Dear all, Good nutrition education often falls by the wayside in the hectic daily lives of families and against the backdrop of a vast array of ready-made foods. Julia Eismann doesn’t want to accept this for herself and her children, and sees it as part of her care work to teach children the joy of healthy eating, and of cooking and baking with wholesome ingredients. How she manages this:
“Mum, can we stop somewhere now where we can have a nice salad?” I hear sentences like this from my children when we’re out and about. It’s always funny, too, when we rummage for cash so the youngest can cycle to the honey vending machine. It’s a homemade wooden box with individual compartments; for around 7 euros in coins, you can open a compartment to take out a jar of honey.
The children know the names of all the vegetables. At the cheese stall, they order Gruyère – no, organic please. And the mature Parmesan, because it’s more flavourful than the young one. They’re familiar with both the local farm shop and the weekly market, and we all love our vegetable box. During the pandemic, we didn’t just cook, we also did a lot of baking. During this phase, all the children were able to flip pancakes by tossing them in the air – just like Papa Wutz, except that it went well for us.
Nutrition education: We cook with the children
We cook. Well, I cook with the children. We chop, taste, sometimes don’t like something and try something different next time. They also love baking, nibbling on dough, and giving their homemade biscuits to others.
We’ve got snacks with us. Always and everywhere. Chopped-up bits and a selection of new snacks from the range of new brands that are making things new and better. And buttered bread, the classic sort. Here they’re called ‘Stullen’. Very popular: Lord Sandwich, named after the legend that the Lord had his food served between two slices of bread at the card table. Here, that means “a sandwich with cream cheese and cucumber slices”. Except that we don’t use white sandwich bread, but prefer something with grains and wholemeal flour.
We call that “proper food”. How did the children learn this? I took the time to do it with them. Time and again, day in, day out like clockwork: breakfast in the morning, a hot meal at lunchtime, and in the evening usually supper or another hot meal or a lovely salad. These days the schedules are fragmented, yet we never go a day without a home-cooked meal here.
This is part of the care work. There is a term for it: nutrition education. Many people lack it. If this is down to convenience, we end up with too much fast food and highly processed foods, with the visible consequences of obesity, cardiovascular issues and the like. You can also tell from the family budget whether meals are planned and based on basics, or spontaneous and focused on speed.
Fruit, vegetables, meat or alternatives, sweet and savoury – everything is tasted and discussed. Where does it come from, and what is required before it can end up on the plate? And of course, that is also care work. Nutrition education is what should be happening in families. Or perhaps we should say: what used to happen in families for a long time but has not yet found a new place.
Because families are cooking less. We are already seeing in the generation of today’s parents that cooking and eating together at home is no longer part of everyday life. Canteens and business lunches have replaced the preparation of midday meals. This is not something that can be reversed, because our current way of working brings it with it. To ignore that would be naive.
Nevertheless, the question remains: how will today’s children learn to eat healthily and mindfully? How will they understand that the best food choices aren’t necessarily the expensive ones, but very often the basics?
Truly experiencing food
Experiencing food in the kitchen, being there and getting involved when a few dry lentils are turned into a stew, creamy mashed potatoes from brown, earthy potatoes, and – depending on your preference – a dish with roasted flavours from raw meat, or seeing a sweet, creamy batter turn into a fluffy cake, watching yeast dough rise and then turning into cinnamon buns with cinnamon sugar and icing, which you eat warm and in the best of company – all of this creates a very special sense of home. And it’s not the same when you buy things ready-made. Nor is it the same when you buy them almost ready-made and heat them up in your own appliance.
Like all care work, nutrition education is an investment in children’s futures. Those who learn how food ‘works’ acquire the basics for looking after themselves properly. You learn about flavours, textures and methods of preparation. You also learn what should be included in a diet and in what quantities.
And you learn to appreciate the produce; and, of course, particularly in rural life, it is often possible to get a glimpse into how things are produced. Whether it’s at the chicken coop, where the eggs come from, and chicken feed is also on hand so the children can interact with the animals, or the farmer asks if they’d like to come and see the cows.
Even the question “How do you eat this?” is no longer a major point of discussion. Table manners and using cutlery are taught at nursery. Meals at home are traditionally not really cutlery meals: breakfast (where it takes place before the busy day begins) and dinner tend to be cold and eaten with the hands or, for example, as porridge with a spoon. Should nursery teachers also be expected to teach children how to use cutlery at all? Here too, incredible efforts are being made wherever possible.
Because that is the reality for many children today. We are witnessing a shift in where meals are eaten. Children eat in nurseries, and later in schools. Parents also eat out, perhaps in canteens, and in any case away from what the children can perceive as meal preparation.
We won’t be reversing that. Our daily lives are busy and noisy, and we’re just glad if the children are fed properly. What ends up on their plates certainly leaves more to be desired than how they actually eat it. What remains is this: in this system, the challenge of imparting knowledge about good nutrition is left to chance.
Inspiring a passion for cooking and baking
People who are passionate themselves pass on that passion. The agricultural sector has programmes designed to raise awareness. People who blog and post about food-related topics, for example, play their part. And in the end, it’s still a matter of luck who will be able to prepare a meal from brown, earthy potatoes and raw eggs.
I don’t have a ready-made answer to that. But I believe it starts with asking the question in the first place — and talking to one another about how we want to achieve this.
