Читать книгу The Food Our Children Eat: How to Get Children to Like Good Food - Joanna Blythman, Joanna Blythman - Страница 20

When we decide that we aren’t going to give in to the prevailing defeatism that says children will eat only junk, we make an important commitment to feeding them well. But in a world where children are under constant pressure to eat badly, how can we carve out a different path?

One common approach is to continue with the structure of modern children’s food but try to change the content so that it is healthier and more acceptable. The idea is that children will think they are getting the undesirable things they want but, in reality, we are giving them something better.

The classic example here is the ‘healthy lollipop’. These are marketed as better for children because they are flavoured with fruit juice, tinted with natural rather than artificial colours and use artificial sweeteners instead of sugar. But are they really such an improvement? The proportion of fruit juice in them may be very small indeed and, as discussed on pages 6–7, although they do not attack tooth enamel it is questionable whether artificial sweeteners are desirable in wider health terms. But all that is irrelevant because even if these lollipops did have undisputed plus points over their conventional sugary, synthetic counterparts, there is a problem. We are still encouraging children to think that it’s all right to suck for long periods on something sweet and sticky. Do we really want to give them that message?

The same issue arises with popular foods that have had their original composition altered in line with modern ‘healthy-eating’ thinking. So now we have reduced-sugar baked beans, lower-fat crisps, ‘healthy’ sausages, oven chips, no-added-sugar yogurts, white bread with added fibre and so on. They purport to be better for children, though their merits are highly disputable. Although they might represent some improvement on the original junk food they still cannot measure up to the real thing (unadulterated yogurt, natural wholemeal bread etc.) in nutritional terms. The question remains, is this the kind of food we really want our children to eat or, at the end of the day, are we simply encouraging a slightly more acceptable face of the children’s diet ghetto?

If you analyse this approach, it is basically a slippery slope which attempts to hold the line against out-and-out junk food by curbing its worst excesses. It could produce very small benefits but it remains a defensive strategy, where adults attempt to draw a distinction between what’s not too bad and what’s worse. Now that’s a very difficult line to maintain.

What we need when we decide that we want our children to eat more nutritious food is a positive philosophy that challenges the assumptions on which children’s ghetto-food thinking rests and breaks away from its structures. We want to reverse the existing situation where ‘children’s food’ is shorthand for ‘worst food’. How do we make this happen?

Let’s begin by drawing up a profile of how we want our children to turn out eventually. We want them to:

• Enjoy food and delight in the pleasure of eating.

• Routinely eat a wide and varied range of foods from all food groups (excluding meat and fish if they are vegetarians).

• Select food that is good for them.

This is the opposite of the typical modern children’s diet where children appear to view food as fuel and tend to select a narrow range that is so imbalanced it may even defy the laws of nutrition.

So how should we set about seeing that the children we feed don’t go down this path? The single most important thing we’ll ever do as concerned adults is to adopt a ‘real-food’ approach. This means that we feed our children from as early an age as possible on food that is as fresh, whole and unprocessed as possible.

Of course there can be very few households in the land who are able to avoid processed food altogether. Very few of us have the time, energy or inclination to make all our own jam or bake our own bread, for example. A real-food policy doesn’t mean that we can never buy anything processed or take a short cut, just that the bulk of the food we eat is made up of fresh, unprocessed food that has been cooked at home – however quick and no-frills that cooking might be – and that we read the labels of any packaged foods we do buy to check that all the ingredients are wholesome, i.e. the sort we would use at home.

This doesn’t mean we have to be fanatical. There’s no need to feel a failure if you don’t roll your own pasta, squeeze your own lemonade or stuff your own sausages. It just means that, time and energy allowing, we favour home-made food. This needn’t be oppressively time-consuming. It takes very little more effort to bake potatoes from scratch than reheat oven chips, or to grill a piece of cod rather than a fish finger. It’s actually quicker to serve a cut-up tomato than tinned tomato soup.

The first and most persuasive reason for adopting a real-food approach is that whole, natural, unprocessed food that has been cooked at home is just much more delicious than its equivalent bought ready-made in a box or tin. There is no better way to woo a child than the smell of good, freshly cooked food wafting through the house. Processed, ready-made foods just don’t produce the same ‘feel-good’ effect. Once children become accustomed to eating fresh, unprocessed, home-cooked food they will enjoy it and develop a taste for it. This will give them real-food standards against which to taste other foods. By comparison, junky children’s food will not taste so good and will be much less tempting to them. So the taste for real food will limit their consumption of junk.

The second reason is that whole, unprocessed foods in their natural state that have been cooked at home tend to be much more nutritious than processed food. As the World Health Organisation has pointed out, ‘It is widely perceived that obesity has increased in industrialised societies as families turn away from home-prepared meals and utilise more fast or takeaway foods.’

Unprocessed foods come as nature intended, without chemical additives. Nor have they had their formula adulterated to meet the high fat-sugar-salt requirements that make processed foods profitable and palatable – especially children’s processed foods. Here are some examples of how processing changes the composition of food and makes it less healthy:

• 100 grams of baked cod contains 1.2 grams of fat. The same weight of cod fish finger contains 7.5 grams of fat before it is cooked and 12.7 grams of fat when fried.

• 100 grams of fresh raspberries contains 5.6 grams of sugar. The same weight of tinned raspberries contains 22.5 grams of sugar.

• 100 grams of raw lean beef contains 4.6 grams of fat and 61 milligrams of salt. The same weight of raw beefburger contains 20.5 grams of fat and 600 milligrams of salt.

• 100 grams of tomato purée contains 11.4 grams of sugar and 20 milligrams of salt. The same weight of tomato ketchup contains 22.9 grams of sugar and 1,120 milligrams of salt.

When children – or adults for that matter – eat a diet consisting of whole, unprocessed food cooked at home, it is quite difficult for them to eat a distorted, imbalanced diet. Of course it’s theoretically possible. You could go mad consistently with the butter on your breakfast toast or lashings of cream on that favourite cooked pudding. But your diet is much more likely to go awry when it is composed of processed foods with their vast hidden presence of fat, sugar and salt. So when we base our shopping on whole, unprocessed food, without being self-consciously rigid about ‘healthy eating’, calorie counting or reading nutrition labels, we are giving children food that is much more nutritious and healthy.

The third reason for adopting a real-food approach is that real food can satisfy the tastes of adults and children alike, so the person who buys the food has one shopping list, not the ubiquitous two-household list that must cater for sophisticated adult tastes alongside children’s junk-food palates. Obviously there are households where both adults and children live on processed food and there is no conflict. But where adults do have wider palates and hope that one day their children will share them, a real-food policy makes shopping much easier.

The fourth reason for a real-food policy is that it makes it harder for adults to cave in to demands for junk. How often do you hear adults admitting that they would never eat a certain food themselves but are just ‘buying for the kids’. When you operate this policy, you won’t be buying anything for the children that you wouldn’t want to eat yourself.

Not everyone finds it easy to adopt a real-food approach. Although we all might like to, it can seem impossible given the time pressure we are under. The good news is that, despite food-industry propaganda which says that people have no time to cook any longer and portrays any ‘real’ cooking activity as laborious and time-consuming, a real-food approach doesn’t have to mean endless hours of weary toil in the kitchen after work. It is perfectly possible to feed children on wholesome, fresh food without that. We just need to get into the habit of seeing that ‘fast’ doesn’t always translate into ‘junk’.

In our anxiety about fitting in cooking with all our other demands, it’s easy to assume that a real-food approach would be too time-consuming and impractical. But if we stop to examine that assumption, we may be able to see that it isn’t necessarily the case.

For example, it really doesn’t take much longer to grill a chicken breast than grill or fry some turkey nuggets but it makes for a much better and more wholesome meal. We could slather it with bought pesto and stick it in a toasted pitta bread with some raw vegetables to make an instant meal that will probably appeal to children. A dip made with Greek yogurt and mint to be served with raw vegetable batons can be prepared in minutes and it’s much healthier and ultimately more variable and interesting than chips with ketchup. See pages 239–51 for ideas for fast meals that appeal to both children and adults.