How to get kids to eat healthy

As a child I was never fond of broccoli. Now I know why. It was the quality of the broccoli. Yesterday I was in a organic garden with a man who uses worm extract spray on his vegetables and has the complete organic loop in his garden. In other words he has fresh water, well composted fresh soil with worm castings and only fertilizes with worm oil. He picked off a head of broccoli and told me to eat it.

My childhood taste buds were screaming "NO", but I trusted him. The taste was amazing. It was actually sweet. He tossed a piece to his dog and the dog ate it ravenously. The over grown, nutrient poor vegetables that taste like cardboard from our grocery store are a big part of the failure to help us eat healthy food.

I challenge you to find a organic gardener who practices this technique and compare the food. If your child started its taste bud memories with that kind of flavor they will gladly eat healthy.

Now that was an easy thing for me to challenge but you and I know this kind of grower is rare. So this brings us back to the truth that we are going to have to make that effort to grow our own food if we are going to take real steps to healthy food.

I have to say, do not trust the word organic. I go to lots of organic food retailers and never have I had food that tasted the way that broccoli did. The problem is they are not nourishing the soil with fresh worm composting, feeding the soil with the minor elements that are so needed in our diets. They simply are using a compost with high nitrogen to produce a fast plant and not using chemicals. That is all it takes to be called organic but it does not give us food with all the nutrition our bodies hunger for.

When I stop at a organic retailer I ask how they prepare their soil, where their water comes from, do they let the land rest or do cover crops. If they can't give you this information than that should be a warning. If they are not into putting nutrition into the soil, then this is not what you are looking for. The final and best test is taste. Good nutrition taste good, if it doesn't have much taste then it is lacking these elements.