How to Get Your Kids to Eat 10 Veggies a Day
If you’ve ever seen a professional presentation of a Vitamix (a bulky blender with a tractor motor inside), you may have been dazzled by the ease of whipping up a smoothie and delighted by its flavor. This machine can pulverize an entire apple into sweet goop in mere seconds. With very little effort you can toss an apple into the blender, add a carrot, some spinach and ice, then flip the power switch. In less than 30 seconds you’ll have a tasty drink. Cleanup is easy too—it takes less than a minute.
I hadn't heard of this machine until years ago a friend of mine was singing its praises at a cocktail party. The very next morning at brunch, I retold the story to my in-laws. Then I was truly shocked when my mother-in-law said she had a Vitamix and hadn’t put it to use. Would I like it? I couldn’t have asked for a better coincidence.
Over the years, we have used the machine so often that by now we have consumed many rooms full of veggies. I know for a sad fact that the only reason we have achieved this is because we drank the vegetables. I, in particular, am no veggie fan. Except for the amazing potato. I’ll never turn down a plate of hash browns or a pile of mashed potatoes. And I know my way around the potato chip aisle like a pro. So while I have read loads of research on different nutrients and how they aid our bodies in myriad ways, my default is letting the scissors do a lot of my cooking.
What really keeps me committed to gulping veggies is that I have felt the difference in my body, most notably in my hands. I am a massage therapist and, on top of that, I love to garden and write. Each of these endeavors needs strength and finesse from my hands. When I drink the “lawn mower mulch,” as my husband and I have come to call our smoothies, my hands feel flexible and strong. When I don't drink my vegetables, I notice my fingers feel tight, and there’s a slight ache in my knuckles if I make a fist.
We didn't arrive at this veggie depot with our children in one day. It’s been an evolution of their taste buds over the last couple of years. We started their smoothies with very mild tasting vegetables mixed with a higher amount of fruit. Now we put in everything but the kitchen sink! We still add at least one kind of fruit to sweeten the mix, but we don’t take the time to follow recipes.
This great odyssey all began when my younger daughter had just turned 5. One evening we had a veggie showdown. I put three pieces of spinach on her plate and refused to give her anything else until those three miniscule leaves were eaten. She cried, I talked loudly and that went on while the spinach wilted on her plate. Finally, in her way of negotiating through our “meetings,” she said, “Just mix it up and I’ll drink it.” Hmmmm, I reasoned, someday she likely will eat a spinach leaf. But for now, to help her little developing body—built somewhat too much on chicken nuggets and mac and cheese—I am going to let her drink spinach. So that’s how we started.
At first, our girls drank smoothies every now and then. Within a matter of months, we progressed to always setting a small cup of smoothie in the middle of their plates before they could reach for anything else on the table. And now, for more than a year, they have drunk a good 10 ounces or more daily.
Over the years, too, we have streamlined the process for ourselves. We dump in all the veggies and fruit and now add flax, chia, cinnamon and turmeric. In under a minute, the powerful motor can blend an enormous amount of roughage. Then we pour the smoothies out into mason jars. We top the jars with the plastic lids we bought after the tin ones rusted from our improper (lazy) dishwasher route of cleaning them. We then put the jars in the fridge and take the 30 seconds to set them on the kids’ plates at dinnertime.
The result? MY KIDS EAT VEGGIES! They eat spinach, kale, romaine, arugula, various other greens from my garden, tomatoes, edamame, eggplant, mushrooms, zucchini, celery, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, squash, sweet potatoes, parsley, ginger, with spoonfuls of flax and chia and dashes of turmeric and cinnamon. Here’s the walloping corker: They eat this every day and they don’t complain! The amazing latest development in our journey is that our younger daughter has been known to drink two smoothies a day, of her own volition. This is the daughter who refused to eat three spinach leaves in the beginning of this journey.
We have not let perfect be the enemy of good. Our diet and smoothie system is in no way perfect. But I'm grateful for every bit of good in our children's developing bodies. I'm super delighted their brains are no longer shaped exactly like a chicken nugget. Now I'm pretty sure their brains also have healthy grooves and ridges along them like newly planted rows in a garden.