Turn Healthy Eating with Your Kids Into an Art Project

You may know a child who has refused to eat their veggies a time or two (or maybe you have even been that child yourself!) Compared to fried food, sugary treats and salty, packaged goodies, raw fruits and vegetables can seem pretty unexciting and unappetizing to a child. But something we can do to make that produce seem more appealing to children is to turn that food into an art project.

When we are talking about pieces of raw fruits and veggies especially, it is fun and often easy to trick your kids into eating healthier with food art. You don’t need to be creative or an artist to do this, many of these ideas are simple tricks for presenting the produce on a plate in a more fun way. How can a child not smile when they sit down to fun shapes or phrases as their lunch? They will have fun and you will be ensured that they are eating their nutrient rich fruits and veggies. Check out these ideas below.

Sit Down to a Smile

Oatmeal and soup are the perfect opportunities to make faces and designs out of toppings that conveniently top the food. The design also partially disguises the mushy stuff and makes the meal much more enjoyable to sit down to. Try drawing a smiley face out of cashew cream overtop a bowl of raw soup. For breakfast, try this Purple Monster Vegan Oatmeal and make a monster face out of pecans and fruit slices.

Spot a Rainbow

Fresh fruit and veggies vary so much in color, a rainbow of nutrition, so use this to your advantage by shaping a rainbow out of fruit pieces. Line up chopped fruits and veggies in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet in a rainbow shape on a huge party platter.

Use Circular-Shaped Food for Cute Faces

Cut any circular-shaped food into two halfs to make animal ears. Place these overtop another circle-shaped food item for the base of an animal face. Items that will work for this include veggie meat slices, veggie burger patties, fritters, pancakes and rice cakes. To make eyes and a mouth, you can draw with cashew cream, preserves, ketchup, mustard,  mayo, hummus, cheese sauce, etc, or you can use small pieces of veggies (like circular zucchini, cucumber and banana slices or raisins or nuts) for eyes.

Make Trees from Green Food and Pretzels

You can easily make a nice forest landscape by making tree trunks out of pretzel sticks and using edamame in pods, pea pods, broccoli, kale, avocado or spinach as the foliage.

Construct a Garden

Along with trees, you can use fruit and vegetable slices to shape flowers. Celery sticks, bell pepper slices and carots sticks can work for the stems. Cut strawberries into quarters to use as petals. Cucumber slices and cherry tomatoes also make great petals. You can use dips and spreads to decorate as well to pull the whole scene together.

Lead image source: Coqui the Chef/ Flickr