Six Lessons from English School Lunches

Nov 14, 2010 by

In England, it was recently discovered that picky kids were less picky when they ate school lunches than they were at home. The benefits carried over to home, with many kids coming home and asking for the same foods they were getting at school. It happens that in England, home-packed lunches were found to be generally higher in sugar, fat and salt than the school lunches there. So encouraging parents to let kids eat school food instead of mom’s home-packed lunches seems to be getting them to eat more healthy at school as well as at home.

There are several probable reasons for this reduction in pickiness at school.

But today’s…

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Why some kids in England ate at school but not at home

Nov 12, 2010 by

Why some kids in England ate at school but not at home

An English mom, Donna Lovett of Norwich, recently started her “fussy” son, Connor, on school lunches, sure that he wouldn’t eat a thing. She was surprised to see that he loved the school food. He even got into fish and vegetables, she noted. It’s opened the way to serving foods at home she didn’t think were “possible” before.

A recent report from The Food Trust in England has revealed that four out of five kids who ate school lunches there started trying new foods at school that they would never have eaten at home. Half of those children also asked their parents to make some of the dishes that they’d tried at school.

This study came out to encourage parents to have their kids eat at the school cafeteria, following an earlier study that revealed that many parents were packing unhealthy lunches for their children, “because they worry that they…

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More Dinner Table Lessons from Jamie Oliver’s ‘Food Revolution’

May 6, 2010 by

Behind the times as usual, I finally watched Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution—all six episodes at once. We can draw out some meaty lessons for parents who want to change their way their kids eat from Oliver’s strategies to change the way America eats, one school at a time and one town at a time.

Oliver’s first attempt at getting elementary school kids eating healthier was the addition of a healthy meal with real chicken (something unfamiliar) alongside the school’s regular fare: pizza. When given the choice, between the new, healthy meal or their usual pizza, of course the kids chose pizza.

As Oliver also found out, if you offer pink milk or chocolate milk alongside plain milk, the girls take the pink and the boys take the chocolate. Nothing terribly shocking there so far. However, he discovered if you boldly, ruthlessly take away the flavored, sugary milk options altogether, the kids…

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How To Relieve Your Stress by Cooking Dinner

Apr 18, 2009 by

Mom serving dinner happy

“How do you have something different to eat every day?” my daughter’s school friends asked her at lunch one day.  The answer to the mystery:  her mom cooks every day, unless we are eating leftovers cooked previously.  While I do have numerous other personal shortcomings, I do cook. My daughter usually takes something homemade in her lunch. Today, for example, she took a colorful, flavorful salad of raw fennel, roasted beets, oranges and kalamata olives with a dressing of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, fennel seeds and orange peel.

Most of the other girls’ moms “don’t cook,” they reported. Or they cook about once a week. …

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