By Our Fruits Our Children Shall Know Us

A slightly different version of this piece was published in the Globe and Mail a couple of years ago. I was reminded of it recently when I bit into a sour, over-sized strawberry.



One thing has always puzzled me about my kids: They prefer vegetables to fruit. They willingly chow down on green beans, broccoli, asparagus, peas and cauliflower, salads of all types, carrots and cucumbers. But they look askance at the apples, oranges, berries and melons that I doggedly place in front of them. "It doesn't taste good " is their constant refrain. To me it tastes ... acceptable.

Perhaps I do understand why my twin daughters don't like fruit: Most of it is tasteless. Vegetables may be tasteless too, but my children's expectations of them are lower and, like most parents, I dress veggies up with vinaigrettes or butter and salt to render them more palatable. But fruit is supposed to taste good as is. As an adult, I'm used to the fact that most of the time it does not. My children, who possess the enhanced taste buds of eight-year-olds, have not yet become accustomed to flavourless berries and melons.

I wonder, then, why did I love fruit so much as a child? My parents were particular about their produce. Every Saturday, they shopped at the local Dominion for basics, but made a separate trip to stand-alone markets to buy fruits and vegetables. Even as a young child, I had a sense of seasonality, passed on from my parents. There were berries in spring and summer, along with pert plums, succulent peaches, and sweet and sour cherries from Ontario. Summer fruit, my parents called these. In the fall, we had bushels of russet and Macintosh apples. In winter, there were navel oranges and tart-sweet, white grapefruit. These were imported, but their quality was second to none because they were in season in the sunny place where they were grown.

I also have fond memories of the gap year I spent in France. There, my palate first cottoned on to the reality that tomatoes are fruit. But it wasn't just tomatoes that blew me away. I remember biting into a plump russet apple, which the French called Reinette du Canada. I found the name amusing, doubly so when I realized that even these so-called Canadian apples tasted better in France. It was the eighties by this time, and I had noticed a decline in produce quality at home. Quite simply, everything tasted better in France. When I tell my husband this, he scoffs, as he does when I reminisce about the fruit I enjoyed as a child. "Pure nostalgia," he says.

In an attempt to prove him wrong, I surf the Internet where I find evidence of a steady decline in the nutrient content of vegetables and fruits. I discover, for instance, that an apple today contains 55% less iron and 41 % less vitamin A than an apple from fifty years ago (see here and here). I email a professor of food science at the University of Georgia, Robert Shewfelt, who confirms that nutrition and flavour are linked since, for the most part, "nutrition is optimal and flavour is optimal at the same time." So perhaps those bloated, mid-winter strawberries are as bad as they seem — nutritionally deficient and tasteless.

What, then, can a parent of fruit-averse children do? According to Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food, one of the most subversive things we can do today is to plant a garden. I've always admired my elderly Greek-Canadian neighbour, who plants and harvests an impressive array of produce on her small North Toronto lot, but who knew she was such a radical?

As spring arrived this year, I began to wonder if I too could become a radical. My husband was skeptical, since I've rarely put trowel to dirt in my life, but as the days grew longer and the planting season approached, I resolved to try. I purchased books with titles such as The Gardener's A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food and Fruits and Berries for the Home Garden. I took the plunge and planted strawberries, cucumbers, and tomatoes in pots; I dug up some sod and stuck two raspberry plants in the ground. I watered and waited. Summer arrived, along with unprecedented rain; I watered a little less and waited some more. I became disheartened when my raspberry plants inexplicably died.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the small prickly beginnings of cucumbers appeared. The twins found a lone red strawberry amidst an abundance of runners and greenery. They shared it and pronounced it sweet! But my elation was short-lived. The strawberries stopped bearing, and the tiny cucumbers grew strangely misshapen, almost gourd-like. By summer's end, only my tomato plants were bearing well, and even they looked bedraggled and sad.

Today, as I gaze upon what remains of my garden, and peer over at my neighbour's still-lush rows, I admit I'm tempted to throw in the trowel. But I suspect that next spring, hope will trump reality. I will begin my garden anew, spurred on by the thought that, even if it takes several seasons, even if I manage to produce a mere handful of red raspberries, I might just be able to bequeath to my children a memory of redolent, in-season fruit.

Ontario's School Food and Beverage Policy—Update

In a previous post, I took a look at the new School Food and Beverage Policy slated to take effect in Ontario schools in September 2011. Although I came to the conclusion that the policy is well-intended and a good first step in the process of improving the nutritional quality of school food, one particular aspect puzzled me: the new guidelines allow entrees (examples given are frozen pizza, sandwiches, hot dogs) with sodium levels of (up to) 960 mg to be counted among the healthier "sell most" category of foods, which must comprise 80% of foods sold in schools. I found it hard to believe that government dietitians would consider food with such a high level of sodium to be "healthy," given that the "tolerable upper intake level" or UL for sodium for children ranges from 1500 mg to 2300 mg. Confused—and suspicious that permissible sodium levels for "healthier" entrees might have something to do with schools' dubious practice of fundraising through "Pizza Lunches"—I decided to send an email to ministry officials asking for clarification. A few days ago, I received a response from a representative of the Healthy Schools and Student Well-Being Unit at the Ministry of Education. With respect to the issue of allowable sodium levels in "healthy" entrees, she wrote:

The sodium criteria in the standards are based on the allowable sodium content for Disease Risk Reduction Claims with respect to saturated and trans fats outlined in the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s Guide to Food Labelling and Advertising (2004). A Disease Risk Reduction Claims, one of the categories of health claims, is a statement that links the food or a part of a food to reducing the risk of developing a diet-related disease (e.g., cancer, hypertension) in the context of the total diet.

I responded to this (non-)explanation as follows:

This is a rather confusing answer to a straightforward question: should a child's entree containing 960 mg of sodium (per serving) be considered "healthy"? The new School Food and Beverage Policy says yes.

I'll let you know if and when I receive a reply to my second letter. I suspect, though, that the real explanation for the weak sodium standards is to be found in another part of the email I received from the ministry official. Describing the provenance of the new school food policy, the Healthy Schools representative wrote:

The School Food and Beverage Policy was developed by the Ministry of Education, in collaboration with the Ministries of Health Promotion and Sport, Children and Youth Services and Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and with the input from representatives of the education, health and the food industry sectors. [emphasis mine]

(See also, Ontario's new School Food and Beverage Policy.)

Ontario's new School Food and Beverage Policy

As I made clear in a previous post, I am no fan of the ubiquitous "Pizza Lunch" fundraiser in Ontario's public schools. My principal objection is that kids eat far too much commercial pizza as it is. When I was a kid, no one served pizza at birthday parties; many kids (me included) didn't even like it, mainly because industrial pizza, which is the kind served most often at schools and parties, is simply boring, blah food: salt dressed up in dough, stringy cheese substance and tomato sauce. Nowadays, kids' palates have been trained from a young age to like humdrum salty foods. (My children initially disliked pizza, but after the umpteenth birthday party, their palates succumbed to peer pressure, and now they like it.)

Given my feelings about Junk Lunch, as I dubbed it in my previous post, how could I not be pleased with the newly announced provincial School Food and Beverage Policy? This is how the policy works (from the ministry's press release):

The nutrition standards make it easy for schools to determine which foods they can and cannot sell. Candy, energy drinks and fried foods are among the items that will no longer be sold in schools. In addition, 80 per cent of the new school menu must include products with the highest levels of essential nutrients and lowest amounts of fat, sugar and sodium. This includes fresh fruit, vegetables and whole grain breads. As well, 20 per cent of the new menu may include products that have slightly higher amounts of fat, sugar, and sodium. These items include bagels and cheese.

So far so good. It's difficult to disagree with a policy whose goal is the improvement of the nutritional quality of food sold in schools. But will the new standards prove to be the death knell for the hated (by me) Pizza Lunch?

Probably not. For one thing, the policy allows for 10 "special event" days during which less healthy foods can be sold on school premises. I can't prove it, but I would bet that this exemption was granted in recognition of schools' deeply ingrained habit of fund raising via Pizza Lunches. My daughters' school, for instance, holds Pizza Lunches every other week which, given the school calendar and holiday schedule, amounts to around twenty Pizza Lunches per year. So, under the new rules, ten of these "special events" would be permitted. That would be ten too many in my view.

But the special events exemption is not the only aspect of the new policy that concerns me. When one looks closely at the actual standards being applied in the "healthier foods" (80%) category, it becomes clear that the bar for "healthy" has not been set particularly high. Consider the standard for sodium, for example. The new policy (as laid out in the ministry's "quick reference" guide) states that in order for "entrees" such as "frozen pizza, sandwiches, pasta or hot dogs" to qualify as part of the 80% category, they must contain less than or equal to 960 mg sodium per serving. That's a lot of sodium for a child's lunch entree (i.e., not including sides or beverage). After all, the total recommended sodium intake is 1,200 mg per day for children ages 4-8, and 1,500 mg for children 9 and up. (See here.)

Even more troubling is the fact that the new sodium limit is relatively easy for pizza lunch suppliers to comply with—or rather to claim that they are in compliance with. Pizza Pizza has already circulated press releases stating that their pizza complies with the new Ontario rules governing food sold in schools in terms of trans fat, sodium, protein content, etc. When it comes to sodium, however, this claim is misleading. According to the nutritional information on their website, a slice of Pizza Pizza plain cheese pizza contains 580-590 mg of sodium; thus, two slices contain 1160 mg sodium, an amount that clearly exceeds the new provincial standards. The question is, how many children who enroll in pizza lunch programs eat just one slice of pizza? Our school offers children (for different prices) a choice of one, two, or three slices of pizza. From what I gather, some of the youngest children—in Grades 1 or 2—opt for the one-slice option, but the vast majority of students participating in the program choose the two- or three-slice options. (And need I add that the "snack" offered with the pizza is a commercial cookie or chips, which piles on even more sodium?)

My point here is not really to quibble about how and why pizza—or the fundraisers that revolve around this particular junk food—does or does not fit into the new 80% (healthier) or 20% (less healthy) categories. There is a larger point to be made: instead of trying to tinker with existing practices to render them compliant with new (not very exacting) ministry standards, schools should consider using the opportunity of new standards to inaugurate completely different programs. Scrap the Pizza Lunch! End the questionable practice of partnering with fast food companies for fund raising. Instead of Pizza Lunches, why not hold Gourmet Lunches, in which schools expose children to healthy foods from a variety of cultures? The possibilities are endless, but they require that we—school boards, administrators, parents—kick the habit: that is, that we break, once and for all, our unhealthy addiction to fast, easy and cheap food for kids.