Abandon sushi and coffee. Eat spicy and the baby will like spicy (but not too spicy). Beer = bad. They drink wine in utero in France. Breast, right? Go organic. Get a blender. Put food in front of them and hope for the best. Make separate meals. They have to eat more. Together. They’re eating too much. Trans fats. Hide the avocado in the cupcakes. Sign up that teen for cooking classes. You do what? You don’t do what? You know nothing about motherly love.
The voices, internal and external, start in pregnancy and continue through to your progeny’s high-school graduation. How to feed a child is a huge, primal responsibility — I made this body, now I must sustain this body — that’s lately become a mystifying labyrinth. So much so that negotiating the care and feeding of offspring now comes with a slew of books and blogs advising anxious parents. My favourite title is the doomed-before-you-start How to Get Your Kid to Eat ... But Not Too Much.
Of course, the source of the panic is serious. In Canada, childhood-obesity rates are on the rise. A 2007 government report concluded that one in four Canadian children is either overweight or obese, and the sobering ramifications include increased illness, a stressed-out health-care system and a generation that might not live as long as its parents.
Yet we receive this information from within a strange cultural divide: Fatty, processed foods and a screen-centric lifestyle may be making us hefty, but healthy, elaborately prepared food is as trendy as Twitter. Two decades ago, there was only one celebrity chef, Julia Child — back in vogue, thanks to Meryl Streep —but now a fleet of TV stars like Nigella Lawson advocate locally sourced, lovingly designed, slow-cooked family meals. Naked Chef Jamie Oliver campaigned to overthrow the British government’s flabby school-lunch programs, and two successful TV shows recorded the battle as entertainment.
This ideal of a locavore’s (preferably organic) home-cooked meal may be fashionable, and yet, as always with fashion, it’s mostly meaningless in real life. Earnest foodies worship Alice Waters, the California restaurateur and mother of the slow-food movement, but most of us bow down to Kraft, and a few of us to something in between, like Annie’s Organic Macaroni & Cheese, a brand whose slogan should be Feeble Gestures for Those Who Know Better But Are So Freakin’ Tired. Confronted with the buy-local movement, a hard-working friend who’s the father of a two-year-old sighed: “I wanted to try the 100-Mile Diet, but it turns out it doesn’t mean shopping within 100 miles of my house.” Choosing between the knowledge of eating right for the planet and our kids, and the slimness of our wallets, a sheepish hand might reach for the canned-in-Mexico corn (99 cents) instead of its pesticide-free, grown-next-door sibling ($3 an ear).
