Jeremiah and I are now officially hooked on Jamie Oliver's "Food Revolution," and although we love cooking shows ("Iron Chef" and "Top Chef" have been staples in our viewing pantry for years), there's something very different about this show. So much so that we even have our five-year-old daughter watching episodes with us, with interest, on Hulu. (More on that in a minute.) If you haven't heard of Jamie Oliver yet, he's a celebrity chef from England who worked to get the junk food out of British school lunches. Last year he came to America (specifically, to the "most unhealthy city" in America) to try to change how children eat and how their schools and families feed them.

A few things stood out to me in the first few episodes. In one of the more shocking scenes, Oliver held up a variety of vegetables and not one first-grader at the school he had been allowed to make some changes at could name a single vegetable. I'm not talking about showing first graders sea beans or sunchokes, but tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, and cauliflower. (They also were unaware that French fries are made from potatoes.) It was pretty eye-opening when Chef Oliver literally compiled (prepared and piled up on the table) a week's worth of the food that one family ate in a week of their regular diet. Beyond the obviousness of this being a nasty pile of junk food, the entire pile was brown in color - there wasn't a red or a purple or a green thing to be seen. He did the same trick at the school to show parents what the kids there ate in a week, and again, it was brown, brown, brown.

In our household we don't put a lot of weight to the food pyramid; instead we try to have a balanced and colorful diet. We also try to buy in season as much as we can, so that means that we don't always get red in the winter (for instance) but over the course of the year, we try to hit all the colors of the rainbow as often as we can.

After Jeremiah and I had watched it, I thought it about some of the questions it raised for days. Would Z be able to name the vegetables? (None of us really like cauliflower so she probably wouldn't know that...) What would the primary color of our weekly food intake look like if we piled it all on our table? (I can't afford to waste that much food but maybe we can experiment in a different way.) What are we doing to our children to raise them without knowing how to use a knife and a fork? (In England, Oliver said, teachers help the kids in the lunchroom learn how to use utensils - an idea that felt radical and obvious at the same time at a school that had as policy preferred food that required a spoon or better yet, no utensils at all.) What does this say for etiquette in our country? Or for the types of food we choose to eat?

Later that weekend, I took Z to a garden shop to buy some seeds for our garden, and we looked at all the different kinds of seeds and young plants - melons, tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, peas, lettuce - and picked some out. (Last summer, Z stood at the tomato plants and picked the cherry tomatoes off the plant - more of them ended up in her belly than in our basket!) As we looked at the seeds, I talked to Z about the show and later, we decided to let her watch it. She was surprised at the brownness of the food, at the lack of knives and forks (and children's inability to use them) in the lunchroom - she has been proudly learning to use a "sharp knife" to help us cook - and at the inability of the other children to identify vegetables.

We think exposing her to this kind of information is important to her knowledge about food and health. If we shield her from the side effects of our junk and fast food country then what happens when she goes to college and doesn't have that information? Will she fall into the eating habits of her peers? Or even earlier than that - what happens when she is pressured or ostrasized by her peers for drinking green smoothies or preferring water to soda or for her love of sushi or fruit or oatmeal?

Little by little, if we can teach her to value her food - to value the resources that nurtured the plant while it grew and the people who grew it, to recognize the difference between an in-season, ripe tomato and the tasteless blob of red that poses as a tomato in the December grocery aisle, to treasure the health of her body and to nurture it by making healthy, colorful food choices - then maybe she will grow up outside of this brown, fast food America. Maybe she - and others like her - will be able to change the system, support the farmers and the earth and live and grow in health. And maybe she will teach me to instinctively reach for an orange when I need a snack or to satisfy my crunching need with carrots or dried cherry tomatoes instead of chips and salsa, and I'll be healthier too.

Jeremiah and I both highly recommend the show, and showing it to kids, too. There is a lot to it, even more than just info on healthier eating - watching the ways Oliver goes about doing community organizing as a chef, the way he tackles the project from various angles at once, and the way he personalizes the issues involved are all fascinating and inspiring.



Since then, we've planted about twenty tomato plants (mostly cherry tomatoes), a dozen pepper plants, and lettuce and spinach, plus peas, beans, melons, squash, and a few things I'm probably forgetting. Come on, color!

For further info on the state of school lunches (and to learn about other people who have been tirelessly working on changing the system for years) see the links below:

• Jamie's Food Revolution: Sign his petition!


• Let's Move


• Fed Up With School Lunch


• Chef Ann Cooper: The Renegade Lunch Lady


• The Edible Schoolyard


• School Lunch: Subtract the Additives

You can watch episodes online for yourself here. Bon appetit!

The official timeline for my Unlimited Sweets Experiment has come to an end. But the drawer has not been closed - I decided to keep the experiment and drawer open indefinitely! My husband and I both think the experiment was mostly a success. And my hypothesis - If I give my two-year-old unlimited access to sweets, she will be less interested in them - was confirmed. But please read my observations below to determine if you think it was a success, and please share your feedback with me!

We established our home's unlimited sweets drawer about one month ago, filling an accessible drawer with jelly beans, chocolate peanut butter maltballs, generic M&Ms, plain chocolate chips, lollipops and gum drops and letting our toddler daughter Jo have unlimited access to it throughout the day, and even at mealtimes, on the suspicion that she might end up integrating sweets into her life better when they were unrestricted. I let the experiment run a bit longer than initially anticipated, mostly because I wanted to confirm that my observations were accurate. A full month allowed me to do that.

How our daughter responded to limitless sweets

Here are our observations of this experiment, with a few tips to follow.

The novelty of the drawer wore off very quickly. I wrote about week one progress in detail here. During this first week, she frequented the drawer several times per day and especially during mealtimes. But during weeks two through four, things really slowed down. On several occasions, she has forgotten about the drawer for several days. And when Jo does remember, she grabs a couple chocolate chips and walks away for the day.

Our daughter is asking for real food more often. This might be a product of her language development and memory, but she has regularly been asking for soup, fish sticks, grilled cheese, peanut butter and crackers, etc. Prior to the experiment, she had only really been asking for snacks, sweets or drinks.

She has continued to devour the vegetables in the garden. Maybe the way vegetable gardens may improve your child’s diet is a topic for another day, but Jo couldn't get enough raw dill, basil, broccoli and peas from our garden, although she knew chocolate was easily accessible. If we served the same vegetables inside the house, she treated these green foods with the same strong appetite.

Her milk and water consumption stayed the same. I was concerned about her overall calcium intake as we started this experiment, but her milk consumption was steady.

Since she could have sweets at any time, she often added them to her dinner plate, but ate both sweets and dinner food. She would nibble on a cookie, then nibble on black beans and back to the cookies. She consistently follows this pattern. I am hopeful that she is beginning to appreciate the different flavors of a wide variety of foods!

We have one last observation to share, too.

Halfway through the experiment, my husband and I realized that we were less interested in the peanut butter maltballs. In the past, these tasty treats have been a serious indulgence for us (or more accurately, overindulgence for us). Prior to the experiment, neither one of us seemed to have self-control with it. However, we stocked Jo's drawer with it every day for almost five weeks. She cares less about the maltballs now. And so do we!

For all of these reasons, we're sticking with an unlimited sweets drawer.

Five tips for trying unlimited sweets at home

If you decide to duplicate this experiment in your own home, I wanted to offer a few general tips:

1. Continue to have ongoing discussions regarding the importance of nutrition, eating in moderation, physical activity, and the role of vitamins in our bodies. If you don't, start.


2. Be a good role model. This is by far, the BEST thing you can do for your kids when it comes to nutrition and exercise. Children imitate our actions on a daily basis, and eating and activity levels are no different. If you can set a healthy example for your kids, they will follow in your footsteps. They will value the importance of eating right and exercise for a lifetime.


3. Brush teeth, often. Dentists say the gummy foods are most likely to cause cavities, so if you include jelly beans or gummy bears in your drawer, stock up on toothpaste!


4. Make up your mind ahead of time about bedtime and the drawer. If you are not going to allow sweets around to bedtime, create a good reason (i.e. sugar leads to cavities, candy keeps you up, etc.). But be prepared. We call Jo the master distractor at bedtime - she thinks of every reason to stay awake past bedtime, so we had to officially close the drawer at 7 p.m.


5. Consider a vitamin. We really like Nordic Naturals Gummies, but choose any children's multivitamin. The vitamin serves as a safety net if your child eats poorly on some days, and it will give you peace of mind.

My daughter is only two and a half years old, so it would be near impossible for me to predict the outcome of a similar experiment for a five-year-old, eight-year-old, eleven-year-old, or even an adult. But I do believe the concept is the same: People generally want what they can't have. And kids are no different!

So what do you think? Was my experiment a success in your eyes? Anyone out there ready to try it at home? If so, tell us your children's ages - and make sure to report back on your results!

When I was growing up, a garden was plants - and almost entirely food at that, other than the border of marigolds that were supposed to keep the rabbits out and the weeds we grudgingly picked. I've been watching my own daughters interact with our gardens this summer and have been amazed at their independent curiosity and creativity. In the process I've learned, right along with them, that a garden is much, much more than plants.

Our garden is a sanctuary. Birds visit our pond for refreshment during hot summer days. Butterflies visit our flowers to fulfill their biological destiny of spreading pollen. Bugs, slugs and worms work their own magic, whether it be good or evil. While my daughters love watching the plants - picking the flowers and food - they have spent countless hours scavenging for other life forms.

They look under rocks to find beetles and slugs.


They gleefully hold their prized (temporary) prisoners (in this case, slugs - one of which fell off my daughter’s hand and almost down the front of my shirt. Boy, did they get a laugh out of my shriek of fear.)



They’ve also taken a "dead zone” of our beds and turned it into a fairy village. I came up with the idea, but they've taken it far beyond what I imagined. It's been a space hidden in shade behind their play house, in poor soil that simply nothing wants to live in - no matter how hard we try. This year I threw up my hands and decided to incorporate natural material we’d gathered from hiking to create an inviting space for fairies. Even if the fairies don't show up, they've drawn faces on rocks to populate the village with little stone citizens.


It has become a very natural (and more imaginative) version of Legos. And, we keep adding to it with new twigs and bark and rocks and such that we find on our very regular nature hikes.


This new perspective of gardening beyond plants has been extraordinary - one of many moments in my children's lives that they have been my teachers. I feel like as we age we get these very clear, focused lenses on life, like looking through a microscope or binoculars. We get so used to seeing life in this way, we forget the grand landscape that exists outside our restricted view. But, life is diversity and every single moment and molecule is tied to so many others. We miss everything by focusing on a simple something.

I don't see our garden as simply plants anymore. Now, I see everything - the food, the flowers, the bugs, the slugs, the ant colonies, the dirt, the rocks, the intentional architecture, the natural chaos - an entire planetary microcosm.

You can read more from Janelle at Healthy Child Healthy World, follow her on Twitter at @greenandhealthy, and find her on Facebook.