ve been bringing food on the road for years, if only a few bananas and granola bars to get me through the gauntlet of golden [...]

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Picture this: Marketing machine

May 2, 2011

Last week, four federal agencies announced new principles governing food marketing to children. Will these voluntary principles lead to significant change? Unlikely, say Marion Nestle and Melanie Warner. (And food companies already have shown they can’t self-regulate.) But let’s hope some of it sticks. Because we really don’t need more “healthy” vending machines like this, you know? For more on why voluntary steps [...]

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Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution is back

April 12, 2011

The other night I watched Jamie Oliver on the “Late Show.” At one point, amid cooking, pitching his newest “Food Revolution” and tweaking David Letterman, Oliver got serious and said (to paraphrase): With what we know about food and health, we ought to be doing better by our kids. Anything less is a crime. Lots of [...]

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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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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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Blackberries unplugged

July 31, 2010

It’s the height of summer. Berry season. We’ve been picking and freezing great quantities of strawberries and blueberries. Raspberries are next, if we can catch them before they’re gone. Then the blackberries begin.  And that’s got me thinking.  About Block Island, RI, one of our favorite places on the planet, about the blackberries that grow wild there, and also [...]

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Send me your children’s menus!
(Because it’s one step forward, 25 steps back.)

July 23, 2010

Just when I was feeling good about children’s menus, this depressing round-up crossed my desk. In it, the Daily Beast names the 25 worst meals from kids’ menus at chain restaurants, analyzed for calorie count, saturated fat, carbohydrates and sodium. I’m not into counting calories for kids. And I think standard dietary guidelines like the USDA food [...]

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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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Creating a better children’s menu: A chef speaks

July 2, 2010

So this is fun. A month ago I wrote a diatribe against children’s menus, calling them out for being unhealthy and insulting. A lively discussion ensued. Then Brian Van Etten, the chef at The Owl House, a new restaurant in Rochester, N.Y., got in touch. He wanted input on his children’s menu. I posed the question to readers. Another lively [...]

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