Check out this interview with Jennifer McCann of Vegan Lunch Box fame:
Meatless Monday: Pack a Healthy Lunch (Contributed by Kerry Truman of The Huffington Post.)
Food products created just for kids are a relatively new phenomenon; back in the day, children ate the same foods that grown-ups did, only in smaller quantities.
In recent decades, however, we’ve witnessed the rise of ‘fun’, kid-centric cuisine–i.e.,those processed foods plastered with cartoon characters that enthrall tots and appall their mothers, turning the center aisles of the supermarket into a minefield (or, more accurately, a whinefield). Weary parents routinely cave in and buy the real-life equivalent of Calvin and Hobbe’s chocolate frosted sugar bombs to defuse an exploding toddler in the breakfast cereal aisle.
Of course, during this same period, we’ve also seen a dramatic increase in childhood obesity and Type 2 diabetes, a disease once seen only in adults.
Coincidence? Consider the astonishing success of Kraft’s Lunchables, which are “loaded with saturated fat, salt, and sugars,” as NYU nutrition professor Dr. Marion Nestle notes in What To Eat. She adds that “they are not about nutrition; they are about sales and profits, as made clear by Kraft’s nearly $26 million advertising expenditure on Lunchables in 2004–and the $500 million in revenues that it generated.”
[Read the rest of the story at: http://www.sustainabletable.org/2009/10/meatless-monday-pack-a-healthy-lunch.]
