Lost in Translation: Family Food tales from the road

I've been traveling a lot this summer. It has also been an opportunity to see how food environments can be very different away from my Brooklyn homeland. I'll post some observations over the week.

Scene: Wal-Mart, Fruit and Produce Section
My mom, a senior who lives in Florida and on a budget, has been doing more and more grocery shopping at Wal-Mart, the store that most in Brooklyn vehemently oppose. (I am opposed them too, but am open to the potential benefits of better food access.) But this is the first time in her life that she has felt like she could "afford" organic and I have to say the fruit and veggies she bought there were quite fresh and good-tasting.

It kills me that Wal-mart of all places has gotten her to try organics and that they may be the best produce place for her in town. But I also know that "organic" produce in many places is just plain expensive and tends to be older because there is less turn-over of stock. My mom doesn't live in a food desert by any means. You would think, living in a place where fresh produce grows abundantly and is shipped all over the country, it would be easy to eat local. But it's not. I have no idea if there's a farmer's market anywhere in her community. So, she's voting with her dollars to buy fruits and vegetables at place like Wal-Mart that is cheap and convenient.

This same Wal-Mart also had Swiss Miss pudding packs stacked by the produce aisle for the unbeatable price of $1. How many people are just getting the pudding and no fruit or veggies at all? Probably most of them. For a family with kids, especially, it would take a lot of will-power to only buy fruit and skip the cheap snacks altogether. (I actually kept my 4 year old away from the shopping floor because I thought she'd go gaa-gaa over all the sweet snacks to choose from.)

Is Wal-mart too much of a devil's bargain? Are there better ways to improve access to good food without the "help" of retail behemoths? How can we change the dynamics to make it easier to afford the luxury of good food for everyone without a complete sell-out to other vital principles? We need to keep looking for concrete solutions.

Can Wal-Mart Save us from Food Deserts? By Adriana V., The Stir

Just Cook: Easy Calzones that Even Kids Can Make

Two Aprons Video

Family Dinner Tip: Get the kids involved. These girls are too cute and aptly demonstrate that kids can cook in the kitchen, especially with some advanced preparations. These calzones would be in the oven in less than 20 minutes, add a salad and you are done.

Calzones
Store-bought pizza dough, cut into 2 or 4 pieces depending on size of calzone
Grated Mozarella cheese
Any other pizza fillings you like: veggies, pepperoni, etc.
Tomato sauce (optional, but I like it for dipping)

Roll out dough, Add fillings with cheese and pinch closed. Cook for approx. 20 minutes in a 400 degree oven.

Note: The girls don't say oven temp in their video, so I guessed a hot oven. Bittman says to cook calzones at 350 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes. Pick one and keep a close watch.

Friday Family Dinner Fan Club: Bloggers who care about Family Dinner

Logo from BlogHer

This Friday kicks off BlogHer '10, the annual blogging conference that has reportedly attracted over a thousand attendees in its 5th year show. Though it is usually a West Coast affair, this year it is being held in New York, practically in my backyard. It was sold-out before I realized it was so close. So, I'm disappointed (and kicking myself a bit) that I won't be able to attend.  Instead, I thought I would give a shout-out to my fellow Mommy bloggers out there, (and the cooking Dads and foodie, non-parents too) that are committed to family, good food, good parenting and family dinner.

Daily, I am inspired and educated by the wonderful information and wisdom that you put out there. Real-life stories of the ups and downs of getting our families to eat together and eat well. Protests and petitions about reforms that can help fix our broken food system. Be it recipes with beauty-shots of delicious dinners or details on nutrition, sustainable eating or school lunch, together we are creating an enormous wealth of information for both parents and policymakers.

Some it is is just fun, of course. Peach cobbler and grilled dinners don't exactly change the world, though maybe.... 

Blogging has been called a revolution in publishing, and that it is. It can also be a call to action and an instrument of change.  I believe in the power of family dinner to transform lives; I believe in the power of committed individuals to make changes in their worlds, at home, in their communities, and nationwide. The Social Network (blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and the like) allow us to share experiences, find common goals, and learn from each other in ways that simply weren't possible a few years ago. Face time is important too. Just as the dinner table should be gadget-free, connections that happen in real-time feel deeper and more true. So enjoy yourself at BlogHer 2010, getting in touch with fellow like-minded women, and a few men. Be inspired, make connections, and come back to the Network to report, teach, share.

Wednesday Videos: Menu Planning Reality TV

Mark Bittman posted a column on Babble last week with 5 tough-love tips for parents who want to make family dinner a priority. I agree with his sentiments, but several commentators, rightly, pointed out that his list didn't actually include any helpful tips for how to get dinner on the table quickly, night after night.

Many cooks swear by menu planning as the answer to making sure family dinner happens every night without fuss. The basic instructions are simple: 1) take time on Sunday to plan for the week, 2) use your plan to create a shopping list, 3) stick with the plan through the week. The Menu Plan can help you be organized and maybe even get a jump on prepping for some meals ahead of time. It can also be a platform to get your partner and older kids to help out. If everyone knows what is on the menu, tasks can be assigned beforehand, so that they can chip in. Older kids can be taught to wash vegetables or start the water for pasta when you are on your way home, for instance.

I found two videos on menu planning that were so funny in contrast to each other. The first shows a regular mom who happens to live in New Zealand. She swears by menu planning as a money-saver; that's another bonus. She eschews paying a menu planning service (that are abundant on the internet) and just opts for a simple printed chart tacked to the frig. Low production values, but very honest, real, and practical.


Reality Menu Planning


The second video is pure fantasy.  Put together by Parents magazine with sponsorship (Bertolli says make pasta, pasta, pasta!), the production values are better: nice shots of well-groomed kids and mom (an actress?) in kitchen and grocery store. She, too, is basically describing a piece of paper that becomes a menu plan and a shopping list. The fantasy part is that the kids are so helpful and that there's time to let them help with the shopping, help with the meal prep, and you can even boost their writing skills if they write the list for you! Kids can definitely pitch in: setting the table, clearing the dishes,  and during well-planned and practiced food prep. But having kids help is not really a time- or work-savers as any cooking parent knows! It's teaching them to cook which is valuable, but not often possible in a time-crunch situation. Still, it's a good idea to involve kids in the planning; each kid can recommend a dish for the week and then you plan how they can be of help with actually cooking it. Realistically, this can probably happen once a week, depending on the age of your kids and the time frame you have between getting home and making dinner. (Maybe Friday night or a weekend meal is Kid's Choice night.) Similarly, the trip to the grocery store is cute, but also pretty laughable in reality. Unless it's a trip to the farmer's market or a health store, the kids may sabotage your healthy pantry and your budget!


Fantasy Menu Planning

Do you menu plan? Feel free to write in with your own menu planning tips.

Orgjunkie.com also has some great menu planning tips under Menu Plan Monday.

Lessons from Research: Who's Working on Family Dinner

The researchers who work on family dinner are a varied sort. They come from nutrition and food science schools, from medical schools, from schools of public health and schools of nursing, and from a wide range of programs in social work, sociology, and psychology. Each of these disciplines come at the research from a different perspective, but findings are surprisingly similar. Family dinner offers a protective effect for kids and teenagers, be it less risk-taking activities, like smoking and underage drinking, more positive actions like improved eating habits and better grades, or just improved general well-being.

The next frontier of research, I think, is to bring the detailed findings of these studies out from inside the ivory tower. Let's figure out how to translate the research into action that goes beyond the occasional pep talk. We need to find out how to both encourage and support families who are trying to create a family dinner routine for their families. Do they need more information about healthy choices at the grocery stores and navigating the choices among prepared foods?  Advice on 20-minute meals cooked at home and menu planning? Do they need help with their family relationships so that everyone chips in? Do they simply need more time? More time might mean flexible and supportive work environments that allow them to go home by 5 or 6pm at night. Probably, all of the above.

Health education campaigns sound so easy, but effective campaigns to change individual health behaviors are notoriously difficult to craft.  It can be also hard to measure their effectiveness or translate what works in one community to another. Nevertheless, the benefits of family dinner are well worth a concerted effort to better promote them.

Select List of Academic Research Centers Working on Family Dinner
The National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), Columbia University,
Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Chairman
Founders of National Family Day
Report on The Important of Family Dinner

University of Minnesota, School of Public Health
Project EAT. Principal Investigator: Diane Neumark-Sztainer, PhD, MPH, RD
Other Research Projects

Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity
Eat Healthy New Haven
Other Research Projects

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The Pampered Chef Family Resiliency Program Center,  Barbara Fiese, Ph.D., Director

Harvard Pilgrim Heath Care Institute, Department of Population Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Obesity Prevention Program


International Association of the Study of Obesity (iaso), Europe
The ENERGY Project

Cornell Food Lab
Food Psychology and How, Why, When and How Much We Eat, Brian Wansink, Ph.D., Director

Baylor College of Medicine
Children's Nutrition Research Center, Dennis Bier, MD., Director

Friday Family Dinner Fan Club: Miriam Weinstein

The Surprising Power of Family Meals, by Miriam Weinstein

 Today I have to give a shout-out to Miriam Weinstein, author of The Surprising Power of Family Meals. Written in 2005, it is one of the only popular books out there that tries to bridge the research of family dinner with tips that families can really use. It is a well-written inspiration that I reccomend to anyone who cares about food and family. I read it in 2007 when I started this blog and it was relatively hard to find. Weinstein seemed like a voice in the wilderness, someone trying to get at the nitty-gritty of family dinner beyond the platitudes, but it was unclear who was listening. I could never find much follow-up writing about it by her after the book was written.

Recently, thanks to a J.M. Smuckers company endorsement, she's been give a new slick web platform to spread the word of family dinner at The Power of Family Meals. It's sort of a funny partnership, but I guess Smuckers feels like this is an authentic way to promote breakfast as a family meal. In a similar vein, Stouffer's launched the Let's Fix Dinner media campaign and website this year, created in partnership with CASA, one of the longest-running family dinner advocates. CASA, founded by Joseph Califano in the early 1990s, is the research group responsible for many of the oft-cited statistics that family dinner is a protective factor against teenage alcohol and substance abuse.

What does it mean that big corporations are espousing family dinner? While part of me is skeptical, there is a big part of me that welcomes the money and resources that big companies bring in promoting what I see as an essential good. For major brands that sell food products at supermarkets, it is a positive trend if people eat at home more. I think the more people eat at home, the more routine it becomes and the better they'll like it. So first steps are important. I worry when the promoters are selling relatively unhealthy processed foods, but sometimes convenience foods may be necessary in order to get something on the table for dinner. There has to be a balance. Perhaps the more healthy foods, like vegetables, fruits, and whole grains need their own champion marketers, funded by the CDC, a consortium of California growers, or a major health foundation like Robert Wood Johnson. Or basic home cooking versus reheating convenience foods has to become a more common and valued skill.

The experts like Weinstein and CASA have a responsibility to make sure the message of the importance of family meals gets out there without too many strings attached to the processed foods themselves. Stouffer's pizza for dinner or Smuckers jam on toast for breakfast are not the only way. Both these campaigns, though, seem to hit the balance very well, and are excellent and authentic in the information they present. So far, so good.  I'm glad to seeing Weinstein on a bigger platform, touting the importance of family dinner in her approachable and non-judgmental style.

Video Wednesday: Tips on How To Make Family Meals on a Tight Budget

Here's a very cute Howcast video with great tips to spread your budget and eat healthier.

Some highlights:

• Eat less meat, and marinate cheaper cuts of meat to make tender. I would add learn to stir-fry, so you use less meat and increase the number of veggies at the table.
• Fresh veggies are best (my tips). But frozen veggies can be good too (their tip). Frozen veggies definitely better than no veggies.
• Try real whole grains, including brown rice and oatmeal. Buy dried beans and learn how to rinse and soak overnight.  
• Make homemade desserts rather than store-bought. Can be more nourishing and more delicious. Fresh seasonal fruit is a great dessert. I sometimes let my kids add a tiny bit of whipped cream to make it special.