Exploits of a Vegan Wannabe

I am so happy to introduce Joey Lee from Meatless Mondays.  She is joining us to share The Kids Cook Monday, an initiative by The Monday Campaigns to empower children to make healthy food choices. By including children in the preparation of healthy meals it encourages them to be invested in the meals they enjoy,  inspiring them to nourish their bodies with healthy foods.

Introducing… The Kids Cook Monday!

By Joey Lee

Over the last 30 years, there has been a dramatic shift not only in what we eat, but how we eat. The ritual of family dinner has become all but extinct. More and more kids come home to an empty house after school and rely mostly on processed snack foods and microwavables to sustain themselves until their parents arrive home, often with a takeout box or fast food fare. Studies show that children who engage in regular family dinners eat more nutritious diets, get better grades in school and develop better communication skills, so how can the modern family break this cycle and bring back family dinner?

The Kids Cook Monday is a new initiative that gives families an effective, weekly way to keep up family dinners. When Monday is family dinner night, the meal becomes a fun event, ensuring that parents and kids spend quality time together every week, all year round.

You can use the beginning of the school week as an opportunity to continue teaching your kids even after they come home from school. As your little chefs squeeze oranges, tell them how vitamin C strengthens their immune systems to fight off colds or how the potatoes they’re mashing first grew underground.

Columbia’s Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse found that family dinners also help foster important life lessons. Kids who ate regularly with their families were more likely to come to their parents with a problem and less likely to try drugs and alcohol. Parents can use Kids Cook Monday night to check in with their kids about the weekend that’s passed and discuss plans for the coming week.

Parents can explore cooking with kids even if they’re novice cooks themselves! The Kids Cook Monday recipes come with age group suggestions as well as “parent”, “kid’ and “together” cooking tasks. Use The Kids Cook Monday toolkit(pdf) to get your family started. You can also share The Kids Cook Monday movement in whatever way works for you: post family dinner stories to your blog every week, hold family dinner recipe contests on your website or start a cooking co-op in your community.

By sustaining the tradition of family dinners, we are sustaining our health and our relationships with each other. Food activist and author Michael Pollan writes “Shared meals are about much more than fueling bodies; they are uniquely human institutions where our species developed language and this thing we call culture.” Make cooking and eating together your first priority on the first evening of each week. Keep our culture, and our children, alive and well.

Thank you Joey for inspiring the next generation to enjoy meatless meals and veggie cooking. Playing and learning and changing the world one meal at a time takes lots of energy from plantastic foods.

Please contnue to post your comments here and on Facebook for your chances to win an Exploits Birthday present. Click here for full contest info. Today I received confirmation of two Meatless Mondays mugs coming our way for a winning reader. Cant wait to see them.

Have a delicious day.

Tags: compassionate eating, dairy free, going veg, Meatless Mondays, plant based diet, The Kids Cook Monday, The Monday Campaigns, trying vegan, trying vegetarian, vegan challenge, vegan experience, vegan wannabe, vegetarian transition