Parents are the absolute role models when it comes to food and nutrition, writes Sheila Wayman
Putting food habits top of the menu
WE HAVE had the moans and the groans. Now half-full dinner plates are being scraped into the bin. It's one of those nights in the week I have tried to cook a "decent" meal for my children.
Too often I am bereft of time, ideas, the organisation and the will to prepare a meal from scratch. It is too easy to resort to the frozen chicken goujons, pizzas, sausages and butchers' burgers. Anyway, what's the point of cooking a really nutritious meal that isn't eaten?
It is only that supposed family staple of spaghetti Bolognese on this particular night, but one child eats the pasta and not the meat sauce, for the other it's vice versa.
I persevere with a limited range of dishes and try not to take it personally. Meanwhile, sticks of raw carrots and cucumber accompany the processed food and I serve broccoli with burgers, in the hope that these vegetables will count for something.
When I read those newspaper articles advocating hummus wraps and rice salads for the lunchbox, and about children who "just love" fish pie and butternut squash, my guilt is compounded. Where did I go wrong?
I know my cooking is not a patch on my mother's. But at least I am happy to experiment occasionally and eat the results. Unfortunately, no one else in the family is.
I feel for any child faced with a plate of something not to his or her liking. (I can still smell the corned beef and the most disgusting shepherd's pie that we were forced to eat at junior school.) So I try not to make an issue of it, only insisting that at least a mouthful is tried.
Yet I am still failing miserably to interest them in many things that don't come out of a packet - except when it comes to baking.
I know it should never have come to this. But years of getting home from work after 7pm, especially when there were babies to cuddle and put to bed before dinner, eroded any desire to cook. Weekends were for fresh air and chilling out, not slaving in the kitchen.
That is an attitude shared by others. A Bord Bia survey in 2005 found that 39 per cent of Irish people see cooking as a chore and only 24 per cent see it as fun, whereas in Britain, 43 per cent see cooking as enjoyable.
Now I am working from home, I don't have the same excuses for keeping out of the kitchen. But I don't seem to be able to recover the ground I lost with the children's eating.
Maybe I worry too much, but I fear it is mothers like me who are rearing a generation of dysfunctional foodies. The less I cook, the less likely they will in the future. Skills like this can be lost within a generation.
"Home is the big educator for children," says consultant dietitian and nutritionist Margot Brennan. It's not only what we give our children, but also what we eat ourselves, which will have the biggest impact on their food habits.
"Outside influences make the job very hard. But parents have to be very aware that they are absolute role models when it comes to food and nutrition." She worries about mothers, particularly with daughters, who are on serial diets: "Children pick up on this."
Nutritionist Paula Mee is concerned that we are being "de-skilled" in cooking. In the US, she points out, "it's all handheld snacks". People in the US consume 50 per cent of their food outside the home now, which is a trend we in Ireland have been following.
"There is a worrying disconnect with what we are eating and where it comes from," says Mee. On the one hand, there has been a boom in state-of-the-art kitchens but many of these are like museum pieces, she points out. "They say the oven is the safest place to keep jewellery because it is never used!"
There is no evidence either that the huge public appetite for "food porn" on TV - celebrity cooking and restaurant reality programmes - has led to any improvement in cooking skills.
The national nutrition survey published last year showed children aged five to 12 were eating too little fibre and too much fat, especially saturated fat, she says. The protein-rich foods they were consuming tended to be high in fat because they were processed. Their diets were also lacking in micronutrients such as iron and calcium.
She believes it would be a great service to children if lessons on where food comes from and how to cook it were compulsory in school. "It could be one of our greatest gifts to children."
Even students who opt to study home economics for the Leaving Certificate have only five cooking classes per year, the rest is theory.
The Food Dudes healthy eating programme, which Bord Bia started on a national basis in primary schools last year after a very successful pilot scheme, certainly seems to help increase children's consumption of fruit and vegetables.
In the first phase, free fruit and vegetables are offered to the children over 16 days, during which time they see a video of the Food Dudes, who get super-hero powers from the fruit and vegetables they eat. The children are rewarded for every one they try.
In phase two, the onus is on the home, with the children's progress in having fruit and vegetables in their lunch-boxes recorded on charts at school, and rewards given when they reach certain goals.
Careful scientific measurements during the pilot programme showed a 73 per cent increase in the lunchtime consumption of fruit and vegetables at school, reports the national director of Food Dudes, Michael Maloney.
The aim of the programme, which was developed by Irish psychologist Fergus Lowe at the University of Bangor in Wales, is to get children past the stage of the "don't like" response to various fruit and vegetables. It is said a child needs to try new food about 11 times before developing a taste for it.
Food Dudes, which has been introduced into 1,000 schools so far, can only "kick start" a change to healthier eating, by enabling a protracted and supportive sampling process, then it's over to the parents to keep the momentum going.
"I think it is much easier for parents to emphasise and reiterate what is being done at school," says Maloney. "It is much more difficult to take the initiative at home."
Parents are inclined to give up too easily when children refuse to eat new foods. "If they keep persevering, they will get somewhere; keep trying," is Mee's advice. "Get them to try even a tiny bit and reinforce that with praise."
It is also important to involve them by offering a choice, for instance, would they like grapes or an apple in their lunchbox? If trying a new vegetable, put it alongside one you know they like.
"A battle is a total waste of time," she warns. "Take away the food they haven't eaten and try not to make a fuss even if you're livid.
"Everybody does feel like giving up," she adds, "it makes life easier but it does not help in the long term."
Children's eating habits can only be changed gradually, advises Brennan. "If they have always had chicken nuggets and chips for dinner and then somebody produces meat and veg, they are not going to eat it."
Make one or two improvements at a time and then stick with them. Replace the chicken nuggets with leaner pieces of chicken. If they are eating bowls of high-sugar cereals in the morning, start by adding in a handful of a high fibre variety.
Parents can also be obsessed with the idea of providing a "full dinner", Brennan suggests, rather than a simple, adequate meal such as baked potato with baked beans, or an omelette.
Any meal that draws from the three lower layers of the food pyramid is fine, she points out. "Smoked salmon on brown bread and an apple afterwards is a perfectly balanced meal. Keep it simple."
It's advice I am taking to heart. Roasted chicken breasts, boiled potatoes and raw carrots were polished off without a whimper last night.
Toddlers dip into cook books
IF YOU don't like cooking yourself, it's hard to be enthusiastic about the prospect of a couple of giddy children creating chaos in your kitchen. But involving them in the preparation of food encourages them to experiment more.
Three is a good age to start cooking with children, according to Yvonne Rosenkranz who runs the Junior Chef cookery school in Blackrock, Co Dublin. She takes them from that age up to 16 for after-school classes and summer camps.
Her aim, especially for the very young children, is to banish their fear of tasting things and to encourage them to be a little adventurous with food.
Sitting in the large conservatory at the front of the cookery school on Newtownpark Avenue, Rosenkranz says: "I have children who when they first come here, they will not eat a morsel. They will prep everything in the kitchen, come into this lovely room and sit down and they will just push it like that," she says, miming food being shunted around a plate. "It's quite common."
But these children's attitudes soon change during their time at Junior Chef. "Parents come in, sit down quietly in the corner and watch their children eat and they are astounded."
Some parents enrol children in classes because they are worried about their eating habits, for others "it's childcare in a very nice setting".
We are not talking about sticking jelly tots on gingerbread men here, but rather learning the basics of cooking for life. "We try to avoid baking; we do a savoury and a sweet always," she says.
"Last week at the after-school cookery school we made our own pesto, with pine nuts and basil, these are three and four year olds, mixing them with the olive oil," she explains.
"Then we marinated the chicken, put it inside a wrap with a little bit of salad and they absolutely loved it."
Three year olds can chop their own celery and their own carrots, with a plastic serrated knife.
The daughter of two restaurateurs, Rosenkranz and her five siblings grew up with cooking. She is astonished at the number of people who don't cook any more. "I met a kitchen supplier recently and he told me has built a kitchen with no oven and they're selling. There are grill machines and microwave ovens, no cooker. They are for people with so-called busy lives."
A mother of one, she sympathises with parents working outside the home. "You are tired and see cooking as a chore. There are times when I hate cooking."
She suggests preparing for more than one meal at a time. "Go back to the old way of thinking that a certain piece of meat will do two meals, instead of every day having to look for something."
For parents with children who are bad eaters she recommends "grazing". "Give them little bits, don't give them big meals. Dips are great."
Peer pressure is also helpful in persuading picky eaters to try something new. "I always say to parents if your children won't eat something then, when they go to a friend's house, introduce something new. Or if they have friends coming, then bring in something new. The peers will encourage her or him to start tasting."
Cooking should be on the primary school curriculum, she says. "By the time they get to age 11-12, they are well able to look after themselves. They are conscious of what they are eating. They can go off and make a bit of pasta with a nice little sauce." Then she smiles: "Sounds ideal doesn't it? It's not that simple."
However, she believes 12 year olds are well capable of cooking a meal. "What I say to children is they must never handle knives or electric equipment without an adult there. Everything they are taught here is supervised and it must be the same at home. You can't just ring up and say 'put the dinner on'."
Whereas teenagers need to be given a free rein in the kitchen: "Allow them to have friends over and cook for them. It's a lovely way of entertaining." For boys as well as girls. "It's a skill for life; if they get it at all, it's wonderful."
She has student lodgers in "Charleville", the large house that accommodates Junior Chef, and it's not hard for her to see which of them have been raised to value home cooking.
"The Irish girls are a disgrace. I have had German girls, Spanish girls; they go to the fridge, they cook a proper meal everyday. I have seen Pot Noodles come in by the dozen with the teenage Irish girls. They just will not get into the habit of cooking a quick something to eat and then go out. It's like as if it's taking too much time."
Getting children to enjoy cooking is what matters, and will set them up for life.
"Don't feel guilty if you don't cook with them every day," Rosenkranz adds. "Memories are created by moments so if you do it once in a month, they'll always remember it."
• For more information on Junior Chef, see www.juniorchef.ie or tel: 01-2780382