Do you find it hard to make healthy eating fun for your children?
To some, food has become a chore. Busy parents can find the task of coaxing a minimum of five-a-day down reluctant kids’ throats somewhat tedious. Meanwhile, children nagged to eat their greens may discover that mealtimes have become more of a battleground than a pleasure.
While it’s as inevitable for good intentions to go stale as it is for sliced bread to grow mould, we can explore new ways of fostering a fun attitude towards healthy food so that at least a proportion of dietary battles are minimised and the joys of mealtimes are maximised.
Food enjoyment is about lapping up the colours and textures of foods; the smell of them, the dripping juice, the soft knap and the crisp snap and crunch of them. It is about letting individual flavours speak to you rather than submerging your senses in an overload of artificial stimulants. For me, it is also about discovering the origins of foods, how other families around the world use them and exploring my own personal responses to ingredients. The fun of food is in the whole process: the preparation, the eating and the gathering together of friends and family.
What follows are some ideas for reminding the family that healthy food really can be fun. They won’t transform tentative eaters into full-on foodies but they can lighten the atmosphere and encourage a little more enthusiasm. Even if this doesn’t result in the whole meal being consumed, it will hopefully banish negative patterns from building and enable children to feel relaxed enough to give what’s on offer a go. They may then surprise themselves as well as you. If success does ensue, remember not to harp on about their newfound love. While the odd lighthearted comment may go down well, too much attention could cause your child to decide to re-dislike it in a bid to reclaim control.
Before we start, one more word of advice: don’t even attempt to employ the following suggestions every night of the week, in between home time, work shifts, after-school clubs and the ironing. This would be pointless as well as exhausting. Novelty and surprise are the keys. Children will quickly wise up to ploys to make them eat and you will lose interest, so pick and choose your moments and keep it fun!
Taste Tests
When I get that bored, same-old same-old, we-need-a-more-varied-diet feeling and want to introduce new, possibly seasonal, ingredients to my daughter I am well aware that I will be met with opposition. The mere sight of a new fruit, vegetable, pulse or previously unseen combination triggers a howl of ‘Eugh! I’m not eating that!’ From this point on, we’re in a no-win situation with my daughter becoming increasingly entrenched in her power to refuse food and me getting more and more frustrated that she won’t even give it a try.
In the past we have solved this one with taste tests. The first time I announced what we would do, brandishing a blindfold and a smile, the thought of a game overwhelmed any anti-new-food instincts in my then eight year old who blindfolded her eyes, so as not to be influenced by preconceptions of what she saw, and tasted bite-sized portions of new improved sandwiches (it was a lunch box situation). The beetroot and cream cheese filling was vehemently spat out but hummus with grated carrot turned out to be a hit, as did marmite and tomato for one school term; then the taste test game began again.
Unlikely Companions and Frozen Fancies
Be courageous with food combining if it makes healthy food more palatable to your children. My daughter’s favourite baby food was broccoli mashed with banana. She went on to love Popsicle Peas — frozen peas straight from the freezer, crunchy with ice — and has since enjoyed raw carrot sticks dipped in chocolate spread. Not to my taste but certainly not boring! Her latest summer love is grapes straight from the freezer. Pop them in the ice box when they’re fresh, for your children to enjoy on hot days. Cubes of honeydew melon are also perfect for this.
What Does A Rainbow Taste Like?
It’s no coincidence that foods are all the colours of the rainbow – different colours tend to indicate different nutritional content. With this in mind, it can be fun to aim to have main meals containing a full rainbow of colours, or at least a minimum of five. Indigo and violet are tricky colours to find, but blueberries, blackberries, red cabbage and red onions fit the bill while, interestingly, lumps of cooked bananas (in a cake, for example) turn a rather gorgeous purple. Chive flowers are also distinctively violet. They have a strong spicy taste but even at 16 months old my nephew loved them. If you’re really stuck on this colour, resort to explaining to your children that in Roman times carrots were purple (and white) until they were crossbred with mutant yellow carrots to create a less bitter, more palatable orange carrot. It’s true.
Another way of adding colour to bland looking food is with natural food colourings. Beetroot and spinach powder are both tasteless and only require a pinch to add a fabulous pink or green hue to food; the more you use, the deeper the colour. Their obvious use is in icing but how about adding one or the other to rice, mashed potato or homemade bread? Turmeric, avocado, and the juice of various berries will dye food but all may impart a slight flavour. Natural food colourings in liquid form can be found in some supermarkets while beetroot and spinach powder can be bought online from The Spice Shop.
You can rely on the colours to make your presented meal look more appealing or engage and distract fussy young eaters by asking them to count how many different colours they can find on their dish. Then ask them what a rainbow tastes like (if you’re not afraid of their answer). Alternatively, have a colour themed meal. Just be sure to have a variety of different colour themes to increase the range of nutrients you serve up over a period of time.
Edible Art
As well as bright colours, pretty shapes and patterns help to make food more appealing. The food may still not be to your child’s taste but at least they’ll get to try it and decide for themself rather than refusing on principle.
- Tomatoes, radishes and kiwi fruit can be cut into flowers. Use a paring knife to cut a zigzag around the circumference of the fruit/vegetable, being sure to push the knife right to the centre. The halves will then separate into two pretty water lilies.
- Cut slices of bread, toast or sandwiches into fun shapes, using cookie cutters. Sandwiches can be made with only the top slice having a shape cut out of it, so the filling is visible.
- While on the subject of sandwiches: if you’re children are partial to white bread but you’d like them to eat wholemeal, start them off by making sandwiches with the bottom slice wholemeal and the top slice white. Then call them zebra sandwiches!
- Apples sliced horizontally through the core reveal a five-pointed star at the centre of each slice. This is why they were traditionally thought to be the fruit of witches.
- Bright red paprika sprinkled in a spiral shape brightens up bland looking dips such as hummus.
- Pizzas are more nutritious with a multitude of healthy toppings. Encourage children to want more than the basic cheese and tomato by using various toppings to create patterns, a rainbow design or funny faces. The pizza dough, meanwhile, can be moulded into heart shaped bases.
- Make traffic light kebabs with red, orange and green fruit. Strawberries, raspberries, clementines, mango, kiwi and grapes are all ideal. As long as enough fruit is being consumed to justify the sugar intake, you could make a chocolate dip from high quality chocolate and let the fun take over!
Peer Pressure
If your children have friends who are adventurous or enthusiastic eaters, invite them round for tea. Just sometimes my daughter will be more willing to try ingredients that she didn’t previously dare if a friend of hers is tucking in and encouraging her to give it a go. Eating with friends is good fun and a little peer pressure can go a long way!
Shared picnics are another enjoyable way of being introduced to a broader spectrum of flavours. If all who come along contribute to the picnic there will be a greater variety of choice and everyone will have a chance to try something they don’t usually eat at home. Picnics can be held in the garden or even on a rug indoors if the weather isn’t conducive to outdoor adventures.
Swapping meal invites with friends can also encourage more adventurous tastings. Food that my daughter won’t touch at home, no matter who cooks it, gets wolfed down and praised in other houses.
Where Shall We Eat Tonight?
Eating out is fun — even if you don’t leave the house. How about turning your dining area into a café or restaurant for the duration of the meal? Get the family to invent a name for the establishment and dress up as waiters or posh diners. Whether they choose a European al fresco café in the garden, a globally themed restaurant, or a cruise ship that stops at a different port each day to serve local food, fun can be had creating the right atmosphere with music, menus and an appropriately decorated sign on the door. Badges can be made for ‘staff’ to wear, with the name of the restaurant and the relevant country’s flag drawn on. Between the ages of eight and ten, I had a habit of asking my dad where the meal he was cooking originated from. I would then draw a mini flag of the appropriate country and, having sellotaped it to a cocktail stick, would wedge it in blu-tac at the centre of the dinner table. It helped that I was already an enthusiastic eater but this added to my enjoyment. My daughter has updated this idea by printing flags off the Internet and gluing them, double-sided to cut-down drinking straws and wedging these in the blu-tac. If the children are waiting on you or being chef for the night, consider paying them a tip. Alternatively, they can delight in being treated like valuable customers as you wait on them, referring to them as sir or madam!
Your Comments, Please
This idea comes courtesy of my daughter who once started a comment book for members of the family to write mealtime feedback in. Children can be encouraged to record whether they loved, hated or were indifferent about what was served up. Suggestions for alterations, additions or omissions can be recorded as well as compliments to the chef and family memories associated with the meal.
If you’ve decided to imagine your dining room as a restaurant for the duration of the meal, comments can be left in the style of the diners you have pretended to be. This could be licence for family members to say what they choose without recrimination; they are, after all, just playing a role!
Travelling Taste Buds
Serve up traditional and healthy meals from a particular country and tailor the eating experience to that theme. Be sure to suggest that anyone joining in the fun must at least try the relevant food! Your food needn’t be outrageously exotic (unless you want it to be!). Homemade pizza could inspire Italian activities; pineapple and mixed fruit kebabs bring Hawaii to mind; potato salad is traditionally German, sweet potatoes and pumpkins are popular in America; noodles and stir fry summon Chinese images; curries are obviously Indian. The list goes on…
- Play appropriate ethnic/world music.
- Ask the children to make place mats decorated with pictures of the country your meal derives from, its flag, native plants or ethnic symbols (Aboriginal art and the Greek evil eye are two distinctive examples).
- Learn some key words in the language of your chosen country. Bon apetit!
- Print out a simple map of the world and mark with a dot the country of origin of the dish you’re eating. As time and meals go by, join up the dots and show your children how they’ve travelled the world with their taste buds.
- Using a plain notebook per child, give them each a ‘passport’ for you to stamp with a fun ink stamp or sign for them every time they try a dish from a new country. You could write the dish they ate, the country it originates from and the date they ate it before stamping the page. Along with the novelty aspect of this, their incentive to try more foods could be a meal or dessert of their choice when they’ve achieved a certain number of countries.
- By collecting holiday brochures or drawing relevant cultural pictures, children can make picture postcards of the country whose food they’ve sampled and stick these into their passports.
- Dress up in traditional national dress, especially on national celebration days. A calendar of festivities can be found on pages 151-152.
- Eat in the traditional style of the culture whose food you’re cooking. Chopsticks while sitting on the floor; naan bread and no cutlery to scoop curry; spaghetti shovelled in enthusiastically with serviettes tucked in at the neck. It’ll be a meal to remember…
Throw A Global Party
Invite family and/or friends to a Global Party. Encourage guests to each bring a dish from a different nationality and to attach a small flag to their contribution, denoting its country of origin. Suggest that they arrive dressed either in national costume or as a native animal. If they can bring a CD of music that represents their choice, so much the better. Children will enjoy decorating paper plates and serviettes with flags or other appropriate artwork. Be sure to use colourfast ink, though!
Games can be organised to match the food. If food and games from different countries are placed around the room, the children can ‘travel the world’ in an afternoon. Some suggested games are:
- boules from France
- a piñata from Mexico
- clapping games from Africa
- baseball from America (if you’re having an outdoor party!)
- limbo dancing and hula hooping from the Carribbean
- mummification from Egypt (a chosen child or adult is wrapped in white toilet paper by a partner as quickly as possible so they resemble an Egyptian mummy before the music stops. Pairs can race against each other to perform the quickest mummification)
- chopstick games from China (scatter sweets or dried fruit on a clean surface and see who can pick up the most using only chopsticks)
- adapt pin the tail on the donkey — how about pin the tail on the kangaroo, tiger or elephant?
The Rule Of Three
If you’re still struggling with your child’s willingness to try new flavours, give the rule of three a go. It may lighten proceedings. The theory is that it sometimes takes a while for taste buds to acclimatise to new sensations. Stating your intention to use the rule of three with your child has the added benefit of encouraging them to put up with your new offering for a little while longer. After all, they’ve only got to cope with the new atrocity for three trials. Hopefully, by the end of serving three they’ll be begging for more. You never know…
So, here are the rules:
1. Introduce a new meal/taste. Child looks at it, claims to hate it, perhaps throws a tantrum for good measure, finally tastes it under duress and still insists they hate it.
2. Offer the same food on another occasion. Child moans profusely but eats some of it grudgingly.
3. Serve up the very same food another day and child wolfs it down, possibly even looking at you tauntingly and saying ‘why are you surprised, Mum? I love this’. It has been known to happen.
If you never get past stage one then I humbly suggest that this may not be fussiness on your child’s part but genuine dislike. Thai green curry is yet to progress beyond stage one for my daughter.
To help stage two meals go down more easily I’m not averse to including a favourite side dish (a handful of chips/onion rings etc) or using pudding as bribery as long as a decent proportion of main course gets consumed. Remember, this is about encouraging children to enjoy their food, not wade through mountains of culinary offenders without the aid of well-loved accompaniments. Mayonnaise has been a bizarre plate-fellow to a number of unsuspecting main courses in our house.
Stage two can last a while before your child is accustomed to the new flavour although I have known the whole process take just three servings, hence the rule of three. Do bear in mind, however, that children’s taste buds are different from ours and recipes may need to be adjusted accordingly. Did you know, for example, that the reason most children can’t abide Brussels sprouts is because they contain a mild bitter toxin, which children’s taste buds recognise more easily?
Categories: children
