Earlier this year I was invited to be the nutrition judge for a competition for our local restaurants. Our local paper (the Bay of Plenty Times) along with the National Heart Foundation challenged local restaurants to improve the menu choices available for our younger diners at restaurants.
 The growing trend is that we are choosing more frequently to dine away from home rather than eat at home. This is also true for people with young families.
If you are eating out with young children at a restaurant nine times out of ten you will be presented with a children’s menu to choose from. Unfortunately often these menus are high fat and tend to be centered on highly processed choices such as chicken nuggets, fish fingers, hot dogs and chips. There may be little or no vegetables offered as part of the meal. The drinks list will often be based around a soft drink selection – at best juice may be offered.
With our increasing trend of dining out it is easy for children to see the high fat choices like chicken nuggets or fish fingers as a normal and every day food, which they are not.
A number of local restaurants participated in the competition and they came up with some great new alternatives. The winning restaurant based his choices around the adult menu, but just put a more child friendly twist on the dishes. This emphasizes that really children do not need separate or different meals from adults – certainly at home most of us will not be bothered to cook two separate meals.
Shortly after this competition closed our family was lucky enough to be heading off overseas for six weeks. While we stayed with a number of friends and family during this time we also had to rely on eating out a lot. Even though we were on holiday and experiencing new countries and opportunities we still didn’t want to come home weighing a lot more than when we left, we also didn’t want our children to only have memories of lots of chips, soft drinks and food treats while we were away.
We certainly had to navigate the menu for our children and often we would only give them an option of one or two things. Often they would say they didn’t feel like the options we were offering them – but generally if we explained why we thought they might like it or why the other choices weren’t an option for them they would go along with that. Thankfully because they have been brought up to eat what is served we had very few ‘meal failures’ while we were traveling.
We also took the opportunity to visit some Indian and Thai restaurants while in the UK. This was initially greeted with great complaints because they didn’t know what the food was. Again once we had encouraged them to try it they decided they were hooked and really enjoyed both cuisines. This was despite the fact that we thought we had chosen a mild dish for them at the Indian restaurant, when in actual fact it was hotter than what we had chosen for ourselves.
So my take home message from this is – even though you may not have complete control over menu choices you can have some control over what you allow your kids to choose off the menus. Certainly you may decide that on some occasions it doesn’t matter what they choose, but sometimes you still will want healthier options to be the choice. If you encourage them to try new things and if you encourage a good variety at home you should be able to encourage the same habits when dining out.
