for Dana
NOTE: A WORD ABOUT “HIGHLY PROCESSED” FOOD
Throughout this book, I use the term “highly processed” to describe certain foods and beverages. But what does it mean?
In its PR materials, the food industry tells us that “processing” is “any deliberate change in a food that occurs before it’s available for us to eat,” whether it’s “as simple as freezing or drying food to preserve nutrients and freshness, or as complex as formulating a frozen meal with the right balance of nutrients and ingredients.” By defining the term so broadly, the industry can then offer all kinds of reassuring messages, like: “most of the food we eat is processed” and “food processing began about 2 million years ago” (referring, I suppose, to fire-roasted wooly mammoth?). The industry and its supporters also like to remind us—frequently—that even frozen fruit, bagged salad greens, and baby carrots are all “processed” foods.
Those statements are literally true, and it’s also true that modern food processing provides all of us with an unprecedented degree of food safety and convenience. We shouldn’t discount the importance of those achievements, nor should we romanticize our preindustrial past, when foodborne illness was far more common and when preparing and preserving food was an exhausting, full-time endeavor—especially for women.
At the same time, though, food’s most basic purpose is to nourish the body and foster health. If it causes harm, something’s clearly gone off the rails—and I think we all know the problem doesn’t lie with frozen fruit and baby carrots.
Because the industry’s definition of “processed food” includes both the pear that’s been sliced and dried and the unfortunate pear that winds up in a box of Betty Crocker Blastin’ Berry Hot Colors Fruit Roll-Ups (ingredients: Corn Syrup, Dried Corn Syrup, Pear Purée Concentrate, Palm Oil, Citric Acid, Sodium Citrate, Fruit Pectin, Monoglycerides, Malic Acid, Dextrose,
Ascorbic Acid, Acetylated Monodiglycerides, Natural Flavor, and Color [Red 40, Yellows 5 & 6, Blue 1]), I would argue that the term has ceased to have any real meaning. So for the purpose of our discussion here, I’ve turned instead to a classification system called “NOVA,” which was first put forth in 2009 by Dr. Carlos Monteiro, an expert in nutrition and public health at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
The NOVA system assigns all foods and beverages to four categories, the last of which is “ultra-processed.” (You can find a description of the other three categories in the endnotes.) Ultra-processed foods and drinks are industrially produced, contain at least five ingredients (but usually many more), and—in addition to salt, sugar, and/or fat—typically contain industrial additives not commonly found in our kitchens. Sometimes these additives are themselves highly processed, like hydrogenated oils and soy protein isolate. NOVA’s examples of ultra-processed foods include massproduced: sweet and savory snacks; ice cream, candy, and cookies; breakfast cereals; energy bars; pre-made pizza and pasta dishes; poultry and fish nuggets or sticks; burgers; hot dogs; and packaged soups, noodles, and desserts.
When I first read the NOVA definition, though, I was actually inclined to reject it because it seemed to reflect a certain distasteful food snobbery. Like, why is a carton of mass-produced vanilla ice cream considered an “ultra-processed” food (with all of that term’s negative connotations) while a batch of homemade vanilla ice cream is merely “processed?” After all, a few industrial additives likely make little difference to our bodies, and in the case of some mass-produced vanilla ice creams, such as Häagen-Dazs’s, the product’s ingredient listing reads like a recipe we might use in our own homes: cream, skim milk, sugar, egg yolks, and vanilla.
But when I read further, I learned that the NOVA system builds into its definition of ultra-processed food a number of external factors that clearly do make a difference to our bodies, by pushing us toward overconsumption of less healthy food while luring us away from healthier, whole foods. Specifically, in discussing ultra-processed food, the NOVA team includes this statement:
The main purpose of industrial ultra-processing is to create products that are ready to eat, to drink or to heat, liable to replace both unprocessed or minimally processed foods that are naturally ready to consume, such as fruits and nuts, milk and water, and freshly prepared drinks, dishes, desserts, and meals. Common attributes of ultra-processed products are hyper-
palatability, sophisticated and attractive packaging, multimedia and other aggressive marketing to children and adolescents, health claims, high profitability, and branding and ownership by transnational corporations.
In other words, what makes the mass-produced vanilla ice cream problematic is the very ease with which we can buy it cheaply and consume it in great quantity, and the degree to which we’re encouraged to do so by a constant barrage of sophisticated and aggressive marketing. None of that is true of homemade ice cream, which takes time and planning to make— precisely why so few people ever undertake the project, even when they actually have an ice cream maker languishing in their kitchen cabinets. Most mass-produced foods are also hyper-palatable, as the NOVA team notes, meaning their flavor and texture have been carefully calibrated to make them extremely pleasurable to eat—so pleasurable that some experts believe they’re actually addictive, or at least potentially so.
In this way, the NOVA definition of ultra-processed food squares nicely with one of food writer Michael Pollan’s most oft-repeated Food Rules: “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.”
I realize there are still some gray areas in NOVA’s definition. Would hand-churned vanilla ice cream from a family-owned shop still be merely “processed?” What if the shop used artificial additives but never engaged in marketing? Some people have criticized the NOVA system for these inconsistencies, along with its obvious anti-corporate bias, and I’ve cited a few of these critiques in the endnotes. But even with this admitted fuzziness on the margins, I still think the NOVA definition gives most of us a pretty clear mental picture of the foods and drinks in question. At any rate, it’s exponentially more precise than the self-serving definition offered by the food industry.
I use “highly processed” in this book as a synonym for NOVA’s “ultraprocessed” category just because I prefer it stylistically. But in light of the correlation between a diet high in ultra-processed foods and beverages and a host of serious health concerns, I sometimes just refer to these products as “unhealthy”—or, where it feels especially warranted, as “junk food.”
KID FOOD
INTRODUCTION
When it comes to feeding their kids, most parents start out with the best of intentions: They simply want to raise healthy eaters. But even before our children climb down from the high chair, it can feel like junk food is coming at them from every direction.
We take our toddlers grocery shopping, and though they can’t yet read, they easily recognize the cartoon characters beckoning from boxes of the least healthy, sugary cereals. At restaurants, a smiling server hands our preschoolers a kids’ menu offering the same six entrées you see everywhere —as though some federal law mandates that children under ten eat nothing but foods that are batter-fried and beige. And later, when they’re old enough to go to school, our kids may encounter snacks like Rice Krispies Treats and Cheetos Fantastix in their cafeteria, PTA fundraisers selling donuts or pizza, or a teacher doling out candy rewards.
Then there are days when every adult who crosses your child’s path seems determined to offer him “just one treat.” The bank teller hands him a lollipop—a sweet tradition you remember fondly from your own childhood. But then he’s offered a second lollipop at the drycleaners, a third when he goes for his haircut, followed by a Popsicle after gymnastics class. The music teacher happens to choose that day to bring in a box of donut holes. Even the pediatrician’s office may offer candy to ease the stress of a checkup. But only the most uptight food-cop parent would object to “just one” of anything, so in each instance you squelch your objections—while also mentally canceling that ice cream outing you were going to propose later as a fun surprise.
We do our best to act as nutritional gatekeepers, but it’s an uphill battle all the way. A decision to let your tween use Snapchat opens the door to “fun” filters from companies like McDonald’s and Taco Bell, which essentially turn your kids’ photos into junk food ads. A quick dash into Office Depot for school supplies turns into a pitched battle over buying
candy from the kid-eye-level racks in the checkout aisle. (Because of course your office supply store needs to sell candy.) It’s an endless game of Whack-a-Mole, and eventually, just out of sheer exhaustion, parents find themselves making dietary compromises they never would have dreamed of only a few years before.
Compounding this junk food deluge is the fact that some kids can be stubbornly resistant to eating healthier foods. So even when you do manage to get a home-cooked dinner on the table (an achievement that really ought to earn today’s time-strapped parents a gold medal), it might well go untouched. And that’s when you find yourself reaching for the highly processed grocery products every kid loves—the boxed mac and cheese, the sugary yogurt tubes, the chicken nuggets—while silently praying that the nutrient claims plastered all over their labels (“contains calcium!” “made with whole grain!”) actually mean something, because: that’s it, you’re done, and everyone just needs to get fed.
Although my kids are older now, I totally understand what today’s parents of young children are up against. I’ve even become known as an outspoken advocate on these issues, although that’s something I never saw coming. I’m not a dietitian, pediatrician, or child-feeding expert, and I don’t even play one on TV. Instead, I’m a former lawyer—and one who used to work for Big Food, at that. But when I try to pinpoint exactly how I wound up on this unexpected life path, I always come back to a brief conversation I had in 2010 about, of all things, animal crackers.
I was a fledgling freelance magazine writer back then, having left the legal profession a decade earlier when we’d moved from New York City to Houston. Our son and daughter (then eight and ten) attended our local elementary school in the Houston Independent School District (HISD), but although I was a stay-at-home mom, I wasn’t the kind of parent who was eager to get involved in school or district affairs.
Then one evening my friend Donna called and asked if I’d be interested in joining a new HISD committee that was forming to gather parents’ input about its school food menus. My first thought was that the district certainly could use the help. A typical lunch in 2010 might have featured a fried or cheesy entrée like “Texas Frito Pie” or chicken-fried steak fingers, often served with carb-heavy sides like mashed potatoes, sugary canned fruit, and a brownie, and kids usually washed it all down with carton of chocolate
milk. If our district were trying to set students on a path toward poor health, it could hardly have done better.
I preferred to send our kids to school with a home-packed lunch, so I told Donna that since we weren’t participating in the meal program, I wasn’t sure I had a legitimate place on this new committee. But when Donna pointed out that we’d both gladly forgo the tedium of daily lunchbox packing if the school food improved, I couldn’t disagree. So a few weeks later, the two of us walked into a conference room in HISD’s administrative headquarters and joined other parents for an introductory presentation about our district’s nutrition services department.
One of the first things I learned from this “School Food 101” PowerPoint was that more than 80 percent of Houston’s public school students live close enough to the poverty line that they qualify for federally subsidized free or reduced-price school meals. In other words, for the majority of my fellow HISD parents, the food in the cafeteria wasn’t an option to be weighed against a home-packed lunch but instead a daily necessity. I was ashamed I hadn’t known so many families depended on school food, and suddenly the idea of improving it took on new urgency.
The second eye-opening fact I learned was this: After overhead, we were told, our district had about a dollar and change (per child, per meal) left over from its federal funding to pay for food. That shockingly low figure would certainly explain the subpar meals I’d been seeing in my kids’ cafeteria, but I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. Was there some fiscal mismanagement going on? Shifty accounting practices? Just what was being included in this mysterious “overhead” that was diverting funds from buying better food for our district’s kids?
The last surprising moment came during a discussion of HISD’s breakfasts, which are provided free of charge and eaten at kids’ desks at the start of the school day. According to various studies, we were told, “in-class breakfast” is a proven way to get more hungry kids fed while reducing nurse’s visits and discipline problems. But the food itself left a lot to be desired: shrink-wrapped, artificially flavored “maple” pancakes; glazed honey buns; snack packs of sugary cereal; and cartons of fluorescent blue Trix yogurt. I also learned that on four out of every five days, HISD students were required to take a package of animal crackers along with their meal.
This last detail was too odd for me to stay silent, so I raised my hand and asked, “Can you tell us why we’re serving animal crackers almost every day at breakfast?” Without missing a beat, the district’s dietitian replied, “Well, students are required to have a certain amount of iron every week, and the animal crackers provide it.” Seeing my obvious confusion, she added, “You know, from the fortified white flour.”
As I drove home from the meeting that morning, my mind was reeling— particularly about those animal crackers. It wasn’t so much what the dietitian had said about iron and white flour, it was the utterly blithe tone in which she said it. To her, and apparently to the rest of our nutrition services department, giving kids sugary, white-flour cookies along with a sugary, highly processed breakfast was a perfectly fine way to fulfill children’s iron needs. And somehow the federal regulations under which these people were operating made this an entirely acceptable choice. It was baffling.
Maybe because of my legal background, or maybe because I’m a nerd at heart, I wanted to dig deeper for answers. As soon as I got home, I searched Amazon for a primer about the National School Lunch Program and saw that one had been published only a few weeks before. And reading this book—Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, by sociologist Janet Poppendieck—was a revelation. It not only answered all of my questions about school food, it addressed many others I hadn’t been knowledgeable enough to formulate.
After first outlining the school food program’s origins as an anti-hunger initiative in the 1940s, Poppendieck explained how and why schools had abandoned scratch-cooking in favor of today’s heat-and-eat fare. I learned why schools sell à la carte snacks like chips and ice cream, and I also discovered that HISD’s shocking “one-dollar-for-food” figure was not only legitimate, it was actually true of almost every district around the country. And yes, by the time I finished the book, I even understood how we’d wound up with animal crackers for breakfast.
Meanwhile, parents at my children’s school had learned at a PTA meeting that I was now a member of the district’s new school food committee. As a result, there were days when I couldn’t walk through the halls after drop-off without someone buttonholing me to complain about our school meals. But while I still shared these parents’ concerns about HISD’s subpar food, reading Free for All had put everything in a new light.
For example, while I didn’t condone serving pepperoni pizza with mashed potatoes and brownies, Free for All had taught me that school meals (then) had no calorie maximum—a relic of the program’s anti-hunger origins carried over into an era of childhood obesity. And although I still didn’t approve of animal crackers at breakfast, I now understood that HISD was using the (now-obsolete) “nutrient standard” method to create its menus, which allowed districts to check off various nutrient boxes (like iron) without necessarily having to justify the bigger picture (cookies at breakfast). Most of all, I was now mindful of how very little money my district had to work with while trying to serve more than 250,000 school meals a day.
I knew few parents had the time or interest to investigate these issues on their own, though, and I was eager share what I was learning. I wanted to offer them a bigger picture of the problems driving unhealthy school meals, while also conveying my newfound empathy for the people serving them under enormous regulatory and budgetary constraints. But noisy school hallways aren’t the best place to impart nuanced information, so I’d find myself nodding along with complaining parents while feeling a growing sense of frustration over all I wasn’t able to say.
Around this same time, I also had growing concerns about our elementary school’s overall food environment. My son’s second grade teacher had rewarded him with M&M’s for every correct math answer. Without asking parents’ permission, the school gave students juice pouches and peppermint candy on standardized testing days in a bid to boost their scores. Seemingly every other week, my kids came home with icingsmeared faces, having just eaten another classmate’s birthday cupcakes, while classroom parties tended to be veritable orgies of unhealthy food (one was actually called a “junk food party”!). And while I had no problem with my daughter’s teacher using a system of “brownie points” to reward good behavior, did the points really have to be redeemable for actual brownies?
None of this would have bothered me very much if my kids weren’t constantly offered junk food outside of school, too. My daughter’s Saturday soccer practice meant “refueling” with Lay’s potato chips and a Gatorade at 10 a.m. My son’s daily snack at a half-day summer chess camp (because chess is so strenuous, kids can’t make it to noon without one?) had included Kool-Aid Jammers, Nerds candy, Fritos corn chips, and Fla-Vor-Ice frozen ice pops. Even an outing to the supermarket meant a friendly employee
handing my kids a large sugar cookie, a store tradition likely meant to keep children quiet while their parents shopped. (But of course, once that cookie had been waved in front of them, saying “no” would produce precisely the opposite result.)
And while we didn’t keep a lot of highly processed food at home, I was dismayed at how well my kids knew these brands—and how much they wanted them. By preschool, both of them had been able to easily identify unhealthy snacks and cereals just from their packaging, and when we later let them watch popular kid shows on cable TV, their knowledge of these foods increased exponentially. I’d also made the mistake of letting my son become a regular player of “PopTropica,” an online game touted to parents as an especially safe learning environment for children as young as six. Because I’d naively relied on that assurance of “safety,” I only discovered much later that the game was littered with ads for Tootsie Pops, Apple Jacks, and Fruit Loops, and that it actually forced players to engage in brand-sponsored challenges, led by their cartoon mascots, before children were allowed move on to the next activity.
These brands’ powerful influence on my kids became clear in the grocery store, where they often begged for products they’d seen advertised or at friends’ houses. I hated having to be the “mean mom,” always denying their requests for this or that unhealthy food, and sometimes out of sheer exhaustion I’d give in to at least one demand by the time we reached the checkout aisle. At the same time, I’d berate myself for caving on products I knew weren’t good for them.
Once my children started encountering all of this unhealthy food in their daily lives, it also seemed as though healthier foods, like fruits and vegetables, were becoming an even harder sell. I cooked a family dinner almost every night, but when my kids resisted that meal, as they were increasingly doing, I’d often resort to surefire crowd-pleasers like Annie’s mac and cheese, Amy’s frozen pizza, and Bell & Evans chicken nuggets. Because those products all came from Whole Foods and were “clean label,” I convinced myself that I was still feeding my children healthfully; in reality, I was only reinforcing their love of bready, fried, and cheesy flavors. And when we dined out and they were handed a children’s menu invariably featuring these same types of foods, it only compounded the problem.
The surprising thing was, I’d never expected this particular aspect of parenting to be a challenge. Because of the way my own mother had raised
me in the 1970s, I’d been certain that when I had children of my own someday, I’d know exactly how to feed them well.
I realize that sounds like I was weaned on tofu and kale, but in my earliest memories, my family’s pantry was actually stocked with the best the processed food industry had to offer: Duncan Hines cake mixes, Hunt’s pudding packs, and chewy Space Food Sticks—“the snacks taken into space by NASA astronauts!” as their ads told awestruck kids. We even had a nowdiscontinued miracle of modern food science called Jell-O 1-2-3, a brightly colored gelatin powder which, when combined with water, separated into a three-layered, multi-textured parfait. (How was that even possible?)
But I also grew up in the early 1970s—the Watergate era—when trust in big food companies and the federal agencies regulating them was at a low point. It didn’t help that some widely used food additives, like the red dye in my favorite M&M’s, had recently been banned for causing cancer in lab animals. Safety scares like those, along with alarming new reports about harmful pesticide residues in food, only further undermined Americans’ confidence in the food supply. Suddenly the idea of “natural food” was moving beyond the hippie counterculture and gaining popular appeal.
My mom eventually tapped into this new zeitgeist, but the shift didn’t start in her kitchen. Instead, it began in her flower garden, which was so lush and colorful that people often stopped in front of our house and took pictures of it. Troubled by what she was learning about chemical pesticides and fertilizers, my mom started to adopt organic gardening methods, like unleashing mail-order ladybugs on the aphids, putting out little saucers of beer for unwitting snails, and starting a towering compost heap out back. These new organic techniques paid off and her garden never looked better.
Then one day, when my mom was out weeding her flower beds, she had a disturbing epiphany. “I suddenly realized,” she told me decades later, “that I was feeding my flowers so much better than I was feeding my own children.”
My mom started to read books by progressive food advocates like Frances Moore Lappé and popular diet gurus like Adele Davis and Gayelord Hauser, and we soon became regular patrons of our town’s only “health food” store, a cluttered little shop with a distinctly 1960s vibe and thickly scented with dried herbs, incense sticks, and stale vitamins. While my mom did her food shopping, I’d wander through the personal care aisles, intrigued and puzzled by those text-dense Dr. Bronner’s soap labels
(“Rise to the stars above and thrill!” “Arouse the very flames of life!”) and sniffing at little tins of beeswax lip balm that looked like they’d been cooked up in some hippie’s basement (they probably were).
These shopping excursions eventually transformed my family’s pantry and eating habits. Gone were the cake mixes and pudding packs, replaced by canisters of brown rice and whole oats, boxes of rose-hip tea, and a stack of carob bars that were somehow supposed to take the place of our beloved Hershey’s (prompting the question: who first had this idea, and had they ever tasted actual chocolate?). We bought a special plastic container to sprout alfalfa seeds and mung beans for our salads, and my mom started regularly baking her own oatmeal “cookies”: dark brown disks, sweetened only with a touch of honey and blackstrap molasses, that no kid in their right mind would accept as a lunchroom trade for a Twinkie or a bag of Bugles. (On the plus side, they were so nutrient-dense from their brewer’s yeast, flax seeds, and wheat germ, you could probably subsist on them indefinitely.)
This evolution from Jell-O 1-2-3 to mung bean sprouts was likely more gradual than I now recall, and we certainly continued to eat some processed foods throughout my childhood. All the same, though, I grew up with the definite sense that I was eating quite differently from my friends. It wasn’t just that my classmates’ sandwiches were on Wonder bread—so soft you could ball it up in your hand—while mine were on dry and dense whole wheat. It was that I was being taught that our food choices mattered, a lesson I absorbed from the home-cooked meals on our table every night and through frequent discussions about food with my mom.
So when my husband and I had our own two children, I was quite confident that I had a solid grounding in good nutrition. And while he and I were both adventurous eaters who loved exploring Houston’s endless array of hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants, at home we typically ate healthy, scratch-cooked meals. With the two of us naturally modeling for our children both an enthusiastic openness to new flavors as well as good daily eating habits, how could we possibly go wrong?
With all of this swirling around in my head, I met my friend Jenny, a fellow writer, for lunch one day and tentatively said, “You know, I think I might start a blog about school lunch—but maybe also about kids and food generally?” Jenny gave me an assessing stare and then responded without hesitation, “You have to.” And that was it. I came home, discovered the
domain name “The Lunch Tray” was still available, set up a WordPress template and published my first post the following morning.
Nine years and almost 1,500 Lunch Tray blog posts later, my entire life has been turned upside down. Not only did the blog upend my budding career as a freelance magazine writer, it eventually pushed me so far outside my comfort zone that I now almost can’t recognize the rather conflictaverse mom who sat in her pajamas that first morning, typing up her debut post at her kitchen table. These days, I’m known as an outspoken advocate on issues relating to children and food, and I’ve had some pretty remarkable experiences along the way, including:
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waging three viral and successful online petition campaigns relating to school kids and food (including one regarding so-called pink slime in school meals), making me one of the most effective petitioners in Change.org’s history, being highlighted in a congresswoman’s TED Talk on the effectiveness of grassroots food activism,
breaking a story about McDonald’s that was picked up by Today and the front page of the Washington Post, creating unwelcome publicity that forced the company to scrap a deceptive marketing program for kids, and
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being named one of the nation’s “20 Most Influential Moms” by Family Circle magazine.
I’ve also been able to reach more people with my writing than I could ever have dreamed, including through an opinion piece about school food for the New York Times, as well as a front page Times news story about “lunch shaming”—the practice of stigmatizing kids in the school cafeteria when they have overdue lunch accounts. The lunch shaming article went viral on social media, which led other national and local news outlets to publish and air their own stories on the topic. Thanks to that intense media spotlight and the public outrage it aroused, a number of states have since passed legislation seeking to ban lunch shaming.
As my expertise and visibility grew, I also became a sounding board for parents around the country—in my blog’s comments section, at speaking engagements, and via the angst-ridden emails I received from readers on a
regular basis. And what I learned from all these interactions is that my own concerns were hardly unique. Other parents clearly shared my sense that very little in our society’s food system and food culture supports parents in their desire to raise healthy kids.
And yet, in responding to my readers’ questions and pleas for help, I often felt uncomfortable—almost fraudulent. These parents saw me as an expert and understandably hoped to walk away from our exchanges with a solution to their problems. I willingly shared my best advice—how to try to improve school food in their district, for example, or how to get junk food out of their child’s classroom—but I was always painfully aware that many of their concerns were rooted in much larger societal problems, ones that can’t be solved solely through individual action.
Like so many of these parents, I’d had a vague sense that I was swimming upstream in trying to feed my kids healthfully. But after almost a decade of writing and advocating on these topics, I now understand clearly why that current feels so strong. And while many of the forces pushing kids toward unhealthy food affect adults, too, it’s really our children who are in the crosshairs.
Children’s bodies are vulnerable and rapidly growing, which means their diet can have significant and lasting consequences for their long-term health. The foods eaten in childhood can also shape taste preferences for a lifetime, yet our society’s particular notion of “kid food” is especially unhealthy. Young children’s brains are immature, which means they absorb junk food advertising uncritically, while older children are strongly influenced by social media, an especially powerful marketing channel the industry eagerly exploits. And unlike the rest of us, young children are dependent on caregivers and institutions for the food they eat. Lacking an adult’s greater knowledge and critical thinking, they simply take for granted the food environment in which they live, drawing implicit but often harmful nutritional lessons based on whatever food they’re offered by the trusted adults in their lives.
So my first goal for this book is to offer you a closer look at our children’s junk-food-saturated days, teasing apart the various reasons why they encounter so much unhealthy food in so many different contexts. I’ll explore the role of “picky eating” in driving children’s poor diets, and how the processed food industry exploits parents’ mealtime worries and guilt to promote its products. I’ll explain why so many school meals still look like
junk food, even after recent federal reforms. And I’ll also point out all the ways we adults quite knowingly exploit children’s love of junk food for ends having nothing to do with nourishment, like controlling their behavior, covering shortfalls in school budgets, reaping corporate profits, and even securing their love.
I next want to empower you, as best I can, to push back against the forces that drive your kids toward unhealthy eating. How can individual parents help improve their children’s daily food environment, from school classrooms to sports leagues? How much power do we have in pushing food and beverage companies to do better? And for those of us who want to drive more systematic change through individual and grassroots advocacy, how can we make our voices heard?
At the same time, though, I want to be transparent about the limitations of individual efforts in some of these areas, asking you to also consider fundamental shifts in national policy that could make a real difference for America’s kids. And for those of you who recoil at the idea of governmental intervention to solve some of these problems, I’ll offer my best case for reconsidering that view.
I should admit up front, though, that I take on all of these topics with some trepidation. From my years of blogging and speaking about these issues, I’ve learned that just talking about our children’s food environment —let alone how we might improve it—takes more than a little courage and a very thick skin. People who’ve found my concerns about children’s health overstated, or the solutions I endorse overly intrusive, have called me everything from a “Food Nazi” to an “angry mommy”—as well as a few less-family-friendly epithets, sometimes with bonus anti-Semitism or misogyny thrown in for good measure. I’ve also been scolded by readers who think I’m not health-conscious enough, as when I once dared to explore the nutritional benefits of sugar-sweetened chocolate milk for kids, or when I’ve expressed more concern over getting fruits and vegetables on school lunch trays than whether those foods are organically grown.
None of that backlash should come as a surprise; our attitudes about food tend to be deeply personal, and discussions of food policy can be politically divisive. But I’ve also found that emotions run especially high in discussions about feeding children in particular. Most adults who work with kids—teachers, daycare operators, coaches—genuinely care about children’s welfare, so when they’re accused of harming them through their
food choices, they can understandably feel angry or defensive. That’s all the more true in heavily regulated contexts like the federal school meal program, where a school nutrition director’s best intentions can be stymied by reams of red tape and insufficient funding.
And when it comes to moms (dads, too—though moms still do most of the grocery shopping and cooking in this country), nourishing a young child is a fundamental, even primal, act of parenting that can trigger all kinds of insecurities: Is my child eating enough? Too much? Why does my friend’s kid love garlic-fried squid while mine eats only bananas and buttered noodles? It doesn’t help that how we feed our children has become yet one more battlefield in the endless Mommy Wars. If you rely too heavily on highly processed foods, other mothers may accuse you of negligence, “poisoning” your child, or even child abuse. Swing too far in the other direction and you might be called a gullible alarmist, a control freak, or— my personal favorite—a “sancti-mommy.”
These sensitivities all provide dry tinder for conflict over food issues, but I would argue that the flame is the food industry’s influence on our elected officials, which in turn shapes our public conversations about food. Politicians on both sides of the aisle accept Big Food’s lobbying dollars, to be sure, but the industry has predictably found the most receptive ear among pro-business, anti-regulation conservatives. And these politicians typically use charged, partisan language to protect their benefactors’ interests: efforts to curb even the worst of the industry’s abuses are “nanny state” intrusions on our “freedom,” while public health advocates are finger-wagging “food police” bent on “telling the rest of us how to eat.” This flag-waving, “pro-freedom” messaging is then amplified in the news and on social media by armies of paid public relations professionals, many of whom operate covertly behind front groups that hide their financial ties to the industry.
Due in large part to this unholy melding of partisan politics and the food industry’s financial interests, anyone who cares about improving our food environment risks being mocked as an elitist foodie, while a carefree embrace of unhealthy food is a sign of being a “real” American. Why else do politicians of all political stripes—even the famously ascetic Barack Obama—feel the need to chow down on junk food while the cameras are rolling? It doesn’t seem to matter that some of these politicians might hold very different views about food in private. Case in point: in 2011, former
New Jersey governor Chris Christie openly applauded Michelle Obama’s school food reform efforts, poignantly citing his own lifelong struggle with obesity. Five years later, he sarcastically mocked those same efforts to court conservative Republicans in the 2016 presidential primary.
For all of these reasons, pushing for change—whether asking one teacher to stop passing out candy or advocating for federal reforms in Congress—can be quite intimidating. Just daring to question the status quo can invite stinging criticism, whether from fellow parents or (if you’re ruffling bigger feathers) PR firms, politicians, and powerful corporations. It’s much easier for all of us to just keep our heads down and muddle through, struggling to raise our own kids in a society that seems permanently and hopelessly saturated with junk food.
I also understand that not everyone is a fiery activist out to change the world. Most parents are challenged enough just making sure everyone is dressed and out the door on time, with completed homework and signed field trip forms safely in their backpacks, and that something vaguely resembling “dinner” shows up on the table at the end of the day. That’s why I want help you navigate your child’s food environment as it is, whether that’s sharing the latest expert advice on picky eating, helping you decode confusing nutrition claims on product packaging, or pointing you to resources that can help even the busiest families eat together.
At the same time, though, I want to offer you a more hopeful vision of what that food environment could be—for your child and for all the children whose parents are too marginalized or disempowered to advocate on their behalf. Because polls show that the majority of American parents do support policies that would undoubtedly improve kids’ health, from better school food to fewer junk food ads targeting their children. Yet very few of us actually vote on issues like these, or even think to hold our politicians accountable for them.
What would our children’s world look like if we actually did?
KID FOOD HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Once given the choice of French fries, pizza, pasta, and chicken fingers, my kids don’t usually want to eat anything off the regular menu.
~ MOM OF TWO, WASHINGTON, DC
A few years ago, before I’d ever thought about writing a book, I once randomly declared to my husband, “You know, sometimes I wish I could go back in time, and instead of studying law, I’d study history. And you know what my thesis would be about? Children’s menus!” At Martin’s blank stare, I helpfully added, “I mean, don’t you ever wonder about that? Like, when they first started and why they’re all the same now, and whether we always fed kids this way in restaurants?” [Another blank stare, now slightly tinged with pity.]
Whatever. Once I knew I was writing this book, I couldn’t wait to dig into all the existing scholarship to finally get some answers. If I could just nail down what Americans used to consider “kid food,” I thought, maybe I’d better understand when and how it all went so horribly wrong. But after several days of coming up short in my research, I started to wonder if Martin’s blank stare had been justified after all. Maybe I really was all alone in my (totally not weird!) obsession with the children’s menu.
Undeterred, I did what any self-styled historian would do: I dove into the primary sources myself (in my case, online menu archives) to try to figure out when kids’ menus first appeared and what they offered. But in the midst of this research, I was so taken with the retro illustrations on a particular 1930s-era railway children’s menu that I posted it on Twitter. And in one of those lovely moments of social media serendipity, that menu was spotted by someone who wasn’t even one of my Twitter followers, who then referred me to the blogger at The American Menu. He, in turn, referred me to Andrew P. Haley, a cultural historian at the University of Southern Mississippi. And Haley, it turned out, had written the definitive paper on the role of children in the American restaurant industry.
Talking to Haley on the phone was like finding my kid-food history soulmate (sorry, Martin!). And while his research focused less on my particular interest—the food served to kids—and more on why kids were being served in the first place, Haley’s paper introduced me to a central figure in the history of children’s menus: Ethel Maude Colson.
To say that Colson invented the modern-day children’s menu would be an overstatement, but not by much. In 1920, she wrote an editorial in the trade journal The American Restaurant, with a title that asked the industry for the first time: “Why not children’s luncheon?” And the ideas she suggested—a special menu just for kids, including “a cheap little toy or some similarly . . . child-delighting feature”—were clearly new. When the journal’s editor enthusiastically endorsed the concept in the same issue, he noted that “to the best of our knowledge,” it “has never been done anywhere.”
Haley didn’t have any more information on Colson, so I assumed she worked in the restaurant industry. But I later discovered that wasn’t the case at all. Instead, she was a writer—and an incredibly prolific one at that. She penned fiction, poetry, books on the analysis and writing of poetry, plays, radio scripts, literary criticism, and even song lyrics. She also worked at one time or another at every major newspaper in Chicago, both as a reporter and as an editor.
On top of all that, in 1927 Colson became one of the few female lecturers at Northwestern University, teaching journalism to young women. She also wrote a book that same year about opportunities in journalism for aspiring female writers (honestly, did this woman ever sleep?) in which she stressed that “the ‘woman’s angle’ is the woman writer’s tool.” In other
words, according to Colson, a female journalist’s best hope for success in a male-dominated field was to focus her reporting primarily on “women’s interests, ways and work.”
And when seen in that light, it actually makes perfect sense that Colson, despite having no connection to the restaurant industry—or even children of her own—wound up writing about children’s menus. Because for a certain well-heeled subset of women in the 1920s, the lack of a kids’ menu was in fact a matter of growing interest and concern.
To understand why, you need to put yourself in the shoes of a mom in the early twentieth century. Food science had just begun to explore the role of “vitamines” and other nutrients in preventing malnutrition and disease, and these findings had been widely shared with the public during World War I as part of a federal nutrition education campaign. Meanwhile, women who’d been barred from careers in food science had carved out their own turf—the new field of home economics—and they, too, were offering a lot of expert guidance on how to feed one’s family.
So if you were a mom of reasonable means and general awareness in the 1920s, you were suddenly on the receiving end of a lot of imposingly “scientific” nutrition advice which you ignored at your child’s peril. All of this clearly influenced Colson, too, who opened her editorial by noting that “[t]he question of food for children is interesting the American public now as never before,” and that “the right kind of food is too often not provided for the growing child, the citizen of the future.”
So just what was the “right kind of food” for kids? Apparently, it wasn’t anything found on a regular menu for adults. “The ordinary child, confronted by the glorious possibilities of a restaurant menu, is apt to order unwisely,” Colson warned, or beg his mother for “foolish, forbidden dainties.” (I laughed at Colson’s quaint term for unhealthy treats, especially since today’s restaurant executives would gladly ply kids with unlimited McForbidden Dainties to get them in the door.)
But Colson also understood that moms in the 1920s faced a new problem. Children were now occupying a more central role in family life because parents were having fewer children and giving each one more time and attention. So it was becoming more common for kids to accompany their parents on various outings, including weekend shopping excursions “in town” with their mothers. And as parents of any era can attest, nothing spoils a shopping outing like a hungry, cranky child.
