In the age of street food, where food is available 24 hours a day, we are no longer used to eat healthy. According to the latest report on catering of the Italian Federation of Public Establishments, 77% of us consume food outside the home, from breakfast to after dinner. Corollary: we have become a people of rude eaters. And this is because eating, net of tastes, traditions and family habits, remains an instinctive act: you’re hungry? You eat. Setting the good example at the table is contagious
We’re immersed in a sea of food, but it’s like we can’t swim in it. In the midst of so many stimuli we are no longer used to hearing the essential one: hunger. And you eat for a thousand other reasons.
So where to start to change and love us more?
Listening to hunger and bringing it back to a grid of times and places would already be a step forward. Then, we learn to encode the information, without suffering it: become familiar with the labels and read them.We try to orient ourselves on seasonality. Prefer whole meal food every day. Between opening an envelope of pre-cooked food and staying 2 hours in the kitchen for a savory cake, it is to use ready-made puff pastry and stuff it with pumpkin, leek zucchini and ricotta: even children would appreciate vegetables!
Reflecting on how eco-sustainable our diet is a way to self-educate: the Mediterranean diet reconciles wholesomeness and protection of the environment because you eat everything, especially cereals and vegetables, in appropriate quantities.
If you are parents even more it becomes important to set a good example at the table. A study published in the Appetite, a found that young people who cook with their parents eat much more vegetables and are enriched with positivity and self-esteem, proud to help the “great”.
To improve our awareness, I propose these 5 suggestions:
- Involve your children in the ritual of weekly spending, surely if they contribute to the choice of what they will eat they will accept the menu you offer most willingly.
- Get used to breakfast, thinking of it as a daily and never hasty pleasure. Try to prepare it according to lot of tastes, without forcing.
- Don’t lose sight of the concept of portions: in the face of excessive amounts of food, you are led to eat more than is really necessary.
- Consider the snack as an additional meal of the day and not as a time to grant rips to the rules.
- It is very important to make children understand where food comes from: for example, following the growth of a seed in a vase is more useful to convince them to appreciate vegetables than to punish them by taking off their mobile phones. Setting the good example at the table is contagious
Luisa Gragnoli
