Outside the Box

A lively, cross-cultural look at the way packaged and fast foods are marketed to our kids--and a meditation on how our eating habits and our family lives are being changed in the process.
 
When Canadian journalist Jeannie Marshall moved to Rome with her husband, she delighted in Italy's famous culinary traditions. But when Marshall gave birth to a son, she began to see how that food culture was eroding, especially within young families. Like their North American counterparts, Italian children were eating sugary cereal in the morning and packaged, processed, salt- and fat-laden snacks later in the day. Busy Italian parents were rejecting local markets for supermercati, and introducing their toddlers to fast food restaurants only too happy to imprint their branding on the youngest of customers. So Marshall set on a quest to discover why something that we can only call "kid food" is proliferating around the world. How did we develop our seemingly insatiable desire for packaged foods that are virtually devoid of nutrition? How can even a mighty food culture like Italy's change in just a generation? And why, when we should and often do know better, do we persist in filling our children's lunch boxes, and young bodies, with ingredients that can scarcely even be considered food?
 
Through discussions with food crusaders such as Alice Waters, with chefs in Italy, nutritionists, fresh food vendors and parents from all over, and with big food companies such as PepsiCo and Nestle, Marshall gets behind the issues of our children's failing nutrition and serves up a simple recipe for a return to real food.