Letters to the Editor
-
Foodology
My son is adopted from a foreign country. Unmarried women in that country hide their pregnancies. I have no idea what she ate or didn't eat, or what she did to hide her pregnancy. My son eats hot dogs, pizza, french fries, cookies, juice, ice cream. He abhors vegetables and fruit. Nothing will get him to eat these foods. He will eat no sort of condiment - no ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, butter, whipped cream, sprinkles, not even hot fudge. He will eat no sauce, not even my mother's delicious spaghetti sauce; in fact, he is adamant about eating his spaghetti pale and naked. No gravy. No mashed potatoes. No boiled potatoes. No baked potato. He is "Mr No" when it comes to food. I have found this to be true of many male children.
He's as healthy as a horse, is taller than 90% of kids his age and is in the top of his class at school.
So I wouldn't worry.
PS -- My mother was thrilled to serve us kids canned vegetables from the supermarket. In her day, you could only get vegetables in season. Since her parents were poor immigrants who didn't own land, they couldn't preserve vegetables. So Mom thought she was doing us a huge nutritional favor by slopping a couple of spoonfuls of swollen, wet canned string beans on our plates. Those string beans looked and tasted like they were stewed in DDT and they probably were. But I lived. Cultures obsess about food and devise all kinds of pseudo-healthy mythology and superstition about food. We're lucky to have enough food to obsess about. We should count our blessings, since so many people in this world go hungry.
-
its about variety
a varied diet is the key here. all pizza diet is bad. but the sometimes pizza meal isnt. i breastfed them all until they weaned themselves,tried to eat right, took all the right supplements. i am vegetarian, they arent. but they are fed well. varied, and well.
from observing the frenzy of diet controlled kids at a birthday party, they are the first, and greediest, grabbers of junk food,like junkies towards a fix.my 5 eat a healthy varied diet.junk food is a component. is not the basis. but whats wrong with nights where we go 'thats it! tonight is custard and fruit for dinner?'. food loses its power that way.
i learnt it the hardest way, when my eldest,(the eldest is always the one you always watch the closest,try the hardest with), who had had such a carefully prepared diet, became anorexic at 14. i learnt to stop making food so powerful. shes healthy and strong now. and the others may eat pizza once a week. or fish and chips,or take away chook. so what. the rest of the time, they get home cooked meals. i like chocolate.they like chocolate. just not every day, but not as a huge dramatic treat. just, sometimes. and their grandparents are allowed to spoil them silly, but not TOO much coloring, please, they get hungover,and i have to deal with it;)
-
Thanks...
I usually feel pretty much alone in the world as I feed my two year old organic applesauce and a ball park hotdog for dinner, so it was a pleasure to read this!
I'm pretty lucky, though. While her favorite foods are fries and pizza, she regularly eats fresh fruits, limited vegetables (she likes sliced tomatoes and recently started eating raw carrots after seeing "The Curse of the Were Rabbit") and soup (seriously, I have a two year old that recently ate a bowl of stracciatella at a nice Italian restaurant). For what it's worth (not much), I just try to get her to try whatever we're eating, for good and for bad.
-
This article made me wince
Yes, birthday cake happens, but it doesn't have to be a staple of your diet at home. I truly understand the pressures of being a working mom--and frankly when mom works, dad should pitch in, so this isn't just about moms--but it saddens me how frequently nutrition and table time are first on the chopping block when parents juggle their responsibilities.
Your kids would eat a wide variety of nutritious food if you fed them a wide variety of nutritious food from birth. I grew up in a country where eating out is the exception and vegetables are the cheapest food there is. Babies there happily eat fruits and vegetables. It's all a matter of what you get them used to.
The obesity and diabetes epidemic in the U.S. are directly related to our sacrificing good food and eating routines for convenience and time management. It's as important to train our children to nourish themselves rather than abuse their bodies as it is to provide them with a good education. A piece of cake now and then isn't poison, but a diet centered around processed, corn-syrup filled foods is a recipe for serious health problems down the road.
-
Child is doomed
Yes, healthy eating is good, and serving your children healthy food is good, but lady, you are neurotic, and your child is going to be neurotic about food. Sorry, but that's the way it is. (Or should I have said, good night, and good luck.)
-
Very, very odd
Change one word and a segment of the article would read:
We don't have to be of the world, but we do have to live in the world. Heroin happens, and it's not a tragedy when it does.
I bet that article would get a very different reader response - even though it's essentially the same concept. Feeding your children substances that will kill them is just basically a bad idea.
-
one slice of cake does not an obese child make
The author is spot on about the fact that the point of parenting when it comes to food is to make sure their little angels grow into adults that have a healthy relationship with food. I am sick and tired of people equating the consumption of a single donut with the obesity epidemic. The person who obssessively consumes only militantly regulated portions of organic, gluten-free, fat-free, taste-free food is no more balanced in their approach to food than the person who eats every meal from McDonald's.
The anorexic who looks like she came out of magazine but is barfing up her lunch every afternoon doesn't have any better relationship with food than the person who weighs 350 pounds, but still the immediate reaction when discussing food issues is to leap on the "obesity epidemic" as the biggest horror show around and the source of all our food problems.
The truth is more subtle than that. We teach our children attitudes about food that are nothing short of insane. On the one hand, we teach our children that food is love -- witness the countless advertisements where mom makes her family feel better by cooking something good, or where dad makes his kid feel better by sharing an Oreo cookie. Indeed, some of the ads for chocolate promote an almost sexual experience just from one candy bar (although there is scientific connection between sexual pleasure hormones and chocoloate consumption, I doubt that anyone has ever acheived an orgasm munching on a Hershey bar). Then there's all the cooking shows, and "foodies" in the media selling us on the notion that fine dining is where it's at, and the right restaurant reservation confers a certain status. The avalanche of fetishization of food that goes on in modern life is unreal.
Then, on the other hand, there are the food nazis -- the diet culture that tries to tell you that everything is bad for you, all foods give you cancer, and no pleasure on earth could be worth even 5 pounds of excess fat. This is the culture promoted by women's magazines, the celebrity diet craze (where everyone is supposed to aspire to a size 2, whether it's possible for them or not), and ironically enough, much of the health food industry. Food to these people is something to fear and loathe, to be as cautious around as one might be if one was handling nitroglycerine.
Is it any wonder, then, that we're so completely messed up in how we eat? French people (who usually live longer than we do and are healthier and thinner than we are) laugh at us and our neuroses. Then they go have a small bite of cheese, a light dinner well-prepared with a cream-based sauce, and walk home without a hint of guilt or angst. Perhaps we might learn something there.