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YOUNG CHEFS
Teaching children the joys of cooking and eating good food.
WRITTEN BY BARBARA TWITCHELL
PHOTOS BY JEFF ROSS
Envision a children’s menu in a restaurant. Any restaurant. Can you name four items on it? Bet you can. And you’d be right on the mark 99.9 percent of the time.
Sarah Elton, bestselling author, food writer, and mother of two, weighs in on the problem.
“I think the biggest hurdle to kids eating healthy foods is our own mindset,” she said in a Global News interview last year. “In North American culture, we believe kids will only eat chicken fingers, pizza, pasta — whatever those common items are on the kids’ menu. So we need to believe that kids can eat healthy foods with pleasure.”
Her solution?
“I’ve found that if my kids are more involved in the kitchen and understand food,” she explains, “they are more likely to eat a wider variety.”
Making young people healthier and more-adventurous eaters are just two of the many perks that come from getting our children engaged in food preparation. Cooking is an important life skill that also builds self-esteem, confidence, and independence. It’s a real-life application of math, science, reading comprehension, and critical thinking. It enhances communication and becomes a bonding experience between parent/teacher/mentor and child. And it’s fun.
The following pages are filled with stories meant to inform, guide, and inspire you to challenge the child-food mindset. So let’s get in there and teach our children that the egg came before the chicken nugget — and that they can scramble, fry, poach, or boil it.
Reno writer Barbara Twitchell spent many happy, memorable, and sometimes messy hours in the kitchen with her three children as they were growing up. She’s happy to report that there’s not a picky eater in the bunch, and they are all good cooks.
