Whenever my children bring their friends home, I go out of my way to make sure that they are fed well and that they are comfortable. Like my own mother taught me, I offer guests clean towels and good food, and I try to make sure that they feel at home.

Most of the time, but not always, my daughters get similar treatment when they visit their friends’ homes. Those few times they haven’t, they’ve come home a mess.

The other day, my 13-year-old returned from an overnight at her friend’s house complaining  that she hadn’t eaten for an entire day and had a headache. Of  course you have a headache, I admonished her. You can’t go a day without eating and not feel weak.

But I know my child, yet I also have a high regard for this particular friend’s parent. So, either my baby girl didn’t like the  food she was offered (which is entirely possible) or her friend – and not the parent – was in charge of  eating that night and took the easy way out. It was probably the latter, I suspected, and inquired further into her story. What did they have for dinner? I quizzed her. “TV dinners,” she whined, her  face  twisted in extreme dislike.

There in was the problem. It wasn’t that the parent hadn’t provided dinner but that my child has never eaten a TV dinner in her life! And she is loathe to trying anything new. Thank GOD, because I don’t want her eating TV dinners anyway. Ever! But I certainly don’t want her to starve when she’s away from home, so we both agreed that perhaps we should limit her overnights.

I realize that all of us are very busy these days. Working parents get home from the office bone-tired. Who has the energy to cook every night? It’s a whole lot easier to have a freezer full of microwave dinners, so at least when we’re tired, the kids are fed. Right? Wrong ! If we train our children to take the easy way out with  food, they’ll develop poor eating habits that can later hurt them. They need to understand that food is meant to fuel us and not just fill up our bellies. 

Fast food just doesn’t do the trick and children must be taught the importance of healthy food and its direct connection to their performance when they are young so they won’t ever crave pure junk. This rush job on eating that society has adopted is detrimental to our health and contributes to poor performance in both schools and the work force. But no matter how convenient fast food is for us, it really doesn’t nourish our families well.

Healthy cooking doesn’t always have to take a lot of time. It’s actually quite  simple (even for folks who aren’t kitchen-savvy) to whip up a delicious meal relatively fast. Considering that most us spend more than 8  times more energy working for someone else than we need to prepare healthy meals, we can afford to find 15 minutes in a day to make a nourishing dinner. And we can teach our teenagers to do the same so that when we have to work late, they can still eat well. Even with no cooking at all, it’s far healthier for children to graze on fruit, nuts and whole-grained cereal in a pinch than it is to make their meal a  frozen dinner. Who could resist this beautiful basket of fruit photographed by Will Croft?

That in mind, I will celebrate my 54^th birthday on June 16 by completing my self-published first book called “Feeding Our Families Well, 12  Steps to Better Health.” In it are lots of tips and recipes for feeding families healthy and convenient foods without chemicals or fat. As a mother of five, I’ve spent the past three decades teaching my children how to be healthy. From the time they were infants, I’ve taught them a healthy philosophy about eating that they are now beginning to pass down to their own children. And I feel very blessed to see the fruits of my food labors come to fruition.  Stay tuned……

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