I truly believe that fun and delicious nutrition starts at a young age, and the way we engage with food in our early years lays the foundation for a lifetime.
Some of my best memories involve food—not just eating it, but choosing, preparing, and enjoying it. I hope you have a special memory, say baking an apple pie with your grandmother after climbing an apple tree or sitting on the counter as your mom made the sauce and you got to add in the spices.
Like any kind of muscle memory, preparing healthy food becomes second nature and can be done with a sense of ease when it’s started in childhood. The confidence this builds allows you to approach nutrition with excitement. Imagine if we spent just a fraction of the time we spend on our children’s sports lessons on time together, focused on creating healthy meals!
A Spirit of Adventure
For me, a favorite memory is of strolling through the market with my young children, choosing ingredients that were colorful, or smelled delicious or were new flavors from around the world. We made it an adventure, a world of possibilities. Could we pick something we’ve never used before? Try a new combination of ingredients? Use something in a novel way?
Back in the kitchen, we would smell the ingredients and talk through our many options. Should we pair the fresh basil with a ripe tomato and some great olive oil and finishing salt…or make a yummy homemade sauce? Unleashing our imaginations was a big part of the fun…and still is today.
Collaboration and Conversation
I love collaboration in the kitchen. For some people, working on a meal alone can feel, well, lonely…and like work. Preparing food with others is togetherness. In those moments, dialogue about cooking can turn to conversations about school, family, friends and into deeper subjects like struggles, fears, and the future. It’s amazing all the things I learned about my kids’ lives through the time we spent together in the kitchen!
Our conversations surrounding food weren’t solely focused on ingredients and taste. We talked about the entire meal, and the event surrounding the meal, for example what to serve first and how to make the table look beautiful. And by event, it doesn’t have to be elaborate. It can be as simple as a family dinner. We still get together every Sunday as a big family and create meals filled with seasonal ingredients that are relatively easy to prepare, so we can spend time laughing and catching up.
A Sensory Experience
One of the best ways to encourage a love for real food is by introducing children to the sensory experience—point out the bright hue of ripe tomatoes, the velvety smoothness of a homemade sauce. Allow them to smell, touch, and taste ingredients and let them help decide what to cook. Encourage them to experiment with flavors, textures and colors. When we involve kids in the process from a young age, they develop an appreciation for fresh ingredients and the art of making meals from scratch.
Making nutritious, delicious food is an experience meant to be savored. Compare the act of opening and eating a box of store-bought cookies made with all of their preservatives…with making your own dough from whole ingredients, cutting out shapes and baking them together (or you can pick up those whole-ingredient cookies at ANEU), and then decorating them with vibrant colors. The latter is far healthier, interactive and joyful. It also reminds us that (1) food shouldn’t be instantaneous and (2) it can be a mindful experience enjoyed by all the senses.
Food IS more than fuel—it’s a way to connect with those we love, create, and celebrate. Let’s embrace the joy of good, healthful food and pass that passion on to future generations.
In good health,
Meridith
