Posted by Ed Levine, January 9, 2008 at 11:45 AM
I've now read Kim Severson's piece on child food allergy conspiracy theorist Robyn O'Brien twice, and I'm still not sure if O'Brien is a righteous crusader or a nutty zealot.
Here's the essence of the story:
[O'Brien's] theory—that the food supply is being manipulated with additives, genetic modification, hormones, and herbicides, causing increases in allergies, autism, and other disorders in children—is not supported by leading researchers or the largest allergy advocacy groups.
On such an emotionally freighted issue it's hard to figure out who's right and who's wrong.
What do Serious Eaters think?
Their books, which teach parents to disguise veggies in brownies, mac and cheese, and pudding, are wrong on so many levels, Mimi Sheraton writes. "First, children get the wrong message that sweets and starches are good for them." Second is "the invisibility of vegetables in their own recognizable forms. As a result, children are not afforded the opportunity to get used to the idea of trying and learning about them. Nor will they consider them necessary for good health."
Update: Cookbook Author Sues Jerry Seinfeld for Defamation [1/8/2007]
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, July 30, 2007 at 12:15 PM
Having a kid in the house has changed dinnertime. Not so much what I cook—the actual time dinner is served. It went from a ballpark figure to an ironclad contract. Before my daughter, Iris, came along, my wife, Laurie, and I would sometimes have dinner somewhere between 5:30 and 8 p.m., maybe later if I was trying something fancy.
Now, dinner is at 6 p.m., the same way Christmas is on December 25. Iris's bath starts at 7. I can delay dinner until 6:15 if I run into unexpected kitchen obstacles, but if it looks like it's going to go later than that, it's time to switch to scrambled eggs or frozen potstickers. Not every kid has such a lockstep routine, I know, but it's worked well for us.
Continue reading »
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, July 16, 2007 at 4:00 PM
Thanks to my wife, I discovered Roots and Grubs a few weeks ago. It's Matthew Amster-Burton's blog about his food life with his wife and young daughter. I really liked Matthew's take on cooking and eating with children and asked him if he'd blog on Serious Eats here and there. So every other week, on Mondays, we'll bring you a bit of advice from him. Here's his first entry. Enjoy! —Ed Levine
By Matthew Amster-Burton | The Man has crushed some of my family's favorite convenience foods under his twin jackboots of recall and import ban!
When the FDA announced a recall of salmonella-tainted Veggie Booty snack food in late June, I was concerned for the safety of its young consumers, but I was also smug. OK, I had a bag of the stuff on top of the fridge, but we're past the stage where my three-year-old, Iris, would request Booty and a cup of warm milk every afternoon for a snack. And adults don't eat that sort of thing. Maybe seven or 12 pieces here and there while preparing Iris's snack. That's it.
Then, the same day, the U.S. banned
imports of one of my favorite convenience foods: eel from China. (The ban also covers catfish, shrimp, basa, and dace. Sorry about that, all you basa and dace fans.) A package of barbecued eel in the freezer and a bag of rice on the shelf meant lunch was minutes away: Cook some medium-grain rice in the rice cooker, and when the rice is almost done, toss a frozen barbecued eel fillet on top and let it steam until the eel is hot.
The same meal will set you back maybe $12 in a Japanese restaurant; at home it's a couple bucks. If you have a little more time, you can buy unagi no shiroyaki, eel without sauce, and make your own sauce with soy sauce, sugar, and mirin.
Well, you could at least, before traces of nitrofuran, malachite green, gentian violet, and fluoroquinolones were found in the now-banned Chinese seafood.
So now our house is a Booty- and eel-free zone. To the global food industry: Please clean up your act. Nobody wants to see a frozen potsticker recall. That's one staple dad and daughter can agree on.
Is there a Veggie Booty or eel addict in your house? How are you dealing?
About the author: Matthew Amster-Burton lives in Seattle. His work appears frequently in the Seattle Times and Seattle magazine. His favorite food is pad Thai.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, March 8, 2007 at 3:01 PM
"Welcome to the World's First Great Big Vegetable Challenge! Take one seven year old boy named Freddie and his mother as they face the challenge of turning him from a Vegetable-Phobic into a boy who will eat and even enjoy some of life's leafier pleasures. Join us as we work through the A to Z of vegetables!"
Fred's mom posts photos and the recipes they've tried (some suggested by readers) and Fred himself rates dishes—recently he's given potage crecy a nine and courgette quesadillas a full ten, so he can't really be that much of a vegetable hater, he certainly seems to like them more than I do! The GBVC is first and foremost a fantastic idea but it's also a very charming read, and I look forward to eating vegetables vicariously through their continuing adventures.
[via The Grinder]
Posted by Lia Bulaong, March 1, 2007 at 1:02 PM
Recent research by the Dairy Farmers of Britain suggests that a significant number of children don't know where their food comes from: "At a time when the government is overhauling school dinners to encourage children to eat healthy meals, the latest findings suggest that changing school dinners may be only half the battle - there is also a need to educate children about the origin of their food. More than one in ten (11%) 8 year olds don't know where pork chops come from, and many more have no idea where yoghurt (18%) or cheese comes (11%) from."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 16, 2007 at 2:32 PM
A study of 9,000 British families has found that the children of women who ate more seafood during pregnancy than the US guideline of 12 ounces a week have significantly more advanced fine-motor, communication and social skills than the children of women who stay within the guidelines or eat no fish at all. "The research suggests that those who avoid fish or do not eat enough of it risk depriving their unborn children of important nutrients that are needed to help brain development. (...) Those children whose mothers had eaten no fish were 28% more likely to have poor communication skills at 18 months, 35% more likely to have poor fine-motor coordination at three-and-a-half, 44% more likely to have poor social behaviour at seven, and 48% more likely to have a relatively low verbal IQ at the age of eight, compared with the children of women who had eaten more fish than advised by the US guidelines."
If you're pregnant, avoid fish at the top of the food chain like sharks, tuna and swordfish as they're more likely to contain pollutants; if you don't like fish or can't have fresh fish regularly, omega-3 supplements are an alternative. (Raw shellfish is listed as a no-no but not raw fish altogether; some but not all Japanese doctors tell women to avoid sushi during pregnancy, but recommend they keep eating fish.)
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 16, 2007 at 1:44 PM
The Kansas City Star published a three-part feature late last year on how schools in their area are working to improve the quality of food, it's well worth checking out whether or not you have school-age children for what's said about trends in healthy eating.
Part 1: Reap it and eat visits the Niles Home for Children, where the fresh produce used in the cafeteria comes from the school garden that the students work on: "Ratcliff, the garden director at Niles, has seen kids who professed a lifelong hatred for vegetables try —and like — everything from cucumbers to kohlrabi, a kind of cabbage. The pea crop never made it to the cafeteria because the children ate them all straight from the garden. Almost all the green bell peppers met the same fate."
Part 2: This is not your father's corn dog looks at how food manufacturers are now making healthier versions of cafeteria staples. Children might be better off at the cafeteria than you think: "Kids who ate school lunch consumed seven times more vegetables and twice as much fruit as brown baggers, as well as 21 percent fewer calories from fat, according to a 2002 study by Eastern Michigan University. Sack-lunch students also ate three times as many chips, cookies and packaged snacks as school-lunch participants."
Part 3: Putting the café in cafeteria discusses how food service directors are getting ideas from restaurants to get savvy students to eat healthier, more varied options: "Once a month the Lee’s Summit district serves a menu selected by students. But surprisingly, the elementary group’s top choice for its first menu of the year wasn’t pizza or chicken nuggets, the perennial favorites, but chef salad topped with chicken strips. “It’s what they’re seeing at Applebee’s,” Hentzler says."
