Help Kids Eat Healthy through Exploration! Part I of "Play with Your Food", a training on nutrition and creativity with Steven Dobrinski & Nikki Vega

    Afternoon shoppers watched curiously as VHFLC teachers trickled into New Seasons, taking their place by a table with numbered take-out boxes and an assortment of mysterious covered platters. RS Steven Dobrinski & New Seasons Asst. Promotions Manager Nikki Vega clearly had some tricks in store for the attendees of their "Play with Your Food" training, an informational session on how to present healthy food to children using creativity and innovation. 

Children are Natural Explorers

      Once the group settled (the turn-out was a blend of teachers from both the ECE and school-age communities), Nikki and Steven began their training by provoking everyone to think about the fact that childhood is characterized by maximum physical and mental growth. By the age of 20, Steven mentioned, we will have lost half our taste buds, and by the age of 10, our brains will have already forged the majority its connections. In other words, both our capacity for learning and the behaviors we adopt -- our tendencies, our ways of interacting and engaging with the world -- will largely be solidified by this time. With this in mind, it is especially crucial that we establish healthy and accurate relationships with food in our early years.

      Do you have a childhood memory of rejecting a food because it seems too strong, too sour, too bitter, or maybe just too 'new'? The chances are you do. Combine the extraordinarily heightened senses of a child and a world bombarded by artificially sweetened, colored, preserved, and flavored "children's foods", and what you get is a taste palette that is literally being trained to reject unaltered, 'real' food. 

With sugar, for instance, copious amounts are often added to the "healthy" foods we see on grocery store shelves -- from more obvious items like cereal, to less obvious items like yogurt, fruit/vegetable juice and tomato sauce. Steven pointed out that this can have very negative behavioral implications, as it lowers the immune system, disrupts mood and focus, and releases neurotransmitters in the same way that drugs do, causing addiction. You can watch this TED-Ed video to learn more about the subject. 

         
      
      As a parent or a teacher, it can be easy to become fatigued by a child's repeated rejection of a particular food (or foods, as is often the case), and to forget the impact and power that food presentation can have. Food aversions can be reversed with a combined positive attitude (your children will feel it!) and the patience to try tactics that appeal to their natural desire to explore through their senses. As Nikki and Steven noted in one of their hand-outs, "making food is one of the few opportunities to use touch, smell, sight, and taste all at once," and appropriately, children who are engaged in the cooking process (or the process of assembling ingredients) are far more likely to eat the result.

• Smell - help children get acquainted with individual food items by having them learn their unique smells. As it turned out, Steve and Nikki's numbered take-out boxes contained a variety of ingredients (olives, eggs, carrots, bread, etc) that the group was asked to identify with their eyes closed. Everyone (and these were adults!) had loads of fun watching each other make their guesses, and it was really interesting to hear both the answers people came up with and how they arrived at them.

• Touch - Incorporate a variety of textures into your meal and try letting your kids explore them through touch. In Steve and Nikki's blind smell test, when people struggled with identifying a food, they were then allowed to explore it through touch -- another activity that proved enjoyable and revealing!

• Sight (color/shape/etc) - incorporating a variety of colors into a meal insures a diverse range of nutrients and helps to protect cells and tissues in the body. A range of colors can also provide children with the palette to make their own artistic creation. Alternatively, it can be fun to try and make 'troublesome' foods part of a monochromatic meal, or to cut foods into an assortment of shapes.

• Transformations - Try a simple project like pickling or drying a food. This isn't just an interactive way of getting children to be excited about their food, but it's also an opportunity for them to learn about things like the science of chemical reactions or the impact of passing time. You'll find that working with food can be about so much more than just a good meal or developing healthy habits -- math, artistry, spacial ability, time management, and dexterity (among other skills) can all play their part. Be sure to remember that experimenting and making errors is not necessarily bad here and can aid with the learning process.

      After trainers and teachers discussed these ideas, the mysterious food platters were uncovered to reveal cucumber slices, cheese, bread, and other sandwich ingredients. We received instructions that showed us different ways kids could assemble these materials (below), and were then given the option to either try and mimic them or to try and make our own creations. Scroll down to see the caterpillars, sail boats, Pac Men, and porcupines that ensued...

Do you have examples of unique ways to engage children with their food? Show us! And be sure to check out Part II next week for more ideas on specific dishes you can prepare with your kids, healthy substitutes, and the value of eating local.