I confess that my daughter, Sofia’s, favorite food is Cheetos. This is a difficult disclosure for me, since I spend a lot of time and energy (and, why not, love because I actually enjoy) cooking meals for our family. I cook every night of the week (we usually go out once a weekend), make breakfast in the morning, and pack lunches for everyone (as well as snacks for after-school).  Yet, in fear of being extreme, I do occasionally allow her to eat junky stuff, at at party or on a road trip, just for the heck of it.

What’s On Your Plate?

My 7-year-old Cheeto-loving mini-rebel is the reason I was interested in seeing the documentary film, What’s on Your Plate?, which is premiering on the Discovery Channel’s Planet Green. The film chronicles two eleven-year-olds investigating where their food comes from, how it’s made, and how it got there.

It struck a chord when the film’s director, Catherine Gund, said she was inspired to create the film when her daughter, Sadie (rarely exposed to junk food, like mine, and with hereditary cholesterol issues) was entering middle school and would be free to choose her own food at lunch and after-school. She wanted her daughter to have the knowledge to back up her own choices.

I met the director and the two young stars, Sadie and Safiyah, at a lunch organized by the Discovery Channel this week at Candle 79, a delicious organic and vegan restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side. (It was an extra treat to also be able to meet No Impact Man, Colin Beavan, whose book is on my To Read list.)

Eating Well is a Family Project

What’s on Your Plate? is meant to be watched by children and adults together. The idea is that a family’s attitudes about food will not be changed by one person — whether it’s top-down (a mother enforcing healthier food) or bottom-up (a child declaring he wants the household to go vegetarian).

While the film will probably largely go over the heads of children under 7 (my first-grader was a little fidgety), I liked the idea of starting a conversation about food and health with my kids. The movie’s curious pre-teens interview everyone from parents suffering from diabetes to food experts to a Mexican family farming rented land outside of New York City.  They inspired us to talk about what caused my daughters’ grandmother to have a heart attack, and what exactly are Funyuns?

The film treats a wide-ranging array of food issues, but here are just a few ideas I took away from my experience with the film and conversations with its creators.

Tips and Ideas for Eating Better (and Saving Money)

• A thousand conversations. Maybe talking about food and health with kids should be treated in the same way some child development experts advise we talk about sex:   instead of one big “Talk,” why not have a thousand tiny dialogues interwoven in daily life?
• How do you feel? Ask children to consider not only what fast food is made of, but how it makes them feel after eating it.
• Home-made junk food. If your kids beg for fast food, Sadie suggests using one of Michael Pollan‘s Food Rules from his new book:   you can eat as much junk food (french fries, cookies, pizza) as you like, as long as you make it yourself.  (Parenting magazine Babble recently published 6 of Pollan’s Rules.)
• The luxury of fresh fruit. A bag of Ripples costs less than a quart of strawberries. Is this partly the reason why obesity often coincides with poverty?
• Cheap at what cost? Cheap food is never truly cheap:  the chemicals, packaging and factories needed to make it cost us both our health and the environment.
• Fight the good fight. It can take effort to combat the temptation to buy what’s cheap, easy and instantly satisfying.  Corporations in our capitalist system tend towards bigger and bigger in the drive to sell more products at the lowest production cost.  In order to buy small, local and fresh, we are often working against forces greater than we are.
• Organic farming is a tough business. We can support farmers (instead of factories) by patronizing green markets and participating in community-supported agriculture programs (CSA), where you pay a farm up front to receive a share of the goods at harvest time, delivered to your neighborhood.  To find a CSA near you, check out Local Harvest.
• Small changes do matter. Here is a list of a few more things you can do to help our country eat better.
• Growing stuff is fun. The hands-on, sensory aspect of farming is appealing to children and adults alike:  in the words of my daughter, Sofia, “It would be cool to see how all the plants looked like and it would be cool to dig them out of the ground and find them.”
• Being frugal and healthy are sometimes at odds: it’s OK to spend more money on things that will improve your overall well-being.  The more we put our money where our values are, the more we help those things flourish.
• Cooking is a big win-win. Cooking is one of my favorite solutions in the Frugal Mama quest to save money and make life better.  Restaurant food can cost 10 times as much as home-cooked food and is often treated with all sorts of hidden chemicals and processes.
• More advantages of eating at home: you can relax, eat in your pajamas or lie down afterwards, you fill your home with delicious smells, you don’t have to entertain your kids while you’re waiting for the food or be mortified if they ruin the place, your children learn home cooking values and skills (even just watching you), kids can learn to contribute to the family unit by taking on responsibilities like setting the table, clearing the plates, and sweeping up afterwards.  Can you think of more?

And you know what, it does make a difference that I’m feeding my children well. These food habits and taste preferences will last a lifetime — even if they may occasionally gorge themselves on Doritos at a party. They’ll eventually crave a crunchy green pepper — like Safiyah, who is convinced that the reason she’ll eat anything is because her mom didn’t feed her any sugar until she was one.

Home cooking may be one of the biggest win-wins, but my daughter put her finger on an equally important one after seeing the movie:  “It would be really cool to plant things, because then we would have free food.”

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