The cleaner plate club: Making sustainable food realistic fo

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The cleaner plate club: Making sustainable food realistic for parents
By Ali Benjamin
18 Jan 2012

I love the sustainable food world. But there’s this other world I occupy, as well: that of the harried, working mom. Children aren’t easy. They have homework and sports practice and doctors’ appointments and medicines and sometimes a doozy of a tantrum. Just keeping up with it all — keeping them alive, safe, fed, their homework done, their clothes clean and shoes matching while emphasizing please and thank you, and don’t you dare call your sister a dummy — feels like a Herculean effort on many days.

Last year, I coauthored a book with Beth Bader, The Cleaner Plate Club: Raising Healthy Eaters One Meal at a Time . With the book, Beth and I want to help bridge the sustainable food world with the reality of exhausted parents who are trying to put food on the table. And, while the book itself isn’t likely to get every parent back into their kitchen for every meal, we see it as a piece of a bigger puzzle — one in which we really examine what family life looks like these days, recognize that contemporary parents are struggling, and that processed food is a symptom, not a sin.

Excerpts from the book will appear on The Grist over the next few days of you are interested in more!

Cleaner Plate Club blog