Home for Dinner

5

Play with Your Food

The suggestion that you and your children play with food may seem a bit subversive, or just plain messy. I certainly grew up being told not to play with mine, especially when I built my peas into a pyramid or pushed around the gristly meat parts to disguise the fact that I wasn’t eating everything on my plate. Later, as a mother myself, I wasn’t amused when my son confessed that he had earned a weeklong detention for his role in a middle school cafeteria food fight. And I used to flee the kitchen when my husband commandeered our sons to help put away the groceries by “playing catch” with cans and bags hurled across the kitchen.

But maybe my husband was on to something. The kitchen is the heart of the home, the place where ...