But throughout the almost two-hour movie, I found myself wondering – no, hoping — that the film would plant the cooking seed in at least one of my two kids. How cool would it be if, in 15 years’ time, my son tells me that it was this film that inspired him to attend the Culinary Institute of America to train as a chef? Or if my daughter tells me, “I’ve wanted to go to Paris ever since I saw it portrayed in that movie about the rat.”

Indeed, I’m now wondering how many future chefs are being duly inspired as I write this. I’d read on various foodie sites about how this movie would thrill cooks of all persuasions with its accurate portrayal of a Parisian restaurant’s kitchen. And I loved how it managed to demonstrate an elevated sense of taste using art and music. More than a great way to spend a summer Saturday with the kids, I can’t help but think a fair number of impressionable minds will leave the movie theater with a newfound interest in food and cooking.

My kids, at least, were asking me if I knew how to make ratatouille on the drive home. I told them we’d look it up in a cookbook tomorrow.

Two American kids asking their mom, not particularly known for her cooking skills, about a French peasant dish? That’s success in my mind! Pixar has done it again. Any parent with any interest at all in cuisine will want to take their children to this delightful new movie.

And I was right. But I also was surprised to find myself agreeing with just about every point he made. Particularly the point about our being held in the “grips of a nefarious chicken finger pandemic, in which a blandly tasty foodstuff has somehow become the de facto official nibble of our young.”

Somebody say Amen!

I think it’s already been well proven that the more you pander to kids’ unformed palates the more picky those palates will become. Unfortunately, as every parent knows, it’s simply too easy to pander at the end of the day.
Fortunately, the times appear to be changing. At least in the world of dining out.
Kamp cites various restaurants that are starting to think out of the box in terms of their children’s menus. Why can’t a five year old enjoy a small, very tender steak with smashed potatoes? Well exactly.

And there’s the ethnic option of course, where hopefully you’ll never be confronted with chicken finger. Rice and beans? Healthy and kid-friendly as anything gets. Rice noodles? Pot stickers? Orange chicken?

With just a little imagination, restaurants can serve its younger diners delicious, healthy, and appealing meals… with nary a fried chicken nugget in sight. It’s a trend I’m all for.

How about you, parents? What sort of non-child menu food do your kids like to get when you take them out to eat? Dish it!

They were so skinny. So small. So…malnourished looking? I understood the politics behind choosing to be a vegan, but surely, I thought, would it hurt to slip your kid a little scrambled egg or a piece of cheese now and then?

The babies usually looked fine. They were always breast fed, of course, well into their preschool years. Breast milk, with its complex mix of protein and fats, was obviously doing its job of keeping the babies fat and healthy. It was the older kids, the preschoolers and beyond who didn’t look as strong as the other kids in our courtyard.

But I couldn’t say anything. It wasn’t my place. And these kids were well-loved by conscientious parents who were doing what they thought best. No meat. No dairy. No eggs. Nothing to do with any animal on the food chain. Plant food only. I was a vegetarian, too, but one who ate fish and eggs and dairy… and who allowed my kids the occasional hot dog. Who was I to question their parenting choices?
That’s why I was so struck by an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times. Writer Nina Planck bravely states that a plant-only based diet is “irresponsible.” She points out that the recent conviction of a vegan couple whose baby died of starvation, the third such conviction in four years, demands a more open discussion on the topic.

I would agree with her, but I’d quickly duck, too. Her piece is sure to invite lots of passionate debate, pro and con — in print and in the blogosphere. But then someone had to start the discussion, didn’t they? Who better than a mother — and former vegan?

(Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy USDA Agricultural Research Service)

The Farm Bill? (yawn). Much as we like to keep abreast of current events, arcane legislation is very low on the radar of busy parents like us.

Ah, but as Pollan writes, the Farm Bill, due to come around for re-examination this year, does indeed set the rules for the American food system (and by extension, the rest of the world’s food system). And we parents should take an active interest, since it plays a large role in determining what kinds of foods our kids eat in school.

The school lunch programs started back when undernourishment was a problem for poor kids. Now, of course, the tables have turned, making obesity the public health crisis of the day. Part of what the Farm Bill does is subsidize the overproduction of the sorts of grains used for fast foods and soft drinks.

Pollan cites this alarming statistic: “Where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40%, the real price of soft drinks (a.k.a. liquid corn) declined by 23%. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.”
The system is rigged to make the most unhealthy calories the ones that are most affordable. This is not lost on budget-strapped school districts. So instead of helping local lunch ladies make nutritious meals from whole foods grown and bought locally, the politics of American food policy conspire to keep our kids in high-calorie ‘Tator Tots and processed chicken nuggets.

How is that helping combat childhood obesity? It isn’t. So the time has come for parents (and everyone else who eats) to sit up and start paying attention to what’s going on with our country’s food policy — from the top down.

I want my kids to be interested in the eating and the cooking parts. I want them to grow up with memories of their mom preparing them food. And I want them to wonder how it’s done, if only to question why I botched things up so regularly.

Part of doing this is to officially sanction playing with their food… even as they make it.

This weekend I made almendrados, almond-lemon macaroons, from a Sephardic recipe I found in the New York Times. (I’d link here but the link is now archived so no longer free). It’s a simple but elegant-sounding dessert that I was inspired to try.  Read all about it here.

When it came time to roll the dough into little balls and swipe them through sugar on a dish, my six-year-old Jack couldn’t help but want to help.

“Wash your hands first,” I instructed. “With soap!”

He made little balls of macaroon like an expert, and set them carefully onto the parchment paper.

Then he got his six-year-old on and started making macaroon monsters. Two decorative almonds instead of one. Then three. Then he made a macaroon centipede. And a Woolly Mammoth.

Naturally, I had to bake all of these, too.

His play briefly crashed into my sense of seriousness. I’d never made these before and I needed to pay attention. Ruining simple recipes is my specialty, but I wanted these to turn out. I soon realized, however, that I needed to lighten up.

My almendrados turned out lovely. And my son, meanwhile, had a lot of fun helping me bake. He actually took great care with the baking of these macaroons, setting the timer and keeping his eye on it, helping his scatter-brained, too busy mom to not overcook something for once.

He was rewarded with all the macaroon mastodons he could eat. With milk. Chalk up another positive childhood kitchen memory.

“Aren’t you worried about the caffeine?” one mom ventured?

Not particularly, I told her. Especially since it didn’t seem to have any impact on her sleeping. She drank it because her father, an Englishman, and I, drank it every night after dinner. It was a cultural tradition that we were simply passing on to her.

I continue to get the occasional raised eyebrow when I mention my kids’ love of tea, as if I were permitting some sort of barely-legal activity.

But kids all over the world drink tea. In Britain, little kids come home not to milk and cookies (”That just sounds so off to me,” my English husband once admitted), but to tea and biscuits (biscuit being their word for what we’d think of as a cookie but their cookie means…oh never mind, it’s too complicated). Kids in China, Japan, Korea, and India all grow up with tea.

It’s now been well-established that tea is good for you. How good is still being debated.
But Americans aren’t tea drinkers. We prefer other, less healthy sugary drinks. And although premium tea (and the corresponding “tea houses”) is now a growing beverage segment, we still don’t generally accept tea as a child’s drink.

Indeed, as immigrants move to this country and adopt our diet, their children stop drinking tea — and fall prey to all the usual Western maladies such as obesity and diabetes.

But my kids are half-English, and they drink a lot of tea, to no ill effects at all. Indeed, these days they insist on their cup of “honey tea” every night before bed. It’s a warm, relaxing ritual that, if the health claims are right, will put them in good stead.

As if that weren’t enough to give you pause, the Federal agency, which says there is no evidence cloned food products are bad for you, has indicated that it doesn’t think these cloned products even need to be labeled as such. In other words, there’s no way we consumers would know if it’s real or if it’s Memorex.

I’m surprised there’s not more of an outcry in this country. In Europe there has literally been rioting over the prospect being sold genetically-altered produce, or “Franken-food,” as some activists call it.  It’s been picking up lately, and not a moment too soon.

Several large grocery and food chains have come out firmly against this trend, including markets Whole Foods and Wild oats, as well as Dean Foods and Unilever (makers of Ben & Jerry’s). I confess to being less-concerned than I should be over whether my salmon is farmed or caught fresh and similar environmental foodie issues. But this one really bothers me. I don’t think we have any real clue about what we’re getting into with this cloning business. I certainly don’t want to consume anything nature didn’t have a hand in. I don’t want my kids touching the stuff, either, and since they’re the ones headed deeper into this disturbing future than I am, maybe we should start fighting the good fight now.
Parents – how do you feel about this issue? Willing to feed your children meat and milk from cloned animals?

I’m also wondering if there’s a difference between preparing food (like a sandwich, for example) and cooking food (like pasta). I suspect one leads into another.

And that’s why I was very pleased to note recently that my six-year-old son insists on making his own PB&Js. As you can see from the photo, these are some mighty fine looking sandwiches. It suggests to me that he’s watched me long enough to know he can take his fate into his own hands (and with my cooking, that’s prudent). Somewhere along the line I must have decided that 7 is the magic number for real cooking instruction, because he cited this back to me the other day.

“You said you’d teach me how to cook when I was 7,” he said.

“I did?”

“Yeah. And I’m almost 7.”

Well, OK then. I suppose I can start with the very basics, like, how to open a can of soup, and progress toward the finer points of boiling pasta. I’ll move on from there. Maybe he can be my own captive sous-chef.

Right. Nothing fancy going on in my kitchen. But that’s not the point. The objective is to keep them interested and curious. Curious enough to venture out there themselves and see what they can cook up.

In the meantime, they can cook for me. My son can now make me a sandwich, which is a very fine start indeed. And my 10-year-old girl knows how to make a mean cup of tea. If I play my cards right, I’ll have a couple of young foodies cooking gourmet for me… under my own roof! Bwaahhhaaahhaaa!

My 10-year-old is already talking trash about living in Paris one day. It’s all I can do to keep from buying her a ticket now.

Our own Janelle from Talk of Tomatoes has just launched The Brown Bag Blues, a blog devoted to the fine art (or is it a science?) of packing an appetizing brown bag lunch.

Being a mom herself, Janelle understands how the constant onslaught of mom duties tends to squash time and creative energy. Who can think of new baggable menu items when you’re trying to juggle kids, pets, work, husbands or partners, schedules, laundry, and Girl Scout Cookie sales? Well, I’m not very creative at the end of the day, anyway. I’ll take all the help I can get.

Not sure how Janelle does it, though. Maybe she’s on a better grade of coffee than I am…

Her blog promises to be the remedy for those nights when you stand in front of the refrigerator or pantry and despair. What to make for lunch tomorrow? Close your mouth, close the refrig door (energy’s expensive!) and log onto the Brown Bag Blues for ideas.

An idea I already like? Color-themes. Pick a color, say red. Then have your kids help you brainstorm baggable red foodstuffs. Janelle suggests items such as red pasta with olive oil and salt (I can already hear my daughter smacking her lips. *red* pasta? How cool!), strawberry jam on wheat bread slices, red tortilla chips, tomato bagel, and dried cranberries.

I’m bookmarking this one.

Check out these totally cute silicon oven mitts featured on StyleHive. Would my two kids love these? Yes, indeed they would. Would I let them use them to drain the hot water from the pasta pot? Er, probably… not.

But they would surely be preoccupied while I did it myself. In fact, I might get a whole 30 minutes of question-free cooking in with colorful little mitts like these.