Summer Challenge: Feeding the Grandkids

…what they mostly won’t eat at home

I don’t know about all grandmas, but I know from my own experience with other people’s kids that they often come to spend a week or two expecting to be fed precisely what they usually get fed at home, and can be positively horrified to find that Grandma doesn’t stock chocolate cereals or big bags of candy or white bread and baloney for sandwiches, and there’s not a McDonald’s or Wendy’s in sight.

Now, it’s not that I don’t make some concessions to the basic kid-diet. My non-vegetarian grands and nieces/nephews and such do have the option of a can of beef-a-roni or a frozen pepperoni pizza here and there. I’ve even been known to purchase some turkey-dogs to roast over the campfire. But the grilled burgers are black bean, there will be no “Happy Meals,” and no bacon bits for the baked potatoes.

I also stock lots of fruit, whatever’s available when they’re here. I grow strawberries in the garden, those usually get eaten as soon as they’re picked, and they only last so long into the season. I have some cherry tomatoes that went wild one year, show up in unexpected places all over the garden. Those get eaten as soon as they’re picked as well, one granddaughter swears they’re sweeter than cherries! None of the kids seem to like cooked greens very much, but they’ll eat as many peas raw from the pod as I can possibly pick on any given day.

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Filed under Diet, Grandchild Visits, Vegetarian, Vegetables, Family Gatherings, Nutrition | Comments (2)

Best Reasons to Go Vegetarian

Under the general heading of “nutrition” we’ve examined how to get the kids to eat vegetables, taken a look at how big food producers subvert our best nutrition goals through targeted advertising, how those same corporations once subverted the AMA to claim there’s no relation between diet and health, and how the best “animal protein” for infants comes comes directly from Mom.

The great blog One Big Health Nut has a post entitled Ten Great Reasons to Become a Vegetarian that just might help to push some of those kids who are toying with the idea all the way over the line. If Mom or Grandma were to help reinforce these reasons at home, that is. Why, a Grandma just might end up with a grandchild (like a couple of mine!) who eats bell peppers and whole tomatoes like apples, shuns any bread with no color, and subverts their school, scout and summer camp buddies to veggieburgers and veggie dogs.

Of Health Nut’s reasons, the ones that have worked best with my kids and grandchildren were #4: Save the life of many animals, #8: Help the environment, and #10: Vegetarian diets are healthier. Mad Cow and e.coli infection (Health Nut’s #1) are great reasons to avoid meat, but kids generally don’t tend to worry about such things much. They worry about obesity - they all know fat kids in their schools, and don’t want to be them - the environment, and (most of all for primary schoolers) animal welfare.

Go on over to One Big Health Nut and get the whole list! It’s worth printing out and putting up on the fridge with magnets. I did!

Ten Great Reasons to Become a Vegetarian

Filed under Vegetarian, Diet, Green Choices, Vegetables, Family Life, Nutrition, Child-Parent Relationships | Comment (0)

Getting the Kids to Love Veggies

Good Nutrition is a Mom-Job!

It’s true that one of the many ‘important’ jobs Moms do is to direct the proper nutrition of their families. Some Moms do better at this than others, as the growing obesity epidemic demonstrates. There are a surprising number of working Moms out there who don’t cook, and families that somehow manage to survive on pizza and hamburgers.

I was a singularly lousy cook back when I got married. Knew how to make exactly one thing - Campbell’s Bean with Bacon soup (add a pat of butter and a dollop of ketchup to the pot, eat it when it’s hot). I’ll never forget our first breakfast - I did so want to impress him! But I fried that bacon and fried that bacon until it shrunk to nothing and turned char-black, but it just never would get stiff! Brave and loving soul that he is, my hubby ate it anyway and even pretended to like it.

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Filed under Vegetables, Gourmet Cooking, Recipes, Feasts, Nutrition, Family Life | Comments (3)