RFRK and Maxime Farnell featured in Reader’s Digest

Wondering how to make mealtime hassle-free? Read how a little love, a splash of humour, and an iron resolve can go a long way. Sasha Chapman breaks it down in the September issue of Reader’s Digest Canada.

Key Ingredients

They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It begins in a moment of weak­ness, when you agree to leave the sauce off your daughter’s pasta. When the kids announce they don’t like roast chicken anymore, you whip up some spaghetti or pour out a bowl of cereal to get something­anything-into their bellies. Then one day you look over at the kitchen table and realize little Jimmy is eat­ing grilled cheese for lunch-for the seventh day in a row. “Oh well, there’s no accounting for taste,” you say to yourself, and you silently hope he’ll grow out of it. But the rise in picky eating may have more to do with the way we’re rais­ing our children than with our kids’ palates. It may be another symptom of helicopter parenting, or what The New York Times columnist Lisa Belkin calls “my-own-mother-never­breastfed-me-so-I-am-never-going­-to-let-my-kid-out-of-my-sight parenting.”

Although no one sets out to be a short-order cook for their kids, a surprising number of us find ourselves doing just that. I’ve met parents who make four separate meals every night for their families, restaurant-style, and kids who will eat only white or beige foods. You can see how it happens. No parent wants to see their kids go hungry. We may think we are being good parents by capitulating to the whims of our children’s palates, but instead of broadening kids’ experi­ences, we narrow them It’s the ulti­mate paradox of modern family life: When we give our children freedom to eat what they want, we may in-fact be robbing them of future choices.

“Oh well, there’s no accounting for taste,” you say to yourself, and you silently hope he’ll grow out of it. But the rise in picky eating may have more to do with the way we’re rais­ing our children than with our kids’ palates. It may be another symptom of helicopter parenting, or what The New York Times columnist Lisa Belkin calls “my-own-mother-never­breastfed-me-so-I-am-never-going­-to-let-my-kid-out-of-my-sight parenting.” Although no one sets out to be a short-order cook for their kids, a surprising number of us find ourselves doing just that. I’ve met parents who make four separate meals every night for their families, restaurant-style, and kids who will eat only white or beige foods. You can see how it happens. No parent wants to see their kids go hungry. We may think we are being good parents by capitulating to the whims of our children’s palates, but instead of broadening kids’ experi­ences, we narrow them It’s the ulti­mate paradox of modern family life: When we give our children freedom to eat what they want, we may in-fact be robbing them of future choices.

You can see how it happens. No parent wants to see their kids go hungry. We may think we are being good parents by capitulating to the whims of our children’s palates, but instead of broadening kids’ experi­ences, we narrow them It’s the ulti­mate paradox of modern family life: When we give our children freedom to eat what they want, we may in-fact be robbing them of future choices.

No one feels this paradox more keenly than David Farnell and Lulu Cohen-Farnell. Parents ents themselves (Max is seven, Sienna, two), they run the highly suc­cessful–and unorthodox–catering company, Real Food for Real Kids. They feed close to 5,000 children at 85 different child-care centres and elementary schools in Toronto. Their menus-which you might call vision­ary or just plain weird, depending on your point of view-venture way beyond grilled cheese, offering much more balanced and grown-up lunches to kids around the city. They’re filled with nutritious foods our kids aren’t supposed to like, such as flax-crusted fish (for a double-dose of omega-3s) and protein-rich quinoa. And yet Real Food for Real Kids is surpris­ingly popular with the kinder crowd. Lulu and David learned early on that the success of their lunch pro­gram depended as much on the adults who were serving the food as it did on the supposed preferences of the kids. So they created a series of workshops to educate the parents and caregivers. “We invest hours teaching kids how to ride a bicycle,” says David. “Yet most of us will let kids give up on a new food after the first bite.” Most children don’t like a new food the first time they try it un­less it’s chock full of sugar,

Lulu and David learned early on that the success of their lunch pro­gram depended as much on the adults who were serving the food as it did on the supposed preferences of the kids. So they created a series of workshops to educate the parents and caregivers. “We invest hours teaching kids how to ride a bicycle,” says David. “Yet most of us will let kids give up on a new food after the first bite.” Most children don’t like a new food the first time they try it un­less it’s chock full of sugar, fat and salt. Studies have shown that kids need to try food an average of eight to ten times before they will accept it. Although there are plenty of foods their son,

Although there are plenty of foods their son, Max, dislikes (he currently objects to fish and avocados), Lulu and David still cook with both those ingredients. They don’t make a fuss about it, but when Max makes the blanket statement, “I don’t like fish,” they remind him that he doesn’t like this fish on this day-and that tomor­row he might feel differently.

It’s easy to forget that kids’ taste buds change over time. In fact, they grow new ones every month. Just as Max will outgrow today’s shirts, he may outgrow his aversion to fish.

Most of us think of the school lunch as a means to an end: a way to get food in our kids’ bellies so they can concentrate on the more important business of learning. But more and more schools across Canada are beginning to look at the school lunch as an end in itself. Not only is it an opportunity to teach kids about nutrition and where their food comes from but it can also be a way of teaching them about being citizens rather than consumers.

For me, the penny dropped when my daughter’s kindergarten class made granola bars. It seemed funny making a food that’s available at the store. But the teacher wanted the kids to understand that those granola bars came in wrappers, which turned into garbage the minute they were unwrapped, and that making your own bars would taste better and have less impact on the environment.

Following that logic, Real Food for Real Kids is rolling out a new litter­less lunch club in southern Ontario elementary schools that aims to get kids eating their meals family-style. Instead of personalized brown bags; the club offers two menus; one for vegetarians (which they term “herbi­vores”) and one for omnivores. Kids bring their own reusable bowls or plates from home and line up (soup­kitchen style) before sitting down to eat with their peers. Getting kids to eat the same food together means less waste (in terms of food and cost), which means the program can afford premium ingredients. It also promotes an atmosphere of sharing and community. And because stu­dents are responsible for bringing in their own dishes, very little garbage is generated.

But perhaps best of all (at least for the parents of picky eaters), eating together often encourages kids to try foods they would otherwise turn their noses up at-even the green stuff such as broccoli “Feeding kids is all about the journey of discovery,” says David. “We need to look: at food through that lens.

To read the Readers Digest article in English, click here.
To read the Readers Digest article in French, click here.