The protein question

I’ve written before about my 12-year-old son who decided he’d become a vegetarian when he was 8. You have to hand it to the kid: he’s never wavered. Not for a pepperoni pizza, not for fresh smallmouth bass caught by his dad, not for gummy bears or marshmallows made with gelatin.

Luckily, he’s willing to try new things and genuinely likes beans and most vegetables. He’s even becoming interested in cooking—thanks, in large part, to the fact that his middle school has mandatory classes in cooking and baking, a rarity these days.

Lunch in a bowl: vegetarian soup for all reasons

And his decision has definitely had a huge impact on our family’s eating habits. The rest of us now eat meat only occasionally (maybe once a week), and rarely cook it at home. For the record, I don’t think everyone has to go veg, though, as most people have heard, there is growing evidence showing a plant-based diet is better for your health—not to mention the environment.

But all this growing awareness about eating less meat doesn’t stop everyone (and I mean everyone) from asking us worriedly how we get our growing (and athletic) child to eat enough protein. From now on, I will offer my standard “did you know broccoli is a great protein source?” and send them directly to Michele Simon’s scathing article: Protein propaganda: it’s what’s for dinner in Grist.

Simon points to the powerful meat lobby and its stranglehold on our collective food conscience. She argues: “One way to distract attention away from heart attacks and colon cancer is to conflate the idea of meat with a nutrient that we do in fact need: protein.”

Grist is doing an entire series called Protein Angst trying to break down the rhetoric about this incredibly controversial subject. I’ll definitely be watching it.

Growing chefs

One of the food predictions for 2011 I highlighted back in January was the suggestion that professional chefs would get involved in school lunch—and bring children back into the kitchen. Of course, this makes it sound as if chefs haven’t been doing this all along, which is simply not true.

In Vancouver, in fact, an organization called Growing Chefs—in which volunteer chefs are paired with elementary school classrooms—has been running since 2005.

Growing Chefs has a two-part mandate: to promote urban agriculture; and to connect kids and chefs to encourage a sustainable food system. What this means in practice is that the volunteer chefs go into the classroom over a three month period, first helping the kids grow indoor veggie gardens, then engaging them with games and activities about sustainability and nutrition, and, finally, heading into the kitchen to create delicious meals from the food they’ve grown.

The Growing Chefs site also has smart resources for growing food indoors, recipes and ideas for fun food experiments—a great way to turn little people into little chefs.

Check out "The Little Chef," a short film about small but mighty chefs and the lengths to which they'll go for carrots

Home ec revisited

I was something of a tomboy growing up and didn’t pay much attention to anything I considered girlie.

I did however learn how to cook, sew and (later) type. At school. In the 1980s. Home economics was not optional in my elementary school. The Grade 7-8 girls did home ec; the boys did shop. (There may have been a few cross-over types but it was generally frowned upon.)

I remember burning a lot of things in the oven, and making a horrid floral blouse that I never wore (it was stiff and prissy and I’m pretty sure it’s the reason that to this day I almost never wear collared shirts or floral prints).  I spent most of the time being sarcastic about it all, irritated that sexist stereotypes were being perpetuated in school and figuring I’d never use the skills I learned. Home ec was for housewives, and that was not something I imagined ever wanting to be.

Fast forward some 25 years, and I type (for work) and cook (for pleasure—and family) everyday— with the occasional sewing project thrown in on special occasions.

I wouldn’t wish my old home ec class on anyone—especially divided by gender—but the idea of having such practical skills incorporated into school life sounds amazing, even essential, to me. Especially the cooking part.

Lamenting the loss of food skills in our culture has become a cliched refrain, but it’s also absolutely correct. Industrial food culture, of course, encourages this de-skilling—how else to sell more Big Macs, frozen chicken nuggets and Lite Delite Dinners? And the worst part of all is the impact it’s had on our health—and the health of our children.

There are some schools out there still offering cooking classes—often combined with their school gardens–though not many in my part of the world. In Britain, however, after years of campaigning by interested teachers and parents, “cookery” was finally added to the curriculum for 11-14 year olds. Advocates successfully argued that one of the largest barriers to good health is a lack of cooking skills.

But according to Jackie’s School Food Blog, the new Secretary of Education is doing a curriculum revamp and is likely to get rid of compulsory cookery. (Sustain is running a campaign called Keep Kids Cooking to pressure the government to maintain it.)

Squandering this resource is an astonishingly shortsighted thing to do when health and food are so much at top of mind for people around the world.

Just last year, in fact, the Journal of the American Medical Association even weighed in, publishing a editorial that urged American educators to “Bring Back Home Economics Education.” Not some retrograde version of my gendered home ec class, but curriculum for boys and girls focused on basic principles about feeding yourself and your family, complete with practical lessons, field trips and demonstrations.

I can’t believe I’m saying this considering my own resistance to home ec, but in our contemporary food culture, teaching kids to cook could be one of the most radical moves of all.

Kids’ choice: quinoa

In yet another of my attempts to get family meal buy-in from my children, I recently decided we’d call Sunday evening dinner “Kids’ Choice.” They get to decide what we eat and help make it. Cool, right? Control and engagement for them, a  fun, new ritual for all of us. (I was inspired in part by Laurie David, producer and activist (An Inconvenient Truth) and recent author of  The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect with Your Kids, One Meal at a Time, who I heard on the radio explaining how she had “Taco Tuesdays” with her kids every week.)

We’ve only been doing it for two weeks so the jury is still out on its success, but the first week was our 6-year-old’s choice and without missing a beat he said: I want QUINOA!

Uncooked quinoa

When I was his age, I wouldn’t have known quinoa if I was buried in it but we have this yummy, nutty seed pretty regularly. He likes the flavour much more than rice or couscous, and we like that it’s extremely quick, and this little nutritional powerhouse packs in protein, iron and fibre.

Seems my boy’s not alone. In fact, quinoa has become so popular, it’s starting to change the lives of subsistence farmers in Bolivia where it grows well in the altiplano. They can afford more land and are able to send their children to secondary school. But according to a piece on NPR, the increased demand is also making quinoa so expensive it could soon be out of reach for the average person in the Andes where it’s been a staple for centuries. The Associated Press reports, in fact, that the wholesale price has jumped sevenfold since 2000 and some kids  in Bolivia are actually showing signs of malnutrition because their parents are offering up rice and noodles instead of healthier, and (now) more expensive quinoa.

The Bolivian government is trying to promote internal consumption by providing rations to pregnant women and young children, and there will no doubt have to be more checks and balances created—to monitor and control the environmental costs of increased quinoa production, as well.

With intelligent regulation and an eagle eye on equity, surely this doesn’t have to be another story of the needs of the developed world trumping those of the developing. Still, it’s a reminder of the challenges of the complex international food system we’ve created: where one kids’ choice can mean another’s missed chance.

Cooking at the Cookshop

After my older son saw the movie Ratatouille with its tiny perfect chef a few years ago, he began a cooking phase. We had all sorts of interesting and creative hors d’oeuvres served to us—crackers with cream cheese and cucumber drizzled with honey was one I recall with particular fondness. Unfortunately, it lasted all of about a week. Both boys like to bake with me but making non-sweet food doesn’t seem to interest them much. Next year, we’re planning to have our older son pack his own lunch for school — so maybe he’ll find his inner chef once again.

I was reminded of this reading about the Food Bank for New York City’s very cool CookShop Classroom program.

If you ask most kids living in New York City where their food comes from, the answer is likely to be “the grocery store!” They’re not wrong, of course, but it’s hardly the whole story. That’s where CookShop Classroom comes in.  At classes run by their teachers, some 11,000 kids from the city’s lowest-income neighbourhoods take part in a hands-on program of food discovery, learning how things grow, how farmers tend and harvest their fields, and how they and their families can prepare and eat these fresh foods. Focusing on one new fruit, vegetable or grain—like cabbage or the artichoke—over two weeks, the kids follow it on its journey from field to table, tasting all along the way.

In urban neighbourhoods where fast food restaurants are often a way of life and nearly a quarter of students are obese, where apples and carrots are the only produce many kids see, CookShop is a breath of fresh air. By giving children access to unprocessed whole foods, exposing them to farmers and the pleasures of sharing good food—not to mention introducing cooking skills—they’re learning habits they can hold on to for life.

Cooking for little people

My 6-year-old son has been at the same daycare since he was 1.5 years old—and his older brother was there for a few years before that. It’s a comfortable place with loving staff and active parent community close to our home. About three years ago, parents advocated for and managed to fundraise so that the in-house cook could purchase organic dairy products and meat.

But this past winter and spring things have really taken off on the food front. I’m pretty sure it’s because the new(ish) chef Sam has embraced his role as a food educator as well as cook. He introduced vermicomposting to the staff and kids, and has planted a veggie garden right outside the front door. They’re growing herbs and tomatoes, peppers and more. They are also attempting to sprout avocados in the classroom window—something I remember my mom doing when I was a kid.

Not only that, the food Sam makes is great—my son is always telling me how much he loves daycare lunches. The unspoken message (bless his little heart for not saying it out loud) is that it’s better than what we offer at home. But I’m not taking offense—at least he’s enjoying one meal a day.

Daycare staff in our city are notoriously underpaid (and undervalued, considering the essential service they provide) and licensed daycares themselves are few and far between in the downtown. So it’s not easy to find childcare in which the food is made in-house and food education—often considered an “extra”— plays a role in daily life.

A curriculum guide called Grow It, Try It, Like It: Preschool Fun with Fruits and Vegetables has recently been produced in the US aimed at daycares interested in doing as Sam has done. It’s all about getting kids to touch, smell and taste new things and have fun doing it. Imagine the possibilities for change to our food system when kids as young as three are learning (and experiencing) healthy, sustainable eating and growing simply as part of their every day.

Veggication* for the nation

"I like to eat sweet potato soup with carrots on the side."

This year at my sons’ school, there was a focus on food as part of the annual Arts event. All through the second semester teachers looked at food in various ways. Some classes focused on marketing, others on growing, others on compost and soil. It culminated in a day-long event in the spring.

The kindergarten class (of which my long-eyelashed, pig-nosed, sweet potato–loving son, above, is part) did the art/writing project you see here. They talked about healthy eating, and then created these 3D plates with their favourite healthy food, and the posters were hung in the hallway. I love this example of a teacher getting creative and using age-appropriate materials and concepts to talk to kids about food. My son was very proud of his sweet potato soup (and yes he actually does like it, mostly because it is sweetened with maple syrup).

Of course, there are lots of interesting ways to get kids talking and thinking about food. One of the best is to get them actually eating—and trying new things.

*Veggication is the (brilliant) name of a curriculum-based lunch program that, in the words of its creator Lisa Suriano:

“introduces young children to the wonderfully delicious and nutritious world of vegetables. This is done by incorporating unique and kid-friendly vegetable preparations into a fun and exciting school experience. By replacing food fears and resistance with ownership and positive peer pressure, students are empowered to expand their horizons while simultaneously improving their nutritional status.”

Cool. Especially if she could just get my son to eat sweet potatoes when they’re not in his favourite soup….

The little chef

The Little Chef, kung-fu master, lover of carrots

And for another look at how seriously some kids take their food, check out  The Little Chef from the good folks who brought you Bad Guys are Bad.