Tips to encourage healthy vegetables eating

When I was a kid, I watched the "Popeye" cartoons. Popeye, a cartoon sailor, got great strength to do good and fight evil when he ate a can of spinach. Well, so as a pre-school girl, probably when I was around four years old, I asked my mom to get some spinach. Amazed she bought fresh spinach, cooked it into a hot green goo, and served it to me. As you can imagine I took one bite and said, "Yuck." It was many years before I ate spinach again! She was very annoyed (though not as much as usual) that she had bought a huge bag of spinach and gone through all the preparing and cooking (this was in the 1950's when things still took a lot of time to prepare). This is one reason why I became a very cautious eater and was not "adventurous" in trying out new foods. It's another difference between older generations and the new. When we were growing up mothers who cooked had to spend hours preparing things that people today just pop purchased from the store into the microwave. So people were more cautious about requesting food that they might not like (especially if dad got ticked off at spending his hard earned money on something "new" and mom had to do all the preparation and cooking). So there is a reason that older generations were more cautious in things that younger generations take for granted, and it's not because we were too dumb or lacked sophisticated taste!

Fast forward decades and I am a busy commuter in Manhattan. I'm in Penn Station and starved, so I look for a slice of pizza, but all they have left is spinach pizza. I buy one and to my amazement find I loved it. I reconnected with spinach and now will select it for a variety of dishes. The same with mushrooms. I really disliked them in my youth (partly because of the way they were prepared) and again, I was introduced to them via pizza topping and eventually use and enjoy them in all forms.

Parents need to remember this and be creative in adding vegetables to favorite foods while children are young. Do not introduce vegetables to them as goo or lumps of "healthy but not tasty." Adults develop a taste for vegetables, but children need help with continuity from when they are babies and will eat pureed vegetables, through the solid food stage, and yes, most definitely, as children and teenagers.

So be sure to add spinach, mushrooms, squash slices and other good vegetables to favorite foods from the very beginning so that kids develop a liking for their combined flavors. Spinach sauteed in olive oil and spooned onto pizza is a healthy way to get both spinach and olive oil into a pizza lover's dietary intake.

The second tip is to add cheese. Just about everyone loves cheese. Some years ago a cheese industry advert correctly showed that kids love even "healthy foods like vegetables" when they are topped with cheese. Also, real cheese (not pseudo cheese product) is a valuable source of daily and nutrients, especially as kids AND adults do not drink enough milk. So you can cultivate a liking for vegetables as a side dish for your children by slicing or shredding cheese over the prepared vegetable. Mozzarella in particular enhances the flavor of vegetables for children.