Joanna Blythman - The Food Our Children Eat - How to Get Children to Like Good Food

Family mealtimes, we are told, are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Gone are the days when Mum was at home all day to cook and Dad waltzed in just in time to carve the meat. Nowadays, family meals are being replaced by a new phenomenon – staggered eating, where everyone eats at different times. At the extreme, we hear of households where adults and children take it in turns to use the microwave so they can reheat an individual meal of their preference, selected from a stock of ready meals and convenience foods which is replenished at the supermarket every week or ten days. The less extreme, but increasingly common, phenomenon is the two-shift mealtime, where the children are fed earlier, usually between 5 and 6 pm, and the adults eat together later, any time from 7 pm onwards.

We are not just talking about babies here. Obviously they have to be put down to sleep when they are tired and are just too small to wait for food without becoming desperate. But according to a survey carried out by the Observer newspaper in 1998, almost half of children aged seven to fourteen do not eat a regular evening meal with the adults in their household either.

Separate children’s meals are a major departure from tradition, a relatively recent phenomenon that has probably developed out of modern working patterns. Modern adults are tired after a long day out at work, or worn out by an even longer day looking after progressively more grizzly children without the backup of an extended family. Most people eat their main meal in the evening, but longer working days for those in employment dictate that they get home late and it can be difficult or impractical to keep fractious children up and waiting for food that long. And, of course, we positively yearn for quiet adult time, to enjoy some food and a drink with a little peace and quiet – and who can blame us?

But imagine the dispiriting solitariness of separate children’s mealtimes from a child’s point of view. Children’s tea or supper generally takes place at their rattiest time of day, the infamous ‘happy hour’ between 5 and 6 pm. They are presented with food by an adult who is generally hurrying to get on to the next chore. It is likely to be served in a fast-track manner – at a table, if the adults still have traditional leanings, or more commonly on a plate on the lap in front of the television. The table is not set as it would be to mark the ritual of communal mealtimes and the expectations that go along with that, and the adults don’t sit down with the children to share the experience.

Children who eat on their own are the most isolated of the lot, while those with brothers and sisters can at least keep each other company. But in the absence of adults who would otherwise act as socialising centrepoints, almost like a master of ceremonies, the whole business is not a lot of fun.

And then there’s the food itself. If adults are basically focusing on something more interesting and ‘adult’ to be consumed after the children have eaten, it’s obvious that the children’s meal is at best secondary in their efforts and, very often, an irritating afterthought whose necessity, day after day, becomes somewhat oppressive.

The results are all too familiar. Put bluntly, when staggered eating becomes the norm it is highly likely that the children of the house will end up eating poorer-quality, less wholesome and healthy food than the adults. This is because thinking up two different evening meals a day is soul-destroying and so adults almost invariably fall back on a repertoire of recognised ‘children’s foods’ which can be served earlier. These tend to rely on ready-prepared processed foods, the freezer and the microwave, and lack the ‘feel-good’ qualities of freshly prepared real food that might lead the child by the nose to eat what’s on the plate.

For the child, food becomes routine and dull and eating it is pretty unrewarding. Because there is no special ritual around serving it – such as setting the table, or the gathering together of everyone in the house – the meal is indistinguishable, from a child’s point of view, from casual snacks. So it’s very easy for the child to view it as just more ‘take it or leave it’ food. It may even simply come over as an annoying distraction from other more involving activities such as playing, doing homework or fighting with siblings. The net effect is that the child eats unsatisfactorily: quickly and without pleasure.

For the adult, the whole interaction becomes more and more problematic and emotionally highly charged, as she or he reaches the conclusion that this is not just a picky eater but a child who eats hardly anything. That makes the prospect of ever integrating the child into more adult eating patterns even more bleak, and the apparent impossibility of doing so becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Guilt and frustration build up in equal measure in the adult, until the only ‘escape’ is a retreat into cynicism of the ‘all kids eat junk and that is just normal’ variety.

If we want children to eat well, staggered eating is a total block to achieving that goal. So once we get beyond the baby and toddler stage, when they are too tired at the end of the day to wait up to eat, it is important to try to hold on to some notion of communal eating and family mealtimes. We may not be able to do that at every meal, or even every other meal, but every bit helps.

Yes, women do work and people arrive home later than in the past, but it is still possible to establish the principle that children and adults mainly share the same food. In the long term, if we want children to like good food, eating together is the easiest way to achieve that, saving us fights, frustration and guilt. For ideas about making this work in practice, see Eating Together and Why It Matters (pages 74–7).

Children have been eating sugary and chocolaty sweets for as long as any of us can remember. A love of sweet snacks in all forms is a regular feature of childhood.

Many adults remember with great fondness the thrill of having money to spend in the sweet shop and the lure of everything from penny caramels to sherbet flying saucers.

However, the way we think about sweets has changed. We used to think of them as a different category of edible – a treat, perhaps, a bit of frivolous window-dressing after the main business of eating had been concluded. Very few people would have considered them to be a substitute for a child’s mainstream nutrition. Nowadays, however, sweets are increasingly considered the main event. It is not uncommon, for example, for children to be given a chocolaty candy bar in their lunch boxes, often as an alternative to a pudding such as yogurt or fresh fruit. In 1998 when the caterer Gardner Merchant surveyed children’s eating habits, it found that 39 per cent of children brought a chocolate bar to school in their lunch box.

It seems that sweet confectionery is increasingly being given to children as a staple part of their diet. We no longer expect them to fill up on ‘proper’ food, offering sweets as an add-on, but often rely on confectionery as food itself. The survey mentioned above also found that one in four children substituted sweets, crisps and savoury snacks for their traditional hot evening meal.

This shift in thinking has a lot to do with the power of advertising, particularly on television. Sweets are ruthlessly hyped to children through advertising which makes them desire them. Once they taste sweets, they do like them because the hefty serving of sugar, salt, and fat they offer can be irresistible, encouraging a palate that seeks that instant fix in other foods. Judged against this craving, real, natural, unprocessed foods just don’t taste right and, unlike the commercial might of the confectionery industry, they don’t have any powerful interests promoting them.