Letters to the Editor
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Don't forget "kids' menus"
The NY Times did a great article a while back about restaurants finally starting to trend away from kids' menus filled with almost uniformly starchy beige food--cheese pizza, chicken nuggets, hamburgers and spaghetti--and toward kid-sized portions of "adult" food: dishes including fresh produce, seafood, interesting textures and flavor combinations. Seconding Allie's beef with the way we educate kids--treating a child's education as somehow separate from his real life--I think it's past time to get over the delusion sold us by the convenience foods industry that children are somehow unable to handle real food. Look at a restaurant children's menu sometime. Would you want to eat it? Then why would you feed it to your child?
I would never want to wholesale revert to the Victorian ideal of children as little adults, but there's a healthy middle ground to be found between that and our distorted paradigm construct of children's life not being real life--school as separate from the real world and kids' food as different from real food are both part and parcel of the bigger problem of the ways we cut children off from healthy reality.