Eat Your Sweets and I'll give you a Carrot

How we think about food is influenced by how our parents thought about food, and their parents, and their parents before them. My father's ideas about food are his father's - inherited from a time of rationing after the war. "Finish what's on your plate."

Hours I spent, point blankly refusing to finish a plate of food too big for me. My sister has a fairly entertaining story about my Nanny's chicken pasta, though she would kill me if I shared it here. Friends have mentioned the terror of brussel sprouts being sprung on them each roast dinner and nobody ever says "Can I please have some more of that disgusting soggy broccoli..."

Around the table we've been discussing attitudes to food. I have multitudes of siblings and one or two are still young enough to throw a hissy fit over certain foods; vegetables of some description usually being the culprit. But we learn how to think about food from our parents and those around us, so why do we all hate vegetables so much? All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it’s all up for grabs. From our first year, human tastes are astonishingly diverse. Eating is not something we are born instinctively knowing how to do. It is something we learn. A parent feeding a baby is training them how food should taste. At the most basic level, we have to learn what is food and what is poison. We have to learn how to satisfy our hunger and also when to stop eating. Out of all the choices available to us as omnivores, we have to figure out which foods are likable, which are lovable and which are disgusting. From these preferences, we create our own pattern of eating, as distinctive as a signature.

Instead of saying: If you eat your banana you can have a piece of chocolate. Why not say, if you eat the chocolate you can have a banana. Banana becomes a desirable outcome, a reward for something suffered through, instead of something to suffer through in order to get a reward. How would changing your own attitude towards food affect your children's attitudes toward the food you give them? How about removing the reward factor? We all know the meal you put in front of them is wholesome, delicious and entirely edible, so why do we continuously have to coax kids to eat certain foods?

Could it be that they are just not hungry? I for one have never had to experience real hunger and for that I am truly grateful. I have always had food of some description available almost 24/7. From my experience as a big sister of four siblings and an au pair to many under the age of ten, they want to snack continuously, grazing on a little, often. And this is how I've always eaten too. I want my biggest meal for breakfast or lunch to fuel my hectic day. Not an enormous dinner to spend hours digesting just before bed. So if I've eaten well the rest of the day, sometimes I'm not hungry for dinner. Perhaps kids feel this way too. When they are given a plate of food with three or four different things on, they might not need to eat all of it to feel full, so why not pick the best bits. When it comes to the last few mouthfuls, we weadle them into the poor, stuffed kid and pass on to them the attitude that eating your vegetables is a chore that must be endured. Any child is going to associate negative feelings with the food they are forced to eat when full.

Can you imagine how their relationship with that carrot would change if they'd grown it themselves? If that carrot had started as a seedling in a yoghurt pot or loo roll. If it had been carefully transplanted into your vegetable bed. Weeded and watered. Then picked in anticipation of the evening meal? I know not everyone has time to grow all their own veg, but everyone can have a pot of carrots. Rather than paying for yet another after school club why not divert your children's attention to the garden, the window sill or a couple of pots on the patio. Have one night a week where your vegetables are showcased, maybe even let them decide on a recipe and cook the meal together. Healthy attitudes to food begin in childhood; it is so much easier to eat a healthy diet if you've always done it, as far back as you can remember.

We need to stop being too busy to care about our food.