“The kitchen is the best room in the house for teaching green values.”
-- Laurie David
Last night I attended an enjoyable talk by Laurie David -- best known as the producer of An Inconvenient Truth -- whose new book The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect with Your Kids, One Meal at a Time shares many of the same values that we hold here at 20,000 Meals. Ms. David, a warm and engaging speaker, is on a mission to restore the family dinner to its rightful place at the center of family life.
The evidence is certainly on her side: Study after study has confirmed that if you want healthy, well-adjusted kids who do well in school and stay out of trouble, the single most important thing you can do is make sure that your family sits down to a meal together on most days. Ms. David sees the preparation and sharing of meals as an irreplaceable vehicle for creating a sense of family history and connection, and instilling shared values.
One of the values she is passionate about is the importance of caring for the planet, and the book includes a chapter on bringing “green” values to the kitchen. She believes that they “should permeate everything we do in the kitchen -- shopping, cooking, eating, cleaning -- without paralyzing us in the process. Being green is not about perfection...it is about connecting the dots so we understand where things come from and what impacts result from our use of them.”
The Family Dinner includes tips for cooking with kids, ideas for enticing people to the table, and lots of games and conversation starters to make them want to stay there. It also offers dozens of family-friendly recipes and meal ideas, many but by no means all of them vegetarian (Ms. David identifies herself as a “meat reducer,” and reminds us to eat less meat and spend the saved money on “better” -- i.e. greener -- meat.) Although some of the recipes are more or less standard, the book includes a number of ideas that sound like great new additions to the family dinner repertoire.I haven’t had a chance to try any yet, but I intend to spend the next couple of weeks cooking my way through them. I just can’t decide whether to start with Oven Grains, Greens and Cheese, Please or Apple Cider Chicken with Caramelized Apples and Onions.
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