Archives for May 2011

When it comes to food and drink, chances are there are certain brands you keep on coming back to. But why? In Secrets of the Superbrands tonight at 9pm on BBC Three, I try and work out just how the biggest food brands in the world have managed to hook so many of us on their wares.

I find out how Coca-Cola (or a Coca-Cola owned drink) has become the number one soft drinks brand everywhere in the world, except Scotland (where Irn Bru reigns); how Heinz manage to sell 1.5 million tins of beans a day in the UK; how Starbucks can charge £3 for a cup of coffee and why Red Bull has invented its own sport.

Of course, I always thought that the brands I chose were the ones I felt tasted the best. However, human behaviourist Peter Hughes told me that what we think about brands can be so powerful it can actually affect our taste buds. So if we believe a certain brand tastes better, it can actually start to taste better.

I found that hard to swallow. So my team and I set up an experiment on the streets of Kingston-upon-Thames. We put Heinz beans into two flasks, one bearing a Heinz label, the other a supermarket own brand. And even though the beans inside were identical, only one person thought they tasted the same. Everyone else was convinced they tasted different. No wonder Heinz sells 10 times more beans in the UK than anyone else.

Of course some branded foods have such a distinctive taste you could pick them out blindfolded. And that’s part of their appeal: people seek out McDonald’s because they know exactly what they’re going to get. But I got a shock when we filmed at a McDonald’s in India, a country where the majority of people hold the cow sacred; meaning for most beef is definitely off the menu. Instead of a Big Mac, they have the Chicken Maharaja-Mac, plus the McAloo Tikki and the Paneer Salsa Wrap - dishes that reinterpret local specialties with an international twist. And how do these exotic offerings taste? Er…well, just like a McDonald’s.

That‘s because McDonald’s and many other brands have a signature taste, which helps differentiate them from rivals and allows them to maintain consistency across thousands of restaurants in different countries. And it means they can offer foods tailored to local tastes, while maintaining their brand signature. Flavourist Stephen Hart of International Flavours and Fragrances told me how his company could develop taste signatures which actually reflect the ‘personality’ of a brand.

But do we really think of food brands as having personalities? Well thanks to Professor Gemma Calvert of Neurosense and an MRI scanner, I was able to find out. When we showed our volunteer images of his friends and family, there was activity in the reward network of his brain, the region associated with positive mood. The pictures were making him feel good. No surprise there. But when we showed him products from the big food brands he liked, his brain reacted in a very similar way, right down to the area we use to recognise faces. This result backed up Neurosense’s own research: it seems that we perceive the biggest and most popular food brands we buy in the same positive and friendly way as our nearest and dearest.

If people feel that strongly about your brand, you’re well on the way to becoming a superbrand, and if the food you’re selling doesn’t actually taste the best, don’t worry, because it seems your customers will soon believe it does.

Are there particular brands of foods that you just can’t live without? But do you reckon you could pick them out in a blind taste test? Let me know what you think.

Alex Riley is presenter of BBC Three’s Secrets of the Superbrands.

This week The Food Programme investigates whether the UK’s good food bubble has burst. On paper it doesn’t look good: sales of organic food in supermarkets down by almost 6% in 2010, the average cost of a trolley of food up 4.7 per cent from March to April and a £780 drop in disposable incomes this year and next, and so it goes on… Evidence that recent positive changes to our food habits are being reversed. So will quality food shrink to become just another little luxury for that top 1% of the population who are thriving in these tough times?

The recent fourth Real Food Festival in London’s Olympia seemed like a good place to find out - 300 stallholders selling what the organisers called ‘real food’, from all over the country. Would it be a requiem or something a bit cheerier? One of the first people I talked to was Jonathan Burrough from Peradon Farm in Devon. He and his wife sell organic meat direct. They set up in January 2009 and have built up from a turnover of £400 a month to £10,000. He says, “People tell us, ‘it’s not like it was’, but we don’t know how it was - we’ve just managed to grow and grow and grow. The disposable pound isn’t what it was, but people like quality. ”

Geoff Sayer of the Well Hung Meat Company, also in Devon, but longer established, had a similar story of steady growth based on that taste for quality - something, he said, his customers are willing to make a priority – rather than, say cars or holidays.

The School of Artisan Food in Nottinghamshire, which had a big stall at the festival, was set up in the immediate wake of the recession to be a training ground for the quality food movement. Like Peradon Farm, they’re thriving. Riverford Farm, the big beast in the veg box business, has seen its sales rise 5% this year after two years of decline. Founder Guy Watson says the recession has cleared out the weak players: “the ones who are doing well are those with good products, not trendy foods… Organic isn’t enough, it has to taste good and be well priced.”

There were very few tales of woe. So what does it all mean? At the festival I chaired a debate on the state of the British good food industry with a mixed audience of public and stallholders. The panel was made up of market researcher Giles Quick who’s been following retail food sales for 25 years, businessman and organic farmer William Kendall, supermarket adviser and fruit farmer Teresa Wickham and Andrew Opie of the supermarket-funded British Retail Consortium. Listen to the show to hear what they said, and tell us what you think: are we moving back to the dark ages of cheap food at any price? Or are changes in our buying, cooking and eating habits more deep-set than that? How have your food buying habits changed in the past few years?

Shelia Dillon is the presenter of Radio 4’s The Food Programme.

Recently, as part of BBC Asian Network’s ‘Get Healthy Month’, I made samosas for the Breakfast Show. “What? Samosas and healthy?” I hear you cry. That just doesn’t seem right. But, these were no ordinary samosas; they were the light variety, baked in an oven instead of deep-fried. More often than not, this is a recipe that I get requests for. The challenge was to come up with a snack which is healthy without compromising on taste and I hope I’ve succeeded.

I’ve always felt that Indian cuisine can be one of the healthiest cuisines around and there have been some misconceptions about Indian recipes. Traditionally South Asian diets consist of vegetables, wholemeal breads, rice and lentils, but if you have a lot of fat and too much salt in the dishes, it could make your Indian diet less healthy.

Changes to your eating habits should be gradual. I've found that making changes to my diet slowly have reduced my food cravings for chocolates, cakes, Indian sweets and rich kormas. My father died of heart disease at an early age, so my brother and I have to watch what we eat and maintain good eating habits as well as active lifestyles. He cycles to work, while I go for BodyJam, Zumba and Bollywood aerobics classes (I’m still waiting for that call from a top Bollywood producer to appear in one of their dance numbers!).

If you’re eating out at a restaurant, it’s worth choosing tandoori dishes that are on the menu as they contain very little sauce and the food is baked instead of fried, which is better for your heart. I also find that unleavened flatbreads such as tandoori rotis help me appreciate the taste of curries more than naan breads made from plain flour.

In my cooking at home, I use very little butter or ghee in my recipes and believe it or not, sunflower, rapeseed and olive oils work really well with spices. I also find that I use less salt to flavour my food because I want to taste the individual spices. Here are my tips for enjoying Indian food that’s good for the body, as well as the soul:

• Opt for wholemeal flour instead of plain flour when making chapatis
• Try to swap white rice for brown basmati rice
• Replace cream with low-fat yogurt in ‘creamy’ curries
• Snack on unsalted nuts instead of deep-fried pakoras or bhajis (my personal favourite is almonds)
• Choose to eat a portion of fruit instead of an Indian sweetmeat
• Use tofu instead of full-fat paneer cheese
• Have semi-skimmed milk in a cup of chai instead of full-fat milk
• Have at least one item that’s green at mealtimes

Are you a glutton for butter chicken or do you look for ways to make your curries healthier? Tell us your tips for making healthy Indian food.

Manju Malhi is a guest chef featuring in the Asian Network’s ‘Get Healthy Month’. Download a PDF of the British Heart Foundation booklet on healthy Asian meals that she contributed to.

Let’s face it; we don’t take barbecuing that seriously in the UK. At this very moment there are grills still in pain after a long sentence of garden misery. All that rust is a sorry sight. But we all like playing with fire - even if it’s a fair-weathered passion, and the flames are soon burning again if the weather’s nice. Just try and have a few BBQ recipes at the ready during the early excitement of the season.

Adam Perry Lang

Barbecue expert Adam Perry Lang called time on a career in copper-panned French kitchens to follow his passion for BBQ, from New York to London’s Barbecoa restaurant. He offers a few handy tips for summer and sheds light on the proper American barbecue:

1. Invest in a good barbecue. This means you need a grill surface – cast iron is particularly good. Buy a good-quality grill brush because constant cleaning will help ensure that your grill remains non-stick.
2. Lightly oil the grill surface. Use a clean tea towel that you are willing to part with. Fold it up, lightly coat with vegetable oil and, using a pair of tongs, brush the grill surface. (This will accentuate the grill lines on your burgers).
3. Create a safe zone, an area where there are no flames on the barbecue. If flames start rising up, you have a safe haven where your food won’t burn.
4. Cook with shorter and thicker cuts of meat. That way you develop a more flavoursome crust and help to make the meat juicy. Rib-eye steak is particularly good. Re-season as you cook because grill bars tend to pull off spices and seasonings.
5. Glaze and sauce toward the end, otherwise the sugar will cause the meat to burn.
6. Consider vegetables – onion flavours work well because of the natural sugars. Leeks, spring onions and vegetables in their skin, such as onions and sweet potatoes.
7. Make easy side dishes beforehand, so you don’t have to walk away. That way you’re at the heart of the party and enjoying yourself – the most important part of barbecuing.

Pulled pork is a staple of the southern-style American BBQ

Barbecuing is taken very seriously in America and the regional rivalry is intriguing. But how does the food differ along the country’s barbecue trail? “Put simply, southern-style barbecue, or what people like to call American-style barbecue, is really more about low and slow – cooking over a lower temperature for a longer period of time, using wood as the primary source of cooking”, according to Adam. Then there’s the Yankee barbecue, which is direct grilling, usually found in the North East. So, what does he prefer? “That’s like choosing children!”

It’s surprising that authentic southern-style flavours still haven’t migrated to the UK. But maybe this is the summer where it all changes. Early signs are bright, as pop-up American barbecues are springing; we’re seeing competitions taking place imitating the American Royal – and even a rock-festival-meets-cook-off in Bristol.

What are you barbecuing this summer? Have you tasted Southern-style barbecue?

Michael Kibblewhite works for the BBC Food website.

The western world should cut down its meat consumption for many reasons: livestock drains the planet’s water and grain supplies, causes environmental degradation and produces 18% of all greenhouse gases. And that’s aside from the argument on the morality of killing animals when humans can survive pretty successfully on plants.

But that isn’t the whole story. I thought it would be interesting to investigate the flip-side of the livestock argument: would the world really be better off without meat?

What’s the beef with giving up meat?

Economy and culture
What would we do with the 315,000 people in the UK working in the agricultural livestock industry, creating a farm-gate value of £7.6bn? Shifting these people and this income from a livestock-based countryside is presumably possible, but it would mean dramatic change. And simply planting more crops wouldn’t fill the gap.

I’ve worked with the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic and have seen the crippling cultural disintegration caused by a rapid loss of traditional skills and a shift away from hunting culture to a modern welfare society. The sudden irrelevance of an economy and culture built on a specific skill-set has caused widespread misery and associated social problems including unemployment, alcoholism and domestic violence. If we dismantled the livestock industry, we’d render centuries-old animal husbandry skills, history and traditions irrelevant, and risk destroying much of what gives rural communities in the UK their identity. In every developing country I’ve visited, waste-fed and foraging animals such as chickens and pigs are one of the few sources of income, especially for people who have little or no land of their own. Take away their livestock and you take away some people’s ability to survive.

By-products

Without the dairy industry, we wouldn’t have eggs, milk, cheese and butter, hugely important food sources for billions of people; neither would we have the by-products of 11 million tonnes of leather and two million tonnes of wool. These by-products would have to be replaced by something else, with its own ecological cost. Manure from livestock contributes around 15% of fertilising nitrogen - a small but significant amount, and without it the organic system of farming (which relies on manure) would disappear too.

Efficient land use
Although a high proportion of land in the UK is used for agriculture (nearly 68% compared to a European average of 40%), we actually have a relatively low amount of arable land for growing crops (39% compared to, say, France at 62%). Half of the UK is covered by grass and grazing land, and this is mostly permanent grassland for grazing livestock (and let’s not forget, we can’t eat grass or hay, so it really is better eaten by an animal). Converting that to a different usage isn’t necessarily cost-effective or even possible. Marginal grazing land is often more efficiently used for livestock rather than crops, and around the world an estimated 10% of animals are currently raised without being fed grain, which is small, but significant.

Rural management
Without livestock, the investment that farmers make in managing the countryside would change dramatically. Have you seen the vast crop-only fields of northern France and the American Midwest? It’s like the moon out there, with not a hedgerow or coppice in sight. Animal husbandry provides an income that encourages farmers to care for the rural landscape.

None of these individual arguments are insurmountable, and we should definitely cut our meat consumption. There are ample reasons to change livestock farming for the better (perhaps we could start by farming kangaroos, which produce no methane?) but it does seem that getting rid of agricultural livestock may not be the panacea we imagine.

So over to you, what do you think would happen if the world cut meat from its diet?

Stefan Gates is a BBC presenter and food writer.

When some good friends of mine announced their engagement, I found myself offering to make their wedding cake. "How hard can it be?" I thought. I like making cakes and I turn out a pretty mean chocolate cake. Thus began my initiation into the world of wedding cakes and believe me, it's a whole other world. So, if you're thinking of making your own wedding cake or for a friend, here's my step-by-step guide. 

Practice

If you haven’t made a cake like this before - even if you think you’re a good cake-maker - it’s worth practicing with a smaller project to develop your skills and confidence. Also, bear in mind that it will take several days to make the cake and you’ll need to assemble it on the day of the wedding, so don’t be afraid to ask for help from family and friends. Perhaps you could bake the cakes and someone else could decorate them?

My first wedding cake

What kind of wedding cake?

Is the wedding cake going to be traditional or something a little different like cupcakes or macaroons? Spend some time searching for wedding cakes in a search engine and put together a mood board of cakes that you think the bride and groom will like the look of. There are certain things you need to decide:

Round or square? Bear in mind that round wedding cakes are easier to cover with icing. You’ll need to either hire or buy the necessary cake tins.

How many tiers? A three-tier wedding cake is traditional and will feed about 100 people (that’s for a round, 15cm/6in, 23cm/9in and 30cm/12in cake). If you’re catering for a large wedding, you can also bake an extra tier and leave it in the kitchen for cutting and feeding more people. This guide is useful for working out portions.

Which flavours? Fruit cake is traditional and has the benefit of being made in advance, however vanilla, chocolate and lemon are all popular choices. (Dousing your cakes in sugar syrup will help them to stay moist for longer.) Think about having different flavours for each tier to suit everybody’s taste.

Which recipe? It’s best to use a recipe specially written for a wedding cake as it will be in the correct proportions and also give you tips on how to assemble the cake. We’ve got lots of wedding cake recipes on the BBC Food site, including this fabulous recipe by baking expert Dan Lepard.

Filling and icing the cake

Ready-to-roll fondant icing is the easiest option for covering a wedding cake to give it a smooth, white finish. For best results, you need a cake with a level top and straight edges. If you’re making a fruit cake, the best way to achieve this is to cover the cake in marzipan first. For sponge cakes, you can cut the cake into layers, then fill and ice it with buttercream before covering in fondant icing.

Decorating the wedding cake

There are many options for decorating a wedding cake. The simplest is to wrap ribbon around the bottom. You can then use fresh flowers (your florist can provide these) or crystallised rose petals for easy, yet really pretty decoration. For advanced cake-makers, sugar paste flowers or piped designs will make the cake look really impressive.

Assembling the wedding cake

To assemble your wedding cake, you’ll need some specialist equipment, which is all available from specialist cake shops. These shops are also a great place to ask for advice. You’ll need:

• Thin cake boards: to give the cakes a sturdy base
• Large rolling pin: this will make it much easier to roll out the fondant icing
• Cake smoother: this helps to smooth and polish fondant icing
• Dowelling rods: these are used to provide stability to a cake so that you can stack several layers on top of each other
• Cake boxes: it’s best to assemble the cake at the venue and you’ll need cake boxes to transport the cakes
• Cake stand or thick cake board: to display the cake (the venue may provide this)
• Cake spacers or pillars: you can either stack the cakes directly on top of each other, or use cake spacers or pillars to create height

Dan Lepard shows how to use dowling rods to assemble a multi-tiered wedding cake in this video:

Planning

Leave plenty of time to make the wedding cake, preferably in your own kitchen or in a kitchen you’re familiar with. You’ll also need plenty of space. Make a time plan and a detailed shopping list. Check with the venue where the cake will be displayed. Will it be on a sturdy table? Do they have a tablecloth and cake stand? Will they provide the knife for the ‘cutting the cake’ picture?

Rough schedule

• Up to three months ahead: fruit cakes can be made up to three months in advance and need to be fed with brandy every four to five days
• Two weeks ahead: cover the fruit cake with marzipan
• Four days ahead: make the sponge cakes and wrap in plenty of cling film
• Three days ahead: place the sponge cakes onto thin cake boards and ice with buttercream
• Two days ahead: cover the cakes with fondant icing and insert dowelling rods
• On the day: stack the cakes and decorate once the cakes are in place

So over to you, have you made a wedding cake before and can you offer any advice? Or are you planning to make a wedding cake for the first time this summer and do you have any questions? I’ll do my best to answer them.

Rachel Manley works on the BBC Food website.

Why devote all our time and energy into growing the cheapest, most available and most disease-prone crops when you could be filling your beds with something more interesting and costlier to buy in the shops? Three-quarters of our personal food growing land is devoted to growing main-crop spuds, carrots and onions. Is it time to turf out the usual suspects and make space for something new?

Tatty-bye?

This week’s Food Programme is all about finding new ways to grow food that is more resilient in the face of climate change. “Life is too short for unremarkable food”, says Mark Diacono who featured in the programme. When you visit Otter Farm, his 17 intensely planted acres a few minutes drive from Honiton railway station in Devon, you get a glimpse of what he’s on about.

He has hedges of autumn olives (olive-like leaves, but pink, strawberry tasting fruit), stands of Szechuan pepper bushes, old varieties of strawberries as ground cover, Himalayan rhubarb, mulberries, medlars, Carolina allspice (grown for its cinnamon-tasting bark), blue honeysuckle with its blueberry-like fruit, and almond, walnut and pecan trees.

Going nuts...

It’s a botanical treasure trove: a mix of what our ancestors used to love (consider the mulberry) and the exotic (Japanese wineberries) that because of climate change can now be grown in at least the southern half of the country. Some people call it “the climate change farm”. It is that, but that doesn’t quite capture its essence: 17 acres dedicated to deliciousness and a test-bed for how we might grow more of our food in the future.

Right now most of our staples come from annual crops: wheat, carrots, potatoes, celery, peas, parsnips, etc. All these crops are highly reliant on lots of water and sun, and, when grown non-organically, just as reliant on artificial fertilisers. It takes massive amounts of energy just to make artificial fertilisers, then when they’re applied year after year they break down the structure of the soil, which means the soil doesn’t hold moisture as well as it did, and lots of it blows away. Soil erosion is one of the major global issues we now face in feeding a growing population.

If you start to produce more of your food from perennials grown at different heights with lots of ground cover so that the soil is never bare, you avoid most of those problems. At the top level you can grow fruit and nut trees, underneath fruit, nut and spice-bearing shrubs, then on the ground the green crops, such as Good King Henry (introduced by the Romans - tastes better than spinach), garden cress, rocket and many others.

It’s an intense form of production that doesn’t cost the earth. But even to think of producing our food in this way requires a huge mind-shift. Monoproduction is what we do well, but the cost of it looks increasingly beyond our means.

So, can we learn from Otter Farm and from the agroforestry research that backs up its effectiveness? Is growing in rows and devoting toil to the resulting weeding and watering to produce what are some of the cheapest and disease-prone veg in the shops mad? You can have inter-planted trees, shrubs, climbers, and ground cover (a rather delicious looking floor of strawberries) that require none of the above, just plucking.

Listen in to Mark, Martin Crawford from the Agroforestry Research Trust and Gerry Hayman from the British Tomato Growers Association on this week’s programme and let us know what you think.

Do you grow food? And what’s your plan for this year? Should we be ditching seed trays and the traditional annuals-based allotments people are used to and growing perennials instead, or making forest gardens?

My unlikeliest moment of culinary epiphany came after midnight in Edinburgh following a skinful of McEwan’s and a sweaty evening of rubbish stand-up. I’d staggered into a packed chippy in search of some grubby late-night oil-infused sustenance and gazed up at the bill of fare. What I saw near bowled me over. The sheer inventiveness of this chipmeister’s application of that glorious crispy cloak of love and lipid-soaked carb (or batter) was, frankly, astounding. This guy battered not just the usual fish, saveloys and pineapple rings, but also pizzas, Mars bars and the very chips themselves. Brilliant. Chips in batter!

But battered chips weren’t the highlight – hoh, no. Just before plugging for a slab of carbohydrate and fat accompanied by a slab of sugar and fat, I spotted ‘deep-fried battered haggis’. Well, I held aloft my cash and asked for a large one. Now, I dig haggis anyway, but this stuff was mind-blowing. It had all the textural resonance that I love (crunch set off by squidge, with the sprinkled gift of nodules of oatmeal to nibble between your teeth). But imagine all those attributes encased in a sunshine crust and coated in a dreamcoat of salt. So many calories in such a small space! Sensual experiences don’t come much more transcendental than that. Well, not when you’re drunk and hungry they don’t.

After I recovered from the experience (I awoke to a face covered in spots), I began to wonder if I couldn’t batter a range of other familiar foods and perhaps improve on them. Here are a few that I’ve tried:

A good or a bad battering?

Top row (L to R)

Smoked bacon
This was unbelievably good - once you’d got past the feeling of oleaginous guilt. The batter lets the bacon keep its moistness, yet you still seem to get the Maillard effect with all those complex caramelisation reactions going on - but all that fat!

Whole roasted coffee beans
I though that this was going to be the big revelation – like the new chocolate-covered coffee bean. But the textures are all wrong and the flavours are too brutal. Big shame.

Stringy cheese
This stuff is about as bad as food gets. Well-nigh tasteless and eye-bleedingly expensive to boot at £13.40/kg, which is a shocker when the venerable Keen’s cheddar is only £13.75/kg. Anyway, deep-fried, it’s fantastic! Soft and tasteless but in a delectable crispy batter… might as well inject it straight into your arteries, mind.

Mint leaves
A revelation. It’s a bit like elderflower fritters, truth be told, delicious and oddly refined. I thoroughly recommend this one, but try to keep the fat very hot so the cooking time is short and the leaves don’t wilt away too much

Middle row (L to R)

Cherry tomato
Hmmm… a bit rubbish, like putting a capsule of boiling water in your mouth and cracking it. And I do worry what would happen if the tomato split in the hot oil – an explosion, probably. Don’t try this at home.

Jelly beans
The kids loved them - funnily enough - although I wasn’t blown away. Deep-frying makes them chewy, but they keep their shape just enough to be fun.

Bay leaf
Surprisingly good. The frying softens the (fresh, not dried) leaf so that you can bite it. Quite strong flavour, though.

Olives
Naah…. how can you improve on an olive?

Bottom row (L to R)

Raw garlic cloves
Yup, brilliant stuff. Like making pungent, gutsy crisps. The garlic caramelises a little in the batter (no idea how) and takes on a toffee hint, while still retaining crunch.

Toblerone
Needed a thicker batter for this one, but the kids were desperate. Hot molten cocoa in a crispy skin. They thought they’d died and gone to chocolate heaven. I thought I might be carted off by social services for nutritional abuse.

Lemon slices
Naah.

Cucumber
I quite liked this, but possibly just because it was a fun idea - like a tempura version of chocolate liqueurs. Pretty soggy inside though.

So tell me, what batters your boat?

Stefan Gates is a BBC presenter and food writer.

How has something as essential and natural as feeding our children become so difficult and fraught with problems? It’s not surprising that parents are faced with such a tough job, what with so many confusing and conflicting messages about what and how to feed our children, not to mention being faced with endless varieties of plastic packaged foods that lure us with five-a-day or 100% fruit slogans. My thoughts and feelings on this subject were reinforced by working on tomorrow’s BBC Three programme Fast Food Baby.

Saying that “if they don’t eat what’s on offer, they don’t get anything else, and they’re not going to starve” isn't an easy philosophy to adhere to, especially when there are so many emotional and psychological triggers involved with feeding a small child, particularly one who’s been very ill early on in life.

Even without a catalyst like an illness, feeding can still be so riddled with anxiety and guilt. At the classes I run I often have parents who readily admit to caving into their toddlers demands or control over food simply because they want them to eat something, or not wake in the night hungry or be grumpy later on. I also understand and sympathise with this dilemma having been a nanny for 10 years, struggling over mealtimes. Incidentally there’s some great advice and support at The Infant and Toddler forum.

I see a wide range of issues that can’t simply be resolved with a quick-fix rule. A child surviving on bread and yoghurt due to severe reflux can suffer real anxiety when faced with new or different foods. This needs a more sensitive approach, but there can be a resolution. Messy play and food exploration can help, according to Dr Catherine Dendy, a clinical psychologist and feeding expert who also worked on Fast Food Baby. During the programme we followed a little boy, called Michael, who had suffered with meningitis. We saw something interesting happen.

During the classes we discovered that Michael enjoyed raw beetroot! The family also learnt the importance of involving their son in food and mealtime preparation and making it fun, so that Michael became more familiar with the new foods that were later presented on his plate and accepted them more readily. From an 18-month-old who drank a lot of milk and enjoyed fish, chips and sips of coke, Michael’s food repertoire quickly expanded to include vegetable soups, dried fruit, parsnip, cucumber and bananas, and broccoli became a firm favourite!

So how do we address the balance and make sure we are all providing the next generation with the foundations for a healthy balanced life? Try some of our tips and let us know how you get on or what works for you and your children in the comments section below.

Top tips for parents from Dr Catherine Dendy and Lucy Thomas of Mange Tout

• Don’t force a child to eat a meal that they don’t like. This will make them like it even less! Instead, take the time to talk about and explore the components of the meal away from the table.
• Prepare a child for what’s to come on their plate. Children are suspicious if they don’t know what they’re eating; even if they are told how good it is for them.
• Never ask a child to eat, try or taste anything. Get them to explore the food by asking them to kiss, lick or crunch it instead. You are not tricking your child, merely asking them to engage with food in a more interesting way. If you ask your children who can do the loudest crunch in their celery they are more likely to bite it than if you say “here try some celery it’s really good for you!”
• Involve a child in the whole process. Take them shopping and touch the produce and explain where it comes from.
• Let them help you cook and be really involved.
• Get a little messy. Let them squash a tomato or squeeze an orange while you are cooking.
• A good way to explore vegetables that are disliked is to explore them raw and cooked. Many children do not enjoy the pungent smell of cauliflower, especially if overcooked, but small crunchy raw florets with hummus or a dip are delicious and very palatable.
• If you’re weaning your baby, a baby’s taste buds develop and change at an alarming rate and are most receptive between the ages of seven and twelve months. Keeping a baby’s food bland for too long can result in shocked reactions to stronger flavours.
• For children over three years introduce reward charts for enjoying five-a-day. Younger children will enjoy an immediate reward of a sticker on their top for participating. You can download a free chart from the Taste for Life website.
• Children and babies are great imitators, so set a good example! Remember that enthusiasm is key. If you would like to see how it’s done, watch this clip.

Lucy Thomas and Dr Catherine Dendy are child-feeding experts. Both appear in BBC Three’s Fast Food Baby.