Posts tagged as:

kids and food

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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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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Hate children’s menus?
Here’s your chance to create a better one.

June 14, 2010

Two weeks ago, we had a raging discussion here on the topic of children’s menus. In a nutshell: They’re loaded with unhealthy food. They’re insulting. They perpetuate the false and damaging notion that “kid food” should be its own distinct (junked-up and deep-fried) category.  Brian Van Etten, the chef at a new restaurant about to open in Rochester, N.Y., took note. [...]

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When parents stand in the way of better school food

June 8, 2010

I’m a journalist, which means I balk at reporting anything before I can suss it out. So I was going to post about this after I’d attended a meeting planned for tonight and talked to more of the people involved and done all those other reporter sorts of things. And I still will. But in the [...]

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Real food on the road

June 6, 2010

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 arches. When [...]

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The assault (and insult) of children’s menus

May 29, 2010

One of our favorite local restaurants lists grilled cheese on both its regular menu and its children’s menu. Same price. Same bread options (wheat, rye, sourdough). But where the regular menu touts “aged” cheddar, the kiddie version offers “mild” cheddar.   The first time I noticed this, I asked the server about the difference, thinking [...]

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Pesticide, organic and other dirty words

May 20, 2010

“Organic” was an early word in my now 6-year-old’s vocabulary. (She pronounced it “ga-nan-ic.” Tell me that’s not adorable.) It’s also one of the first words she learned to spell, which is why we have progressively more readable versions written on random bits of paper and newsprint. So when we go grocery shopping, Tess takes pride in pointing [...]

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“Two Angry Moms”: Still too true (redux)

May 7, 2010

As I posted earlier this week, I was planning to watch the school-food movie “Two Angry Moms” for the second time. Saw it last night, and I was struck again by the similarities between these moms’ battle and the drama that played out on Jamie Oliver’s show in Huntington, W.Va. It was disheartening, honestly, given that [...]

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“Two Angry Moms”: Still too true

May 3, 2010

The school-food movie “Two Angry Moms” was released in 2007, and I saw it probably two years ago, but its message still resonates. That’s both good and bad. Sadly, school food in the United States remains a mess (no surprise to anyone who watched “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” or, frankly, to anyone who’s walked into almost any school [...]

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Retire Ronald? Or reclaim responsibility?

April 29, 2010

I first heard about the “Retire Ronald” campaign on April 1, so I assumed it was an elaborate April Fool’s prank. The website looked legit, and famous foodies were listed as advisers, but I couldn’t believe that anyone would spend so much time and energy trying to bring down a clown.                  Of course I’ve since learned that it’s real, a project of [...]

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