With summer now on its way business in our pizza shop is on the up again. More families and visitors are heading to the Mount at the weekends. This is great for us and signals more good times ahead but with the increase in people comes the endless round of the same questions I get asked every year...'do you sell phone cards?'....'what time do the buses run to town?'...'do you do fish and chips?'....'are you from Ireland?' and my favourite 'what food do you do for children?'
I answer these questions pleasantly and to the best of my knowledge but the last one never fails to amuse me.
In our shop we have a wide range of pizzas, paninis, toasted sandwiches and burgers. We don't do anything fried and we use fresh ingredients for all the recipes. I make the pizza dough from scratch and make the burgers with fresh mince from the local butchers shop.
When a family of say 2 adults and 3 children come in to order dinner, Mum and Dad usually select a pizza each or a hot meat roll, the oldest child will maybe have a pizza, the middle one a burger but when it comes to the youngest out pops the question 'what do you have for kids?'
'Well, what does she like?' I say
'Oh, the usual things that kids like' comes the reply.
'What about a toasted sandwich or a small Hawaiian pizza'
'Hmm...do you do hot chips?'
'No'
'Wedges?'
'No'
'Chicken nuggets?'
'No'
And so it goes on. Now the point is this - why do children have to have a different menu to everyone else? Why do adults happily choose fresh baked pizza for themselves then want their children to eat frozen reconstituted chicken mush deep fried in breadcrumbs full of fat and sugar?
I know that chips and chicken nuggets and other such things may seem like an easy option to the parents of a fussy child but if they are not conditioned to having different food to adults then they would expect just to have the same food and be willing to try more. There is no reason why children should eat 'kids food' its just the TV advertisers telling us thats what they want.
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3 comments:
I completely agree with you on this. If anything we should be feeding kids a wider arrangement of food than even adults are getting, and healthy too. Kids so young are at the critical point of development and need the most amount of minerals and nutrients. Not only get them in the routine of eating healthy as they progress into adulthood, but also get them interested in the abundance of food out there and help develop tastes for things other than processed crap, candy and deep fried anything.
I absolutely hate the fact there is never a kids menu other than nuggets, and chips, fish, and chips, buger, and chips, chips and more chips!! I always get Bethany something 'decent' than the fried crap. Good on you for making everything fresh, you need to speak to more of these 'restaurants' in Welly!!
I hate horrible kid's menus too. It's usually deep-fried junk food, full of salt. Luckily, our kids love pizza (particularly if they've helped make it!) They will often ask for something off the entree or main menu or just share some of ours. They've become more adventurous since we arrived in New Zealand, so that's great.
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