The Food Our Children Eat: How to Get Children to Like Good Food. Joanna Blythman

when we buy ‘baby apple’ for example, naive and lacking in confidence as many parents are, we may fondly think that the apples therein are somehow superior to apples that we might use ourselves. Just because the jar contains apples for babies, it seems safer and more trustworthy than any apple equivalent we might prepare ourselves. The very existence of baby-food apples may even make us feel, quite wrongly, that we are not capable of producing our own version.

      Yet the reality is that, with the exception of organic brands, most commercial baby-food apples are sourced in bulk from the general supply of apples destined for processing. Far from being the pick of the crop, they might just as well be turning up in a commercial apple pie or a ready-made apple sauce. The poor little baby consumers didn’t get any special deal here.

      This example highlights the main shortcomings of most commercial brands of baby foods, which are:

      • The raw ingredients are nothing special; they are sourced from undistinguished bulk ingredients destined for processing.

      • These ingredients will be processed on an industrial scale to extend their shelf life. This destroys much of the natural goodness in them and makes it necessary to introduce additives, such as synthetic vitamins, that would not be necessary in home-made versions.

      • Heavy processing and the adulteration of raw ingredients with industrial additives produce food that is bland, samey and lacks the palette of flavours found in real, home-produced foods. Babies who start out on this limited range of flavours may find it hard to make the transition to the flavour of fresh food.

      • They represent poor value for money. Commercial baby foods work out infinitely more expensive than home-made equivalents. You pay a high price for the convenience and the ingredients will definitely be less fresh and often of lower quality than those you might use at home.

      But what about all those reassuring ‘tick lists’? Don’t they promise nutritional standards far above anything that can be produced at home?

      The answer is no. The purpose of these lists is to inspire confidence in the adult buying the food. On typical commercial baby foods, the strategy is to dazzle you with ticks that make a virtue of the obvious by simply stressing the basic qualities that all baby food should have anyway.

      A classic tick list, on those baby apples again, might read, ‘No added sugar, no artificial flavours, no artificial colours, no added preservatives, no added salt, suitable for vegetarians, gluten-free, milk-free’. You don’t have to be a nutritionist to figure out that you don’t normally put salt in apple purée any more than you would include any of the other tick-listed items.

      Although tick lists seem to be helpful and to offer more information about the product, a tick list like this on baby apples is, viewed charitably, beside the point. Sometimes it is downright confusing. Take the question of prominent added vitamins. Some parents actually stop making food for their babies because they worry that it won’t have as many vitamins as commercial brands. In fact, home-made baby food is likely to retain more vitamins than over-processed commercial gloop, and these will be in a natural form which is much better for babies on wider health grounds.

      On the more complicated multi-ingredient foods, the actively misleading effect of tick lists is to inspire confidence while drawing attention away from the ingredients (usually industrial bulking ingredients and water) that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Other apparently confidence-inspiring claims still give baby-food manufacturers plenty of room for manoeuvre. For example, a ‘No artificial colours/flavours/thickeners’ claim still allows for the inclusion of natural colours, flavours and thickeners. Though these may be preferable in some ways to their synthetic equivalents, they cannot be taken as positively beneficial. If the food was good quality and made from excellent ingredients to start with, such additives – natural or synthetic – would not be necessary. Similarly a prominent ‘No added sugar’ claim can still go on a food that contains sweet ingredients such as fruit juice.

      To put it bluntly, babies who start out life on these foods are simply eating very ordinary processed food – with all the shortcomings that has – packaged so as to play on our confusion about healthy eating and our anxieties about how best to feed our children. That’s precisely the kind of product that babies and parents can live without. If we want our babies to grow into children, then adults, who appreciate a wide range of wholesome food, the regular use of commercial baby food is a block to that process. So if you don’t want your children to go into the black tunnel that leads from processed baby food to processed children’s junk, Part Four, Getting It Right with Babies and Toddlers, tells you all you really need to know about preparing your own (which can be as simple as mashing a banana or grating an apple). It also explains how to read between the lines on food labels and select the best ready-made baby food when you need it as a back-up for home-made.

       STAGGERED EATING

      Family mealtimes, we are told, are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Gone are the days when Mum was at home all day to cook and Dad waltzed in just in time to carve the meat. Nowadays, family meals are being replaced by a new phenomenon – staggered eating, where everyone eats at different times. At the extreme, we hear of households where adults and children take it in turns to use the microwave so they can reheat an individual meal of their preference, selected from a stock of ready meals and convenience foods which is replenished at the supermarket every week or ten days. The less extreme, but increasingly common, phenomenon is the two-shift mealtime, where the children are fed earlier, usually between 5 and 6 pm, and the adults eat together later, any time from 7 pm onwards.

      We are not just talking about babies here. Obviously they have to be put down to sleep when they are tired and are just too small to wait for food without becoming desperate. But according to a survey carried out by the Observer newspaper in 1998, almost half of children aged seven to fourteen do not eat a regular evening meal with the adults in their household either.

      Separate children’s meals are a major departure from tradition, a relatively recent phenomenon that has probably developed out of modern working patterns. Modern adults are tired after a long day out at work, or worn out by an even longer day looking after progressively more grizzly children without the backup of an extended family. Most people eat their main meal in the evening, but longer working days for those in employment dictate that they get home late and it can be difficult or impractical to keep fractious children up and waiting for food that long. And, of course, we positively yearn for quiet adult time, to enjoy some food and a drink with a little peace and quiet – and who can blame us?

      But imagine the dispiriting solitariness of separate children’s mealtimes from a child’s point of view. Children’s tea or supper generally takes place at their rattiest time of day, the infamous ‘happy hour’ between 5 and 6 pm. They are presented with food by an adult who is generally hurrying to get on to the next chore. It is likely to be served in a fast-track manner – at a table, if the adults still have traditional leanings, or more commonly on a plate on the lap in front of the television. The table is not set as it would be to mark the ritual of communal mealtimes and the expectations that go along with that, and the adults don’t sit down with the children to share the experience.

      Children who eat on their own are the most isolated of the lot, while those with brothers and sisters can at least keep each other company. But in the absence of adults who would otherwise act as socialising centrepoints, almost like a master of ceremonies, the whole business is not a lot of fun.

      And then there’s the food itself. If adults are basically focusing on something more interesting and ‘adult’ to be consumed after the children have eaten, it’s obvious that the children’s meal is at best secondary in their efforts and, very often, an irritating afterthought whose necessity, day after day, becomes somewhat oppressive.

      The results are all too familiar. Put bluntly, when staggered eating becomes the norm it is highly likely that the children of the house will end up eating poorer-quality, less wholesome and healthy food than the adults. This is because thinking up two different