Food from the Books
Getting little ones to try new food can sometimes be a matter of simply introducing it through reading. Whether it's a cook book or even a comic book, reading also opens doors to healthy eating.
CARE
Nicole Lasam
12/12/20252 min read
I’ve always been curious about food. Where do certain foods come from? How are they used or enjoyed? What aspects of culture surround some food?
This interest of mine has made me gravitate toward food books. In our family library, we have cookbooks on different cuisines, old Filipino cookbooks (it’s very interesting how the old ones are written), manga on cooking, some nonfiction books with food essays, and even children’s books on food. My writing work has also gotten me to look into particular aspects of Filipino cuisine, from our attitude as a people towards the food we cook to the favorite dishes Filipinos like to cook (depending on the region!)—and how these dishes came about.
‘How can you read this? There are no pictures!’
In my research, I found that illustrated food books, in particular, are something really helpful—especially if the images are actual photographs of the food. I like seeing pictures of the food I want to know about: spices, fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, and other food products… because how can I find these things in the market if I have no idea what they look like? They’re great for getting to know new ingredients, such as those in foreign cuisines that I may want to use in my cooking. They’re also great for showing to little ones so that they have images of the food in their head before they find the new ingredients on their plate.
An exception of this would be the food manga I mentioned before. Oishinbo written by Tetsu Kariya and illustrated by Akira Hanasaki contains drawn illustrations (obviously) and not photographs. (The English volumes published by Viz Media provide photographs to accompany a featured recipe within each book, but the rest of the food pictures are realistic drawings.) Unlike books with photographs, Oishinbo’s black and white ink drawings cannot really help me find the food in the marketplace, but, together with the story and food descriptions, the manga succeeds in getting the reader to want to try the food being described.
Eat your veggies!
The newest addition to my collection is the volume on vegetables, which my kids read with gusto. (I think the girls finished reading the entire volume before I did.) Because it’s vegetables (as opposed to sushi or pub food), the ingredients are easier to find in our market. We bought some ingredients for the simpler recipes, looked for detailed instructions from Japanese food blogs (our favorite being Just One Cookbook), and tried making them in our kitchen. (The kids enjoyed the fried eggplants in sesame oil and the spinach ohitashi.)
What I’m getting at is that reading can also be a window that opens to a world of adventurous (and—more importantly—healthy) eating. If the kids don’t like vegetables, the oft-given advice is to keep serving them veggies, and eventually they will try and like to eat them. But I have observed that discovering the food in the books first helps a lot, too!