How Do We Feed Our Children?

Tonight my son ate a sweet potato. And a few pieces of pasta. And a sauteed mushroom. And some watermelon. And a few kidney and Garbanzo beans. Oh and a few bites of chocolate and vanilla ice cream.

It was a good eating day. Some (read between the lines: most) days sitting down to eat looks more like a game of throw your food on the floor than it does anything else. And then there are the days that he doesn’t throw his food but he only wants to eat one certain thing… a whole lot of cantaloupe or crackers or, my attempt at a somewhat healthy snack, an organic, no-sugar added fruit roll-up thing. Usually those are the days that I don’t have a lot of that one certain food he wants. Of course.

But my frustration with food does not stop there. Just deciding what food to even try to get him to eat is a source of endless frustration. My criteria list is so long and exhaustive that sometimes I just want to ignore the whole food issue altogether. I mean by the time I’ve found food that is:

• Fresh – more nutrients
• Fairly produced — want others to make a living
• Local – better for the environment and supposedly keeps more nutrients
• Cruelty free — don’t want antibiotic-filled milk or caged chicken eggs
• Affordable – $8.00 for a pound of strawberries is a bit much
• Accessible – going to 7 different stores each week isn’t possible
• Somewhat kid-friendly – turnips aren’t going to be an easy sale

I’m tired. And since I’m not quite sure Baby is even going to eat the food and since there is a good chance that a bit of it will end up on my mop… well, you the issue is clear.

Probably the most frustrating thing to me is all the contrary advice and information I hear. I know that many people feel this same way; it’s the whole eggs are good for you one day, bad for you the next, and then good for you again.

Along with the changing information are the reports about how a good food may be bad depending on the pesticides used (Do the nutrients in grapes cancel out the chemical traces we’re eating?) or the container it is stored and shipped in (So is bottled water bad?). And then Wendy Moore’s article, Food, injurious food, dropped in my lap. The article is mainly about all the fillers and gross “ingredients” a 19th century London doctor discovered when he started studying food under his microscope.

Ahhhh; what a breath of fresh air!

I know; that sounds odd. But for some reason it felt good knowing that there have always been issues surrounding the safety and quality of food. It makes me feel the same way I do about war or violence… it has always been around. So, although I’m still not sure how to best feed my babe, I can at least rest in the knowledge that few others do either.

Reference

Moore, W. (2008). Food, injurious food. BMJ, 336(7651), 1022-1022. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.39563.517292.94