What do my kids want to eat? I have to begin with a confession: I rarely start planning a meal with this question topmost on my mind. My criteria for meals are (in rough order of importance): What do I feel like eating? What might my husband feel like eating? (I can't ask him when he's at work, so this is usually a guess; but he's a healthy eater, so too much red meat is never popular, and a vegetable or salad component is a must.) What ingredients do I have on hand? What ingredients seem seasonally appropriate/available? What haven't we eaten in a while? And then, pretty darned close to the bottom of the list: will my children eat it? I do try to make a few family meals a week I know my children will devour enthusiastically, but I know if I'm locked into these dishes and these dishes alone (which number probably a dozen), my resentment will begin to fester. I've also learned that even these supposed fail-safes are not infallible: all parents at some point have the confounding experience of little Susie turning up her pretty nose at a food she's always loved...up to now. So at least half the meals I prepare are with the full knowledge that my kids are likely to have an alternative dinner, be it hotdogs (Applegate Organic, but still hotdogs), fish sticks or pasta. While I agree in principle that no parent should beome a short-order chef in the family kitchen, enslaved to their children's demands for separate meals, I'm happier preparing separate dishes for them occasionally than I would be cooking a rotation of only twelve dishes.
I confess further that I rarely ask my children what they want to eat--does that makes me an anomaly? But when asked what they'd like for dinner, even my daughters, who (as you'll you know from the almost schizoid diversity of the dishes I cook) are exposed to a pretty broad variety of foods, invariably say something uninspired like, "Um...mac and cheese?" Now, I'm not against mac and cheese--in fact, I have a crazy delicious recipe for it from the gone-but-never-forgotten Gourmet--but it's almost like my children have experienced some kind of science fiction mind-wipe and can't actually remember any other dish. So really, unless one would be happy with a diet composed entirely of pasta and cheese (and even they wouldn't--I know because the aforementioned recipe is so prodigious that once we did eat mac and cheese an almost comical number of times in a week), what's the point of putting the dinner decision in the children's hands?
But I have been grappling, in part as result of this process, with the troubling question of wondering what exactly it is that children want to eat. Do they even know? And if they do, should we leave it up to them, and to what degree? I am a big proponent of the paramount importance of teaching children to make good decisions about food, rather than either imposing rigid restrictions or allowing them to follow haplessly in the wake of parents who often make crummy food decisions for themselves, but I do wonder exactly what children would eat if left to their own devices.
A new report today says that the U.S. government is focusing on the food industry's tactics for marketing unhealthy food to children, which includes using characters like Toucan Sam, giving away toys with fast food kids' meals, and creating online games tied to junk food and candy. Of course, this being a country whose politicians are deeply indebted to the dollars of lobbyists and business interests, this is not a call for any kind of actual government regulations on agribusiness--God forbid--but merely a "preliminary proposal for voluntary principles to guide industry self-regulatory efforts to improve the nutritional profile of foods marketed to children." While it's depressing to contemplate that even something so seemingly uncontroversial as improving children's diets needs to be couched in such milquetoast terms, at least it's a step in the right direction.
Examining how we've allowed marketers and agribusiness to steer us towards making horrible, unhealthy food choices, and beginning with safeguarding the most vulnerable members of our society is not just a good step but a necessary one. We have to begin turning the tide against the inexorable spread of obesity and related diseases, and suggesting that businesses conform to even voluntary standards is a start, if a watered-down one. I'm sick and tired of how much our food choices have been manipulated by the brutal cynicism of capitalist interests, and with first-hand experience about how vague children are about meal choices, I believe firmly in the benevolent intervention of the government in this area. These marketing tactics need to be subjected to the kind of public pressure that eventually forced the retirement of Joe Camel.
On a less polemical note, do you ask your children what they want they for dinner? And if you do, what do they say (and do you make it)? I'm curious...
What I cooked this week:
