How to get kids to eat healthy foods? Open the doors. Instead of bribing kids or hiding vegetables in their chocolate pudding or blueberries in their hamburgers, get them into a garden. For starters, bribing is an ethically questionably activity. (Chores, sure; homework, maybe; food, no.) Then there’s the problematic fact that my kids can distinguish percentages of cacao in chocolate, so forget the hidden-cauliflower-puree ploy. And they never liked hamburgers anyway. But give them a farmers market stand or an inviting vegetable garden, and they’ll eat at will. When we went over to a friend’s house today, Isabel promptly asked for a tour of all the edible plants in the garden. After finding that the apples were far from ripe and the Santa Rosas invisible, Sophie sampled the herbs–thyme, marjoram, basil, rosemary, parsley–and pronounced cilantro her favorite. Food is really fast when you pick it.
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I couldn’t agree more – my kids love tasting the fruit at the farmers’ market but will turn up their noses if I slice up a peach at home. They will eat cherry tomatoes off the vine in the garden but wouldn’t dream of eating one from the supermarket.