My belief is if you look at the backbone of your eating habits & food ideas, your family or whoever reared you is bracing it up. Think about it, how many "rules" about food have you carried over from your childhood to your adult life. I am typing this post and I literally hear a 10-year-old OUTSPOKEN_DIVA ask me the following questions:
- Did we ever go to IHOP? Yes, when we get to college.
- Remember those Hot Wings at Cousin Fran's wedding we finally had when we were 8, are they still around? Yes, there are now whole restaurants specializing in flavored wings
- Do we still like Ravioli Casserole? Unfortunately, we do. But only once a year. (Now, I'm fighting a craving for Ravioli Casserole (Chef Boyardee with Cheddar Cheese mixed in), I've had it already this year. LOL Blame Public School Lunches)
Growing up, we didn't eat out often. Until I was 12, my home had three families(My Grandparents, My Mom & her 3 kids and My Youngest Aunt & her 2 kids) residing in it. Home Cooking was the best economical choice for our home. My grandmother cooked during the week and my aunt & my mom cooked on the weekends. Sometimes on Saturdays (once a month on a Friday), fast food or takeout was brought in. Eating out was rather special for us. We ate out
- When we went out of town
- When we went shopping with mom & grandparents (Easter, Back to School, Christmas)
- Church Functions
- If you were in the car when my grandfather decided to show off the latest restaurant he tried with the credit union board after Sunday church service
Now when going out to eat there were 4 rules.
- Behave!!!
- Don't order anything you can eat at home.
- Anything you order, You Better Eat
- If eating at a cafeteria or buffet, there should be two vegetable choices on your tray
I don't remember ever ordering off of any Kid's Menu at a Standard, Sit down restaurant. I was allowed to color but I remember ordering off the regular menu. My mother hated Kids Menus.
"This is a Mexican restaurant, why is there a hamburger on the menu." "Who eats a plate of Macaroni & Cheese? Vegetarian Kids eat vegetables, too".
Once I could read I could see that everything on the kid's menu was stuff I could eat at home. Many of you may see that rule as being bougie or stuck up. I see it as not wasting money. 3.99 for a basic grilled cheese sandwich, fries & a drink that I probably ate already at school earlier in the week. Yeah, I was picking the taco plate off the regular menu. Now, I just heard my grandmother say, "And you better eat all of it". LoL
Once I got older I agreed with the food experts, nutritionists, dieticians & doctors in the 90s and beyond, Kids Menus needed a facelift.
(Well, at least at Standard, Sit Down restaurants, I agreed. Healthy Fast Food is an Oxymoron, in my opinion. If people want their families to eat healthily, Don't Eat Fast Food.) I didn't understand why was there a Kids Menu.
Very few homes I knew of served separate dinners for the adults & the children. And all of those were because of medical requirements & extremely picky eaters. Most homes served everyone the same thing. Adults didn't eat chicken, dressing & green beans while the children eat corndogs & fries. In my own home, the only times the children ate something different than the adults were fried fish night (bone-in fish & fish sticks) and the chitterling meal for New Years (I still eat a separate dinner). So, why do restaurants have a separate and not so equal menu? I finally learned why.
What we know of public children & youth dining in America started with the Volstead Act
(The Act to prohibit intoxicating beverages, and to regulate the manufacture, production, use, and sale of alcohol). In the century leading up to the dry laws, children rarely ate out. Only the children of well off families ate out or stay in hotels Restaurants not attached to hotels didn’t even serve children, because they got in the way of boozy grown-up fun. Prohibition took effect in January 1920, the dry laws forced the hospitality industry to rethink its policy on children: The Waldorf-Astoria in New York in 1921 became one of the first establishments to beckon to children with a menu of their very own. But even as restaurants began to invite children in, it was with a new limitation:
They could no longer eat what their parents ate.
The earliest children’s menus didn’t look so different from the playful ones we know today. The Waldorf-Astoria put Little Jack Horner on the cover of their pink-and-cream booklet; as he pulls out his plummy thumb, a dish runs away with a spoon. But then there was the food—the bland, practically basic food. There was flaked chicken over boiled rice, mixed green vegetables in butter; a splat of prune whip. And the one dish that appeared without exception, the chicken nugget of the Jazz Age was a plain broiled lamb chop.
A pediatrician Emmett Holt, first published a book called
The Care and Feeding of Children, in 1894, it stayed in print for nearly half a century, teaching mothers, nurses, and, apparently, chefs that young children weren’t to be given fresh fruits, nuts, or raisins in their rice pudding. Pies, tarts, and indeed "pastry of every description" were "especially forbidden," and for no reason were such items as ham, bacon, corn, cod, tomato soup, or lemonade to pass a child's lips before his 10th birthday. Holt didn’t explain his guidelines but it this medley of medicine and morality that still dictated the first 20 years of children’s menus. Restaurants packed them with everything Emmett Holt said to, and they did it proudly.
Then came Dr. Spock with the 1946 publication of
Baby and Child Care. Benjamin Spock succeeded Emmett Holt as the nation’s chief childrearing expert which emphasized nurture over discipline. But, for all the collective relaxing over children’s diets in the postwar years, the children’s menu was not abandoned.
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| Look at those prices |
Restaurants were now dependent on its marketing benefits; children didn’t want to give up booklets that doubled as clown masks or featured punch-out airplanes; and parents, quite understandably, had become attached to the low prices. So the children’s menu persisted. Meanwhile, a growing processed-food industry made it powerfully cost-effective to rewrite. By the 1970s, the children’s menu as we know it today was basically in place: The design was as colorful as ever, but the food had been restricted to its present-day palette of browns and yellows.
Again as we see now, our little ones eat a little healthier in restaurants. They at least have a variety of choices, now.
French Fries have a new buddy, Garden Salad & Broccoli with the Grilled Cheese meal. Yes, I've shared this information with my mother. She was shocked that the practice went back so far.
She didn't eat in restaurants until she was an older teenager.
(Jim Crow, Segregation, the 1960s) Meals were home-cooked or takeout, only back then for my family. And with this new knowledge she now just dislike not hate Kids Menus. She wishes that would be abolished and parents teach their kids how to make food choices in restaurants. Well, Like Mother, Like Daughter!!!
As Always, Talking to You in Adult Terms
