Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to take a step to connect kids with real food this week.

Impact Ratings:

Level of Commitment: Baby Steps (or more!)

If you have kids, consider a real food conversation to help them start differentiating between “real food” the way God made it and the fake food covering the shelves of the grocery store.

In case you missed it this weekend, I posted a list of 5 simple real food rules for kids that can help inspire you to start talking.

Other Ideas

• Plan to make a recipe from scratch with your kids this week
• Sometimes it’s hard for me to take the time to slow down and work with kids – if that’s you, here’s some inspiration on cooking with kids
• Let them help with meal planning, weaving in conversation about how you choose to feed your family
• Take a deliberate grocery shopping trip, with the goal of one of these:
• Finding one new produce item your kids have never tried – let them pick it out for a taste test
• Counting all the colors in the produce department
• Reading some labels to look for a certain ingredient: MSGs, artificial sweeteners, or maybe just CORN – and discuss why you don’t buy those food products (for older kids)
• Find out how many cereals have sugar in the first 3 ingredients
• Do some math: compare the price of a processed box like cereal or pasta-roni with its parts to see how much you pay for the processing
• Start a new family routine at the table – identifying the foods the kids think are probably in the meal, then telling them the recipe

• If you don’t have rules already about trying new things, institute the “no thank you bite” rule (or “no thank you 3 bites”) where a child must try a new food before being allowed to say “no thank you.”
• Pack a school lunch with your child, discussing balanced nutrition
• Choose a new homemade snack and make it with your kids
• If you have trouble sitting down to eat together, make that your goal at least once this week.
• Make it a week with zero fast food stops
• Commit as a family to avoiding some fake ingredient for a week (maybe artificial food colorings?)
• Play “kitchen” with your little ones and talk about which of their play food would be “real food” if it was real, and what is just “fun food” to eat occasionally, or “junk food” – if you have never talked about categories like this with kids, it’s a great time to create the system. At our house, they’re “growing foods” and “fun foods” or “junk food.” I love that my little Leah is cooking with her babies in the top photo! She has a baby in a “sling” and then one on a stool next to her to bake muffins.

If You Don’t Have Kids…

…of your own, you can still do something this week:

• If you have kids in your life, like nieces and nephews, neighborhood friends, or grandchildren, choose an excellent real food recipe and make a date sometime in the future to make it with them.
• Or just take those kids a real food treat to show how something without white sugar can taste awesome!
• If you think/hope you might have kids someday, read something this week on kids and nutrition, just to keep up on the information.
• Read your school district’s lunch menu to see what you think.

Tune in later in the week for a great guest post on table conversations with kids, the many responsibilities kids can accept in the kitchen, and a review of Dr. Seuss The Lorax movie.

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If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money.  If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

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