Thursday, December 11, 2008

Food Police - Not Me

My previous post on Yoni may have given the impression that I'm the food police. Far from it. I flipped pancakes in the shape of the letter P when my son David was in kindergarten. He and his cohort of little buddies had no interest whatsoever in learning how to read. They looked like they were created to work on the docks or more probably to haul a moose out of the bush. When I asked what they liked about school, snack was #1 followed closely by recess or perhaps the other way around. What they really liked was wrestling to see who was the strongest. The one thing you could count on was no matter how much you fed them, they'd always be hungry. It took a whole community to keep their little bellies full. Their kindergarten teacher taught everything with food. It was the only thing that worked and even that didn't create any miracles. I just figured God made food in a multitude of colours for kids like them. Today is orange day so we'll wear orange clothes and eat orange food and play with orange toys and paint orange pictures and carve a pumpkin and if you don't know orange by the end of the day, we give up - knowing orange is probably highly over-rated anyway.
My point was that children come in different shapes but their little hearts are pretty similar. Nobody really knows why kids are getting heavier. My son and his friends were all muscle - strong like little bears. It had nothing to do with virtue or self-discipline or anyone monitoring calories or setting activity quotas. Don't look at the kids - look at what's changed in their environment.

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