Want Kid Friendly Dinners?
April 16 2014
Eating healthy nutritious foods should start at an early age. But many kids get seduced by the marketing campaigns from fast food outlets and giant food corporations that care nothing for your child’s health. All they care about is making a profit.
So what’s a parent to do when faced with this advertising onslaught?
Get back to real food. That means cooking your meal at home. Sometimes it’s hard to know what they will eat. You end up preparing a meal and set it on the table to a chorus of “I don’t like that”. It can be frustrating.
One of the best ways to open up your children to experience more nutritious foods is to get them to help out in the kitchen with meal preparation.
Depending on their age, kids can help out with setting the table, peeling vegetables and even some chopping and actual cooking. It might sound dangerous to handing your 6 year old a sharp chef’s knife but with proper education and supervision kids can learn the basics at an early age. In fact, according to a new cookbook, it’s dangerous not to teach kids to cook — it’s a basic survival skill. The case Elton makes for teaching cooking to kids is also the case for her new book, Starting from Scratch: What You Should Know about Food and Cooking.
The British organization, Children’s Food Trust, which advocates for kids’ nutrition and works to build a body of evidence-based research, found in a recent study that children who cook before the age of eight are 50 per cent more likely to prepare at least five meals from scratch a week when they grow up. Cooking when young builds skills for later in life – and sets a kid up for making healthier food choices. That’s because when you make food from scratch, you get to decide what goes into your body.
There’s research showing that children are more likely to eat healthy food if they’re involved in the cooking, and even more so if they are involved in the growing. Which makes perfect sense: I’m not going to try something icky-looking of unknown provenance, but if I’ve labored to make the thing, of course I’m going to eat it.
In France, a cooking school associated with a Michelin-starred chef where they teach kids, as well as adults, to pan-fry fish or prepare escargots. Kids get to handle knives at the age of six!
While it may seem a bit reckless to be handing junior a 9” chef’s knife, isn’t it in fact more dangerous not to be teaching him how to cook and eat nutritious foods?
With that in mind, we’ve created a new Kid Friendly Meals cookbook available to all our members. In it you will find family favorites and healthy alternatives to fast food meals that kids will not only enjoy but can help prepare as well.
Good food habits begin at an early age.
