The topic of dessert--as a regular feature, or a once-a-week treat--has come up in conversation lately at our house. My husband and I are starting to talk about the kinds of eating habits we want to pass on to Bean, and in the process, we've got not choice but to examine our own.
I come from the 'everything in moderation' camp. My parents ate smallish, very reasonable portions. My mom always used fresh, local, organic food (even before it was popular) and baked her own bread. I grew up with flavors: cinnamon, turmeric, buckwheat, amaranth, jicama, boc choi, garlic, coriander, you name it. Sweets weren't prevalent in our house, and we almost never had candy, but low sugar desserts were a regular feature after dinner. My mom's apple crisp with whipped cream will always have a soft spot in my heart. As will the peaches she always canned herself each summer. But I grew up hating to cook, mostly because in my family that was what girls/women were expected to do (my father never prepared a meal for our family in my entire childhood.) And only recently have come around to the idea that cooking can be fun.
My husband on the other hand, came from a family of vivacious Italians who love to cook and love to eat. Overrating is an art form at their house. You get your money's worth at buffets. Snacking is a regular night time activity. Food is rich and decadent: fresh sausages with basil; fresh mozzarella; canolis; ricotta; Panchito. My husband is a dream in the kitchen. Give him any five ingredients and he can make a five-star meal.
We want to come to some sort of balance between us: sharing with Bean a vivacious enjoyment of food and food culture; while also modeling the healthful moderate eating habits that lead to lifelong health. And somewhere in the mix of all that is dessert. Our question is this: do you serve small portions of relatively healthy desserts daily (and by relatively healthy I mean ice cream as opposed to Twinkies) or do you ration out sweets more stringently? Does deprivation of sugary treats cause binging on them later on, when the child is old enough to make choices about his food? Or does providing regular sweets create a habit that later causes cravings for more?
What kind of eating habits do you want your children to have? How are you helping to shape these? And lastly what do you think about dessert?
1. My father always had a garden and very few things in our house came from a box. While I did the fast food thing in my teens, by my early 20s I rarely ever went to a drive-thru and was hitting the grocery stores for fresh produce and meats. I simply preferred eating the way I had been brought up to eat - it tasted better and I felt better.
My husband learned how to cook because both of his parents worked and one of his "chores" as he got older was to prepare dinner one night a week. Happily for me, he really enjoyed learning how to cook and we pretty much split cooking duty 50-50.
Our goal is to teach our boys to enjoy food because it is an amazing part of life, but we definitely fall into the moderation camp. I don't think any particular foods should be off limits, but we will be teaching them to eat reasonable portions at a reasonable pace (no wolfing things down!).
Regarding dessert, we had dessert almost every night. Now that I look back, I am amused because dessert was usually something like baked pears with a little cinnamon and butter, strawberries with fresh cream, and so on... little did I realize that my big treat at the end of a meal was just as healthy as the meal itself!
Posted at 1:09PM on Oct 6th 2007 by CLM