The Food Our Children Eat: How to Get Children to Like Good Food - Softcover

Blythman, Joanna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857029364 ISBN 13: 9781857029369

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 1999

Synopsis

A majority of British children mainly eat processed and junk food. Award-winning food writer Joanna Blythman takes a controversial look at this curious phenomenon and offers parents practical tips on how to improve their children’s diet.

Written in a highly accessible way, The Food Our Children Eat offers practical tips for parents who are concerned about what their children eat and looks at the long term consequences for human health and society of the increase in consumption of junk food. Joanna Blythman suggests strategies for ensuring our children eat more healthily, both at home and at school, with invaluable advice about how to interest children in nutritious food.

This well-researched and fascinating book also discusses the impact of our eating habits on the younger generation and attacks the complacency that surrounds the emergence of separate kids’ food and mealtimes. The Food Our Children Eat explores the decline in the standard of food children eat and is an intriguing polemic on what we can do to improve it.

About this title

Product Description

Unusual book

Review

Children seem to be bonded by a common culture that fosters resistance to good food. How can this be? There are lots of theories ploughing both sides of the nature-nurture divide. Author, Joanna Blythman points out that one belief is that junk food is basically so appealing that once children have tasted it, that is all they want.

So who is to blame for this? The food industry says it is simply servicing a need for popular food. If children are eating badly, then it is the parents' fault for not balancing the child's diet. Working mothers are the usual suspects.

But as this book clarifies, it is in culture that the prevailing conditions go against children eating well. This enlightening book explores the modern child's diet, starting with how the rot begins, followed by the staggered eating patterns and the flickering screen habits.

It assesses the different attitudes parents have, whether it is the concerned and worried parent who blames themself for the child's eating habits, or the philosophical parent who accepts junk food and believes that it is better the kids eat junk food than nothing at all.

The book also considers other factors which influence the child's food choice, such as the modern school meals: often cheap processed intensively reared meat in a fatty fried crumb coating.

So how do parents break the mould? Well each section of this book deals with ways to improve the child's eating habits in the home, at school and at parties and evaluates the possible remedies to break the viscous circle of poor eating habits.

This book is well written and concludes by providing examples of good snacks, good packed lunches and ways to make healthy foods such as vegetables more interesting.

This book is a handy paperback which is useful for parents who want to encourage good eating habits in their children. --Louise Coyle

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1857029364
• ISBN 13: 9781857029369
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320