Healthy eating habits are encouraged when children are involved in the growing process and understand where the food they eat comes from.
– Growing with Nature, Dimensions Education Research Foundation

Disguising vegetables inside other foods might be the worst way to get a toddler to eat them, according to a recent story in The Atlantic. They quote Laura Thomas of the London Centre for Intuitive Eating: “Children by and large don’t need us to go to those lengths to get vegetables into them.” The article cites a large 2018 national study which found toddlers on average consume enough calcium, vitamin A, and iron, and can absorb other crucial nutrients from other non-green foods.

Thomas points out the problem with hiding vegetables in other foods, especially sugary ones: “No amount of vegetables can counteract the detrimental effects of excess sugar.”

Ellyn Satter, another expert on raising healthy kids, encourages a relaxed approach: “The goal of child nutrition is not to get children to eat everything they’re supposed to today. It is to help them to learn to enjoy a variety of healthy food for a lifetime.”

Agreeing, Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, a public-health professor at Yale, recommends surrounding children “with healthy foods, but let the kid decide. Let the kid touch the food, smell the food; let the kid learn to eat when he or she is hungry and stop eating when he or she knows he is full. It’s easier said than done, but it works.”

Take healthy eating to another level by growing food with children. The relationship they develop with the plants invites curiosity. As quoted in Growing with Nature, teacher Tonia Liss shares:

“One of my students with autism, an extremely ‘picky’ eater who would never touch fruits or vegetables, began to sample the fresh garden tomatoes, squash, and other produce that he picked in our school garden.”

Elsewhere in the book, teacher Holly Murdoch shares a 3 year old’s curiosity about a newly harvested beet: “Ellora and Andrew wanted to taste the beet, which wasn’t fully grown yet. I helped them taste the beet greens… Ellora chewed it and said, ‘It tastes the same color it is.’ I asked, ‘It tastes green?’ Ellora responded ‘Yes!’ and we both agreed that some foods do taste green!”