The Food Our Children Eat: How to Get Children to Like Good Food

The answer is that there is absolutely nothing complicated, or even particularly demanding, about producing children who eat well. I have done nothing with my children that hasn’t already been done by generations of parents. The approach amounts to little more than common sense. It is just that these days, children’s junk food is so prevalent that parents think that the old laws of nutrition no longer apply. We need to be reminded of them.

So this book offers a common-sense strategy for getting children to eat better – one that also makes the job of feeding children easier, not harder. There are workable and effective strategies for every testing situation but, in essence, the approach is terribly simple.

HOW TO GET YOUR CHILDREN TO EAT WELL

• Feed children the same food you yourself eat.

• Socialise children into good eating habits by eating with them as much as you possibly can.

• Consciously open up children’s food horizons by introducing them to a wide range of tastes.

• Keep on presenting them with a wide range of foods even if they resist them at first: they will learn to like what they are given.

• Give them the freshest, most nutritious and best-quality food you possibly can.

This is the opposite of how many modern children eat.

HOW TO GET YOUR CHILDREN TO EAT BADLY

• Give them different food from that which you yourself eat.

• Feed them separately most of the time.

• Stereotype them as having narrow food horizons and therefore offer them only a limited number of foods.

• When they reject a food, do not offer it to them again consistently.

• Give them the most processed, least satisfying and least nutritious food around, otherwise known as ‘children’s food’.

The underlying assumption in the points above is that there is only one kind of food suitable for children – good food – and that the best way to deliver that is to socialise them into adult eating patterns and tastes from the time they are weaned. I firmly believe that the modern idea of separate children’s food, which assumes that children have different requirements from adults, is the enemy of good eating in the long term. By going down that ‘separate’ and ‘different’ road, food manufacturers have got away with transforming children’s food into a junk-food ghetto.

For this reason, I have deviated from other children’s eating guides by not including recipes for separate ‘children’s’ dishes. This book does, however, include recipes and meal ideas that should appeal to both adults and children alike; to my mind this is much more useful. It seems to me that children need to, and can, eat the same as everyone else.

Why? Because it’s much less time-consuming for the person preparing the food if there is just one meal on the go. Who can dream up and prepare two different sets of good meals each day for any length of time? If you adopt this way of doing things, then something has to give. What happens more often than not is that one ‘real’ meal is prepared for the adults and the children end up with reheated processed junk. So it seems to me that if we want children to eat well in the long run, we need to get them accustomed to eating the same as everyone else as early as possible rather than feeding them differently.

This book also asks you to question the modern habit of feeding children on their own, not alongside adults at communal mealtimes. If we accept that children need ultimately to pick up eating patterns that will stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives, the quickest and most effortless way to achieve that is for them to share mealtimes with adults as often as possible. I am not saying that it is impossible for children to learn to eat well when they are eating on their own, just that it is considerably more difficult.

These days, as I discovered in the process of researching and writing this book, any insistence on some commitment – however small – to communal household eating is controversial. Although many parents want their children to eat well in the long term, in the short term they find it easier and more practical to feed them earlier and apart. Modern lifestyles have changed. The nuclear family no longer sits down around the table at five o’clock.

Please believe that, as a parent who has always worked, I am not suggesting we turn the clock back to the ‘good old days’ when Mummy was perpetually in the kitchen baking and didn’t go out to work. I do not want any parent – male or female – to feel a failure or traumatised with guilt because they do not bake their own bread or make their own pasta in the frantic ‘happy hour’ after they get in from work and attempt to deal with everything from seven-times tables to endlessly ringing phones. But I do still think that, although communal mealtimes may not be possible every day of the week, even if you can manage it some nights and not others it will help socialise children into liking and appreciating a wide variety of good food and provide an important model for eating which challenges the pressure to eat junk.

So, while advocating communal eating as the goal to try for, this book also recognises the stresses faced by busy, modern parents and offers practical strategies for making successful compromises. It offers a positive long-term philosophy which allows lots of room for individual variation, not a rigid set of rules which are broken at the first deviation from theory. Believe me, it is designed to make life easier for those looking after children, not harder.

You will notice that this book is not presented as a ‘healthy-eating’ manual for children. There are no recommendations to switch your kids on to skimmed milk, lower-fat crisps or diet yogurt, or to read nutrition labels or count calories.

Why? Obviously, one of the main reasons most parents want their children to eat better is that this will make them healthier, but if we are overly concerned with health there is a danger of becoming almost hung up about what we eat. We stop eating certain things because they are ‘bad’ for us and food becomes all about prohibitions and ‘what is good for you’. Even for adults, this type of thinking is a pleasure-killer and for children that feeling is more intense.

What’s more, this thinking is pointless because children can learn to enjoy fresh, wholesome, healthy food when it is presented to them in a positive way, mainly because it smells and tastes good in a way that junky children’s food never can. So the main rationale we give children for eating natural, wholesome food as opposed to junk has to be that it tastes better, not because it is ‘good for you’.

The concept of healthy eating is also much abused and often reinforces the paralysing modern notion that parents do not know how to feed their children any longer and so need help from ‘experts’ who provide ‘special foods’. But often these ‘experts’ are backed by powerful industry interests whose ‘advice’ is highly suspect. A lot of junk and heavily processed food these days can be presented as ‘healthy’ simply because it is low fat, despite the fact that it contains almost no useful nutrition. Thus a diet cola drink can actually come over as a healthy alternative to regular cola. But no cola drink has a place in any common-sense understanding of a wholesome diet.

The philosophy behind this book is that if you give your children food prepared from fresh raw materials in their natural, nutritious, unprocessed form, and encourage them to eat a wide selection of foods from all the major food groups, they will be eating healthily – end of story.

Most modern children do not eat this way. Their diet is top-heavy with protein, fat, refined carbohydrates, salt and sugar – a consequence of their dependence on processed foods. Their consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables is almost invariably far too low. ‘Eat more fresh fruit and vegetables’ is the one positive food message on which most nutritionists can agree and it’s the only modern health message on which parents really need to focus. So this book provides plenty of positive and effective strategies for getting children to like fruit and vegetables and increase their consumption of them.

But that is as far as conscious ‘healthy-eating’ guidance goes. The typical unbalanced children’s diet is a consequence of feeding children on a separate range of highly processed foods, which have been manufactured for profit rather than to retain their nutritional integrity. By drastically reducing the processed foods given to children and replacing them with wholesome unprocessed ones, parents can embrace healthy eating without getting embroiled in often-contradictory nutritional guidance.

So if you follow the real-food approach described in Part Two, you won’t get bogged down in whether that margarine has 15 or 50 per cent polyunsaturates. Instead, you’ll be concentrating on stimulating your children’s palate so that they enjoy a wide variety of fresh, unprocessed food, where pride of place is given to fruit and vegetables. If you do that, then you can afford to be laid-back about ‘healthy eating’.

This book is organised so readers can home in on the sections they find most useful. Part One examines the nature of the general problem we have on our hands now that so many children live on junk. You may find that it makes disquieting reading. Skip it, by all means, if you prefer, and move on to the rest of the book. Part Two, Breaking the Mould at Home, explains the general strategy for getting children to eat well. Part Three, The Gentle Art of Persuasion, is a troubleshooting section for when the general strategy doesn’t seem to work. Part Four explains how feeding babies can dovetail with this overall approach. Parts Five and Six offer practical strategies for sticky situations. Part Seven suggests ways of reinforcing your efforts, while Part Eight offers ideas to inspire you when you can’t see beyond the difficulties.

This book is an empowering one which offers parents the conviction that over time, and with a little bit of commitment, you can produce children who actively enjoy good wholesome food. Such a goal is both desirable and attainable. It will strengthen your resolve to trust your own common sense and good judgement and to be different from the pack, but it will also arm you with devices to cope with the ‘real world’ challenges faced by parents who want their children to eat well.

The motivation is not just the well-being of our children but the satisfaction that we parents can get from knowing that our children share with us a love of food and the pleasure of eating. When we are older and greyer, what a delight to drop in to a son or daughter for a home-cooked meal prepared from fresh, wholesome, unprocessed ingredients. And if there are grandchildren sitting around the table, too, all the better. If they learn, as their parents did, to appreciate real food, then our food chain will be so much safer in their hands.

PART ONE THE GHETTO OF ‘CHILDREN’S FOOD’ (#ulink_d9cd82b2-2507-5cf5-b3d4-cf8691b66708)

THE MODERN ‘CHILDREN’S DIET’ (#ulink_77a39066-ce17-5175-8de2-1e1940f35ccd)

Let’s look at those distinctive foods that have become the mainstay of the modern British children’s diet. It won’t take long, because they are so very limited.

The backbone foods and drinks of the very restricted diet and their shortcomings

BREAKFAST CEREAL AND MILK

The typical ‘children’s cereal’ favourites consist of highly processed and over-refined grains stuck together with sugar in one form or another, and many are also high in salt. Prominent added vitamins give an aura of health but are only an attempt to replace the goodness that has been refined out of the processed grain. These are overwhelmingly sugary foods. The nutritional goodness of the milk (protein, calcium and vitamins) can’t compensate for that.

BURGERS

Mass-produced burgers of the type aimed at children have a very different composition from ones you might make at home. They tend to contain much more fat, and include a number of chemical additives to improve flavour and consistency. They are generally made with meat that represents the lowest common legal denominator in terms of cuts allowed and the source of the animals.

SAUSAGES AND SAUSAGE ROLLS

Similar objections to burgers except that the amount of meat is often lower and there are more chemical additives. Sausage rolls have an additional layer of fatty pastry which makes them even less healthy. They are often served inadequately reheated from frozen and this, combined with the poor quality of the meat, makes them a likely food poisoning source.

POULTRY OR FISH IN BREADCRUMBS

Any food in breadcrumbs is automatically much fattier than its unbreaded equivalent because the coating holds fat, even when it is grilled rather than fried. Apart from whole fillets of poultry or fish, the minced poultry meat in products such as Kievs and nuggets represents a very low-grade mulch of intensively produced meat, held together with chemical additives. They seem cheap but they represent poor value for money given the ingredients used.

FISH FINGERS

Many contain just a fish and additive sludge. Some more expensive fish fingers do contain only fish fillets – even if this is at a vastly inflated price – but they are a less healthy alternative to a plain fillet because of the coating.

CHIPS

A very fatty food, even oven or lower-fat chips. Processing can result in a loss of vitamins.

TINNED BAKED BEANS