I DVRed Jamie Oliver's new show on ABC Food Revolution and watched it this weekend. This part of the show really struck me. These children couldn't identify any vegetables. I'm not talking about anything exotic like arugula. The children in this classroom didn't know what a real tomato or potato looked like.
You have to ask what the parents of these children are not only cooking for their kids (if they cook), but what they eat themselves. My daughter won't touch a tomato, but she sure as hell knows what one is. She's even helped me to pick them in the garden.
It's no wonder that half the adults in this town are obese. If their children can't identify basic fruits and vegetables, it shows an appalling lack of these foods in their own homes.
By not eating these fruits and vegetables themselves, and not exposing their children to them, the parents in this community are not only damaging their own health, but the health of their children.
Getting healthy and slim means taking ownership of your food. Taking ownership means preparing your own food, from scratch, with real ingredients. It can be done, and takes no more time then running out to a fast food joint to pick it up.
That is all so true. You'd think the kids would have learned basic vegetable identification from the good old alphabet. "B" is for broccoli, "P" is for potato, etc.
ReplyDeleteI volunteer at a Food Pantry and the nutritious, costly produce is often rejected by the clients. They don't know how to cook! No one taught them to cook or eat vegetables, and they're not teaching their kids. It's a more complex problem than it sounds.
I love that show. Some of the stuff shocks me, like the not knowing what a tomato is - but it has gotten my daughter to thinking. She's 10 and during the first show she announced that all the food they were showing (except the made from scratch roll) was exactly what they had at her school. She opted to start taking her lunch a lot more often now.
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