The Great Hiding Vegetables Debate

Last year saw the launch of two cookbooks, Deceptively Delicious and The Sneaky Chef on how to hide vegetables in your kids food. These books started a heated debate with health experts and the ‘mums’ world on the value of hiding vegetables in encouraging your kids to eat their greens.

Getting kids to eat their vegetables can be frustrating, difficult and testing on families and the success of these two books and the ensuring debate highlights this.

Hiding vegetables is not new, it is something mums have been doing for generations and is a great way to help your non-veggie lover start eating vegetables provided there are other strategies used in conjunction with this.

Each Yuck to Yum recipe includes a section on how to hide vegetables as part of an overall strategy to help you combat the dinner battle and vegetable struggle.

Yum to Yum recipes and blog show you other strategies to use;

Incorporating characteristics in meals that make food fun to eat for kids, ie finger foods, dipping and scooping
Making dinner visually appealing as kids eat with their eyes
Making dinner sound fun as kids also eat with their ears
Listing task kids can help to make dinner
Playing games to encourage healthy eating as kids love playing
Suggesting books to read to your kids with themes about healthy eating and picky eaters
Suggesting ways to make unfamiliar food familiar
Ways of introducing vegetables

If all these strategies are used together and not in isolation it will help to promote healthy eating in your family.

There is so much to say on the issue I have decided break the debate into parts and post each part separately;