How Do I Equip My Kids with a Love for Healthy Eating? Katie Kimball Has the Answer

Welcome back to Everyday Ancestral. I'm your host, James Berry. I am so excited we're going to be talking about family and kids today with Katie Kimble. Katie helps change kids relationship to food, both through work in the kitchen and helping parents of picky eaters. She's a former teacher, two time TEDx speaker, writer, and a mom of four kids. She created the Kids Cook Real Food E course which was recommended by the Wall Street Journal as the best online cooking class kids. Her blog, Kitchen Stewardship helps families stay healthy without going crazy. And she's on a mission to connect families around healthy food, teach every child to cook and instill those all important life skills. Please enjoy. Katie Kimble, you really speak my language, which is cooking, but you specifically focus on kids and cooking, which is also a sweet spot for me since I'm a father. But you're a mother and you have four. Four kids, right?

Four kids. Last I checked.

You used to be a teacher though, right? You mentioned to me you taught third grade. What brought you over to the cooking side? Was it becoming a mother?

I knew I wanted to be a teacher since at least kindergarten. Like I never wavered all through elementary school. What are you going to be when you grow up? You know, it was always a teacher, went to school for it. And it's kind of ironic that I only taught in a third grade classroom for two years because then I started my family and I knew that I couldn't be a really good teacher and a really good mom at the same time and I would probably break if I tried to do both. So that was kind of an easy decision to come home and just focus on being a mom pretty quickly. As young married people, we were in the red and I thought, oh, I do need to make some money even if I can't be a full time teacher. So that's kind of where I started my foray online and I had this idea for a book, Kitchen Stewardship. You asked? When I got into food and cooking, it was a hundred percent because of being a mom. In our birthing classes, they talked about getting so much protein and eating egg and all this food stuff and I'm like, oh, so not just Hamburger Helper. It's not going to cut it. Oh, okay. And so that was very much my first steps on my journey was thinking about this little being inside of me and how much every bite I took counted for him. And then as I began to feed him, you know, as himself outside of my body, how much every little bite counted in an eight pound body. I dug into nutrition. I started learning to cook from scratch. I was terrible at it. I screwed everything up. I burned everything, I broke everything. Like, you name it, I have messed that up. And so a lot of my internal thought conversations was, gosh, how can I help other moms not be so bad at this? Because I know that there are others out there who really want to feed their families well and also feel that tension of like, budget and time. And so that's where I started out thinking maybe I could write a book to make money, which is hilarious because books don't make money and books are not fast. I just did not know what I was doing. And someone told me, you should start a blog to see if anyone cares about your ideas. So that's how I started writing about cooking and health and nutrition online. So it was kind of my heart for teaching and the fact that I needed a couple bucks. But it's turned into a real passion project and a real mission and we shifted into teaching kids. 2009 is when I got online. 2016 is when we launched Kids Cook Real Food. And that again, was just, was just a gap. It was just an empty space that it didn't feel like anyone was filling. So I'm hearing a lot of moms say, katie, I really do want to get healthy. I want to cook from scratch. But it's so hard because I was never taught to cook at all. And I started to have this vision of like our kids 20, 25 years from now saying the exact same things. Oh, I want to get healthy. It's so hard because my mom never taught me to cook right. When we're uncomfortable doing something, we're not asking our kids to come learn from us. We don't know what the heck we're doing. So I thought, somebody needs to step into this gap and figure out how to make sure that this current generation of youth goes into adulthood knowing how to cook so that they have half a chance and hopefully having some habits of real food right, so that they have half a chance of starting out healthy instead of being behind the eight ball and going, oh, I wish I could get healthy. I'm already, you know, I'm in 20 something and I'm already having ill health.

Can someone get healthy? Not home cooking?

I mean, I think so. If you have a lot of funds, you know, like you can buy now really, really good, high quality food and, and have other people cook it for you or prepare it for you or chop it up, you know, in the big box stores. But it would take A lot of funding.

So what you're really doing is supporting people with a baseline of cooking knowledge, how to take care of themselves and to do it, you know, realistically. Right? Not just on a budget, but just realistically.

Yes. Quite honestly, if I had like a family legitimately asking that question, like, can we just pay someone else to do this for us? I would say really, like, is that really the foundation you want to lay for your kids? Because when your kids launch into the real world, it's highly unlikely that they're going to have a massive budget for food. So if that's their habit, if that's all they know is that we eat healthy food, but we pay for someone else to do it, they probably aren't going to be able to replicate that. So I firmly believe in giving our kids the foundation of the skills and the tools and the knowledge to know what to do so that they can walk into a grocery store at age 18 or 20 or 24 and be like, oh yeah, like I recognize this stuff. I've got a chef's knife, I know how to cut it up. I can feed myself.

How do you define healthy then?

I mean, health is in our bodies and in our mental state. So if we are getting out of bed and we're pretty and we're happy with how we feel, we're able to get good sleep, we're able to do the things we want to do with our bodies and also we're setting ourselves up for, you know, like when I'm a grandparent, I want to be a really cool grandparent. I want to be like on the floor with the kids. I want to be playing catch in the backyard. I want to be able to say to my grown up kids, like, yeah, of course you can go away for the weekend. Of course I'll take all of your kids, however many that number is. You know, I don't want to be like, oh, I'm so tired, or I have all these doctor's appointments I need to go to. Like, that's just, that's a horrible vision of the elderly years. So I think staying out of doctor's offices, staying off prescription drugs, you know, not having chronic diseases, but more than that, just feeling vital, feeling like your body, you're in control of your body and that you can approach your day with vitality.

You know, you're talking about teaching people how to cook, but what should they be cooking? You know, what's the focus of health in how you teach it?

It's so controversial out there. You know, everybody Says, eat this or don't eat that. For me, it's pretty simple, pretty Michael Pollan food rules type of stuff where we eat food that grows in the ground or animals that eat food that grows in the ground as close to the way they are naturally created as possible. So if I'm going to eat a hamburger, hopefully it's a grass fed hamburger. If I'm going to go out to eat, I'm going to have a hamburger and I'm not going to worry about what that cow ate. But I might have it without a bun because I know that for my body, that amount of like white flour, high sugar carbs is not going to make me feel that great. But as close to nature as possible, I think is really important.

So you're not necessarily advocating any specific diet in your programs or when you're teaching. You're really just trying to get people to be comfortable in their own kitchens.

Yes, in our cooking classes, I know that we have members who are vegan members who are paleo, all across the board. So it's just a matter of, you know, here's a fruit or a vegetable or a meat or some whole grains. How are you going to get this from field to fork?

I was talking to this. I want to say, I think she's 20. I just kind of brought up how back in the day, you know, kids would be supportive of the family life. Like, particularly if you had families that had, you know, six to 12 kids. It's like the older kids were supporting that culture because they were taking care of the younger kids. What do you think has changed that we need an outsider, you know, or an outside organization like yours, Kids Cook real food to teach these kids and our families how to cook. Like, what has changed that now requires that? Because I, I would think that back in the day, people seem to know more what and how to cook.

For sure. These skills were passed from parent to child. I don't exactly know how far back we need to go when that was just natural. Right? For sure. A hundred years. Absolutely. Kids are cooking with their parents. They have to, they absolutely needed to. Everyone in the family had to pitch in. And part of that was larger family size, part of that was less convenience options. Right. We didn't have convenience food. We didn't have washers and dryers. Everyone needed to put in some hours. I think kids cook. Real food is needed, unfortunately. I wish I wasn't needed, to be honest. I wish this was easily a skill that could pass from generation to generation. But we've got A gap. We've got a missing link. So I'm a child of the 80s personally, so I would say somewhere in the 70s, 80s and 90s, convenience food became very much the norm, very much the default. And our parents, I believe, were very well intentioned. They loved us. They wanted to see their kids have better lives than themselves. Do you hear that? A lot. Like, I want, I want my kids to have better life than me. And so they look at their childhood and they're like, oh, I had to do chores, I was responsible for all this stuff. I just want my kids to be able to go to school and play and be a kid. Right? Loving, well intentioned, but unfortunate because they're missing that step of passing on the skills. So I really think it started at minimum with the 70s, 80s and 90s parents not passing on their knowledge of cooking. And some of them were already convenience food cooking. So they didn't, they might not have had the knowledge. Which means that the current generation of parents, so many of us do not have the knowledge of how to cook. How can we pass on what we don't have?

So how did you get it? It sounds like as a child of the 80s, I know you were motivated by getting pregnant and wanting to change your diet and make sure you were eating well then, but how were you raised and was it different from how you're eating now?

Yes, it was different. In fact, I always say that I had a weird trickle up teaching to my mom. So my mom learned an awful lot and changed a lot of her cooking and food Prep in her 50s and 60s. Learning from my blog, like she started making homemade yogurt and making sourdough and using fresh garlic and peppers for the first time. And it's funny. And then she learned from me instead of me from her.

I mean, honestly, it's kind of amazing because you talk to most people in the health field and they'll be like, oh yeah, my parents and family never listen to what I suggest. It has to come from someone outside of the family. So that's amazing on many levels.

My mom was amazing. I mean, she was an incredible example of being a lifelong learner for me. And so that's deeply knit, like into the fabric of myself that I love learning. I couldn't wait to be an adult when I was 12, I was like, I can't wait to be an adult and be on my own. And so as soon as I had like my own apartment in college, I would get a stack of like cooking magazines and cookbooks and I just Devoured them. I wanted to learn to cook for myself, and I do think I was fortunate. Not only was my mom a wonderful example of a lifelong learner, but she also was less of a convenience cook and more of what I'd call a hybrid cook. So she did make her own bread. Not all of the bread we ate, but, like, at the holidays. So I had seen bread being made. I saw a lot of baked goods being made, and she cooked, like I said, like, hybrid from scratch. So she would make her spaghetti sauce from scratch, but she would use Campbell's cream of tomato soup. So it's like, oops. Like, so close, Mom. So close. So there was a lot of that where there were, like, convenience food ingredients in what she made. But we had a lot of, you know, like, roasts and potatoes and carrots. She made homemade chicken broth. So I do think I was fortunate that a lot of my, like, here's how we eat habits that I took into young adulthood were at least better than Hamburger Helper and frozen dinners. Like, I. I knew what cooking from scratch looked like a little bit, and I was excited to learn more. And so how did I learn? I failed my way through it. I burnt canned biscuits the first time I cooked with real garlic. I was trying to make an applesauce pork chop recipe for some friends who were coming over in college, like, five of my girlfriends. The recipe called for a clove of garlic. James. So I went to the store and bought what I thought was a clove of garlic. Of course, it was the whole bulb. The whole bulb. I'm trying to cut up the whole bulb, and the papery stuff is, like, stuck to my knife and stuck to my face. It's everyone, like, what is going on? Like, how does anyone supposed to use this? It was nearly inedible. Luckily, I wasn't patient enough, and I gave up before I got the whole bulb into the applesauce pork chops. So I just failed my way all the way through. But I'm a little better, a little bit better now than I was then.

Oh, that's beautiful. I mean, but really, it's those failures that really make you a great teacher, because you can encapsulate what works or doesn't work. You've been doing this for enough years now where you probably are seeing patterns in terms of what people know and what they don't know. And so what are some of those things that are being revealed over the years?

A lot of kids have food allergies is honestly the first thing that comes to mind. Just because I needed to be really cautious when I created the course to make sure that it was accessible to everyone. We were pretty cautious to use very little dairy, very little gluten, always offering alternatives. And in fact, I designed the course to be skills based, not recipe based. So what I always tell my member families is I don't want your kids to have a small collection of recipes that they feel confident making. Want them to have a really comprehensive toolkit of skills where they can look at any recipe and go, yeah, I think I can make that. It's that confidence in those skills. And so because it's skills based, anyone with any eating style or any allergies or preferences can access it. But we know that about a third of our members have food allergies in their families. And so I just. That's kind of near and dear to my heart that I think those families need to learn to cook from scratch because their lives depend upon it. They may not be able to trust others to cook for them. So they're like, my kid needs to understand this. And we had a lot of people coming in with 12 year olds with zero cooking experience. That's definitely a trend that surprised me because our class is set up with levels beginner, intermediate and advanced. And it's supposed to be kind of like preschool, kindergarten, early elementary, upper elementary and beyond. And we have a ton of families right from the beginning have been coming in with 10 and 12 year olds saying, can I start them at the beginner? And I'm like, as long as they don't mind 5 year olds in the video. Yeah, but you're right, they need to learn how to peel a carrot before they can, you know, learn a chef's knife.

I have to think that that is less about just convenient food and more about parenting, would you say?

Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit of both. You know, you asked about, why aren't we passing these skills onto our kids? And part of it is convenience food that we literally don't have the skills of cooking to pass on. But part of it too is that we are more likely in our society to just have one or two kids. And the culture is saying, put them in travel, sports, keep them busy, keep them scheduled. Like, the parents are able to provide these very full lives for their children, but they're full lives outside the house. And so this idea of passing on, like how to clean a toilet or how to peel a potato or cook a roast, like, it's just not necessarily on people's radar. It's not cool. It's not happening to do that with your kids. But it's getting better. That's definitely a truth that I think the pendulum is shifting. There are a lot of parents right now who strongly believe that their kids need life skills and that they need to learn them in the home. And so that's really exciting to see.

That is definitely exciting. Yeah. It is interesting though. There seems to be like a devalue of domestic duties. I grew up with someone cleaning our house and I remember my mom saying, well, I would rather make enough money and pay someone to do it because I really don't like it. You know, we do that as well. We have someone doing that. And I don't think either of my daughters have ever cleaned a toilet, to your point. And you know, they're 12 and 8. Cooking, though, has been something that we do a lot, but that's more because we do cook from home. I do see your point. If, if these are things you're outsourcing, then there's no opportunity for your kids to really do them. Where does picky eating come into play? You think that and, and I would offer maybe the helicopter parent, you know, the person that thinks they have to do everything. And I know that they may seem different, but I actually think they're connected sometimes.

Oh yeah, that's for sure. One of my theories, I mean, we know that picky eating is increasing if it's not shown statistically, and it is. Anyone can see it. When I talk about picky eating, I have a TedX talk out there and the comments are really interesting. You'll have a lot of people in the older generations be like, just make the kids eat. Like, nobody was a picky eater in my day, blah, blah, blah. It's very cute. But the point is, we do have a lot more picky eaters and some of it is very physiological. You know, we've created an environment where we're overloading with toxic burdens our kids. And that is actually sometimes showing up in picky eating tendencies. We've given our babies food pouches and they're not getting messy. They're not engaging with their food and sticking it on their face and on their head. They don't even get to smell the food before it swoops into their mouth out of these pouches. That's a major factor as well. So we were doing a lot in our culture in the name of convenience. That's creating picky eaters. Are parents the cause of picky eating? Research says no, but parents can exacerbate the problems that are happening. And that feel of helicopter parenting, of like, I have to protect my kid sometimes translates at the table into, oh, my child won't eat, you know, this roast beef or this roast chicken that I have. And as a parent, I want my child to stay alive, right? That's one of my primary drivers. As a parent, when my kid's not eating, the worry cycle goes into consciously or subconsciously, my kid's not gonna stay alive. I gotta keep them alive. Therefore, if they won't eat the wonderful roast I've prepared, I should feed them something else.

Chicken dino nuggets.

Dino nuggets, Mac and cheese, french fries, et cetera. And the convenience foods make it so easy for again, well intentioned, loving parents to tumble down this path of letting their kids choose what to eat, which is really, really, really dangerous.

I mean, it's interesting because of course restaurants perpetuate it because you go to a restaurant and there's a child's menu.

You want to know when kids menu started? It's back in the early 1900s. And generally families didn't take their kids out to eat because it was too expensive. That just wasn't a thing that was done. If adults were going out to eat, they were leaving their kids at home for sure. And so just as a marketing strategy, restaurants decided, what if we create a children's menu that's quite inexpensive and that's the hook to get parents to bring their kids in. But the original children's menus were either child sized portions of the adult meals or they were what dietitians at the time said kids should be eating, which was fairly bland food. But it was not at all the type of kids menu we see today. They were incredibly healthy, just low budget. And then somewhere I think in the 50s, we started to see this shift toward this like kid friendly food. It's just the whole convenience thing. The post World War II culture was pretty toxic.

Do you happen to know what's an example of what is considered a healthy food back then if. Cause you know, of course now it's like rice, there's some kind of protein sometimes and then there's an optional. I always find this fascinating optional vegetable or like applesauce. It's like, of course the kids are going to choose applesauce. You know what's even more alarming to me though, now I know that there are some dietary movements of like, oh, you shouldn't be eating vegetables. Right. But technically the restaurants are not doing that for this reason. Okay, but you would go to a restaurant, and this could be an adult meal or a kid's meal.

You.

And there will be zero vegetables on the plate. Zero. It will be literally meat, protein, and then like a tiny little bit of a starch or carb or something. That's it. And I'm like, so is this just a play to force us to get like a salad or to get, you know, sides, you know, what is this?

I have no idea. I'm not sure that I've seen a restaurant just completely not serve a salad or veggie. Could it just be that those are the. The most, like, sensitive things to buy? It's harder to keep produce fresh.

You can get those, but you have to pay extra for them. They don't actually come on the plate. And that's kind of a new thing, in my judgment. I feel like it used to be like there were categories. Every plate had a protein, a carb, and a vegetable, which I know are carbs too, but you know what I mean? It's just they had kind of that set thing. I always think of Stouffer's, you know, Hungry Men, TV dinners or something. They always had those little categories of the foods. And of course, most of us would just jump right into the apple pie piece. One or whatever it was. The apple crumble.

Yeah. Well, it's the same in school lunches, I feel, when you're describing a TV dinner and like, oh, yeah, that's literally a school lunch because there you have to have two starches and one protein and a fruit and a vegetable and a dairy. School lunches are a hot mess. I mean, these kids are. They're forced to take the vegetable. They're usually canned. They're usually over boiled and limp and brown. And, you know, like, to me, that's not an attractive vegetable. The number or pounds of vegetables that go in the trash after school lunch has to be magnanimous.

Yes, absolutely. The amount of food waste. I mean, the amount of food waste that happens in even a household. Right. I mean, sometimes we'll make food, the kids won't eat it, or they'll eat part of it. And then they'll just. They'll say, oh, I'll eat it tomorrow. And they never do, you know, and so that's even something we're working on in our own household. Now, how do you take what you're teaching other families? And how does it look in your household?

Oh, I'm a hot mess. No, I'm kidding. By and large, our kids eat very well. In fact, when you were talking about the kids meals. I was thinking the last time we went out as a family, my 10 year old, who's my youngest, actually did choose the side salad as his side. With the kids meal, I think it was, I mean, it was like grilled cheese. I sort of turn a blind eye when we're out because it happens so seldomly. Like, yeah, fine, if you want the white bread, grilled cheese, go ahead. But I thought it was really sweet that he ordered a salad and they were overwhelmed in the kitchen. We had to wait 55 minutes for our food. And when his finally came out, it was grilled cheese and french fries. And I thought he was going to cry. He was like, I really was looking forward to that. Salad says no American kid ever. That's not true. Lots of American kids love salads, but it's not seen as the norm. And so I do feel proud of my kids that they like their vegetables. Generally they, you know, they know how to eat a balanced plate. I remember one of the early times when my two older kids, they're now 16 and 19, when they were 9 and 12, they started making a dinner meal once every other week and they made pizza the whole first year. That was just part of our training. Like they're going to be able to not have to meal plan. They're just going to get mastery and that practice of walking into the kitchen and making some food. And then they mastered that recipe too. But the first time they served it, they served a side of steamed vegetables. And I thought, that's so. It's just so sweet. Like it shows what habits do for kids. That they knew that we generally would have a vegetable. But with pizza, right? Like James with pizza. Does anyone serve a side of steamed veggies? No.

A salad? Yeah, but not steamed veggies.

Pizza, maybe a salad, exactly. So I thought that was just really sweet that to them a meal had some vegetables in it. I was like, oh, I did something right.

It is interesting to kind of teach your kids right from a young age how to cook. And you let them model you or whatever, shadow you and then also participate. And then as they get older, like our 12 year old, sometimes she'll cook dinner. And it's always fascinating for us to sit back and watch what happens and not try to prompt her on what she should do, but more just like, well, okay, show us what you want to do and just see how all those teachings or that osmosis plays out. I can't say it's always a success, but when it is, A success. It's like, wow, that's amazing. You mentioned earlier that kind of fear that comes over parents of like, oh, my kid's not gonna get enough, or I'm so worried they didn't eat their vegetable at lunch, or they didn't do this or that. What kind of wisdom do you have to share with those parents now from all your experiences? Like, what would you tell that. Let's imagine that's you and your younger self, which I'm sure you had moments like that. I'm sure, you know, we all have. So what would you tell your younger self on how to cope with those fears?

Well, I love that we're on Everyday Ancestral, so I think we can take a page from, you know, years past. In the early 1900s and the 1800s, were parents popping in a tray of french fries and mixing up boxed Mac and cheese when their kids refused a meal? They didn't have that option. And so first, when we become clenched with fear, we have got to remind ourselves that this is one meal out of thousands of meals our kids will eat. This is one moment in 18 years of parenting. And for a child to refuse a meal or refuse a food, it absolutely cannot be a crisis that dictates what our next actions will be. We are the adult with the fully formed brain, and when we decide this is how our family's going to eat, we are going to eat more organ meats, whatever it is you decide how your family's going to eat and which health guru you're going to listen to about vegetables and meats and grains and carbs and all this stuff, right? But your kids and their actions and their emotions and their not fully formed brains should not be dictating changes in the very good decisions that we've already made. And so consistency is king when it comes to feeding kids. I'm thinking about a mom named Jessica who went through my no more Picky eating challenge and her son, very picky, had a very limited range of foods. When I told her that we need to, first of all, we need to let the kids choose how much they eat. Because to say child, you have to eat three pieces of broccoli is a losing proposition. Because think about this. If I actually say that, and I'm going to follow through, because good parents follow through on the words that come out of their mouth. That means if the child says no, I have to force feed them. That's terrible. It's disrespectful, it's disgusting. We can't say things as parents that we are not willing or not able to follow through on in a respectful manner. Right. I'm not going to make my child chew three pieces of broccoli. Therefore, I should never say you have to eat three pieces of broccoli because there are only losers in that situation. So this mom had fallen into that trap where she's like, if I don't tell him to eat three cucumbers, Katie, he's not going to eat any cucumbers. I don't think this is gonna happen. And I said, listen, you choose what goes on the table. You don't have to offer cucumbers and cookies, just offer cucumbers or offer. In this case, she chose to offer cucumbers and strawberries. And it was amazing because the first time she let him make his own choice about how much he ate, exactly the same number she was going to require he eat, she was blown away. And so for parents, the message there is we've got to be consistent in doing what we say we will do. We need to make the decisions on the nutrients and the foods that we offer, not our children. But we also need to allow our children to have agency in how much they eat. And what that really does is lifts the pressure off parents. If I realize it's not actually my job, it's not my responsibility to make sure that my kids are not only being served, but eating a perfectly balanced diet at every single meal for 18 years of their life. It's not my job. And if it's not my job, I don't have to stress about it. I need to provide well balanced options. Yes. Back to the TV dinner. Should we offer a protein? Probably a starch. If your family does well, you know, with those, probably a vegetable, maybe a fruit, maybe not. If you're giving lots of good choices and you're happy with your kids eating all those choices, you're winning. You do not have to stress about how much they eat. There are kids who have a lot of struggles with food. And, and I'm not saying that parents should never consider the fact that maybe their kid needs to, you know, widen their palate or open up. But step one, before we figure out what's going on in the kid's body, before we, you know, dig down to the root cause of their picky eating, step one is to remove that pressure at the table. Luckily, my younger self knew that. I think that's part and not always. I mean, I certainly have said, like, oh, I can't believe you're not eating. Like, just eat the broccoli But. But I knew even from a young mom age to like, make sure I provided a variety and to not require. And so a lot of my kids have cycled in and out of phases. Kid number three, John, he had a no green foods phase for like three years. 2, 3, 4, and 5. He really wouldn't eat green foods at all. And we just kept putting one piece on his plate every single day. And he had a couple pinnacle moments. He was in a friend's garden and started munching on green beans off the stalk. And I was like, oh, my gosh, he's eating green things. That was a turning point. We realized that Costco frozen green beans are nice and long and they taste like fresh. So he would eat frozen green beans out of the bag like the rest of us would have cooked. And I'd throw frozen on his plate. That's my convenience food swap.

Well, you bring up a really interesting point that, you know, a lot of people, they sometimes think they offer their kid it once and then they're like, oh, my kid won't eat it. I guess I won't serve that again. It's like what you're indicating is that, no, it's really about getting them familiar with things. And sometimes that does take time. How do you support that involvement for kids to be less picky? What does involvement look like?

Getting kids to interact with food away from the table is an amazing opportunity to reduce that pressure. Right? So if you're having power struggles at the table, your kids aren't eating everything you provide, it can be very stressful. And we know that physiologically stress reduces appetite. That's not what we want for our picky eaters at the table. Right. And so a great way to remove the stress at the table is to get kids involved with food in the kitchen. They can experience those smells and sounds and the texture with their fingers. And maybe they lick their fingers. That's okay. Especially picky eaters, we wanna worry about health over hygiene or variety over hygiene. But when kids are getting exposed to those foods without the pressure to eat it, it's going to really help their relationship with food. Because that's what I tell parents is like, you don't actually want your kid to just eat a balanced diet for 18 years. That's not your goal. Because then what happens when they leave your home? Right? They're not going to have any skills. You want to help your child build a really good relationship with food where they're open to trying new things, where they understand a little bit about balance, where they understand that food fuels their body, that if they want to do soccer or they want to do drama or play their instrument or do well in school, that they're going, oh, what I eat at breakfast, lunch, and dinner is actually going to impact those things that I care about. We really need to help our kids build a relationship, especially the tools and the skills to create that food for themselves. But we know science says that when someone's involved in the creation of something, they're more likely to accept it on the other end, partly because they want to close that loop and finish the job. So that means eating it at the table, partly because there's, like, that pride and ownership in creation. So kids are much more likely to taste or try things that they've had a part in. But also, physiologically, we need a lot of exposure. And the more preference or the more sensitive your child is, the more exposures they might need to a certain food before their body says this is okay. And luckily, the exposures aren't only that one little piece of broccoli on the plate for three years. It's anytime that they're washing the food, they're cutting the food, they're cooking it, they're serving it to their family. All of those count as exposures. And so we can stack those up a lot quicker if our kids are involved in the kitchen and not just at the table. So it's a faster process, too.

How much of parent modeling do you think is involved? I think of two specific experiences. So one is when we first visited some friends abroad, Their daughter was pretty young. We did not have kids. And they had, like, a little drawer that had all their. The goodies that the parents ate. And they didn't. It was their secret, you know, their secret drawer. Their daughter was young enough where it didn't come into play then, but it was just an interesting example of, like, oh, so you guys eat one way when you're not around your daughter and another way when you're with her. Fast forward to now. I have kids now. I was historically a very picky eater, and I worked through a lot of that going to culinary school. But there's still some pickiness in me, Like, I gotta be honest, right? So I was very intentional of not displaying my pickiness, you know, when the kids were 0 to 10 or something like that, you know, like, from very early on. And I've tried to maintain that as long as possible. And yet what's fascinating is that natural pickiness is just coming into play. And I have to admit part of me is like, oh, are they witnessing it in me? Am I modeling this? Or is this just kind of part of growing up? You know, you get empowered. What would be your thoughts around that?

I have 17 thoughts. Let me figure out where to start. You mentioned natural pickiness in your girls. I mean, there are some genetics of taste where it's possible that just physiologically you've passed on a bit of that like sensitivity or just, I mean, you're a chef. I tell my parents of picky eaters all the time, like maybe your child will be a connoisseur or a chef. They have more of an ability to taste those like subtle nuances in food, right? So it can look like a curse when you're just trying to get your kids to eat their vegetables. And maybe someday that will be a blessing that they have that gift, you know, of being able to really taste everything. You definitely may have passed on some pickiness without modeling. You asked if modeling is important. Holy cow, is it ever? It is maybe primary importance. It's up there. I mean, I think your friends did the right thing in keeping their adult stuff out of the way. I do tell parents, like the later you can introduce sweets and desserts to your kids, the better because they don't know what they're missing. You know, it's not like you're hurting that. I think my mother in law, my kid's grandma, she always used to think that I was like hurting them or withholding something fun from them, you know, And I'm like, listen, like they think raspberries are as good as M&MS. Because they don't know M&MS. Exist. Like just give them their raspberries, grandma. So each of my kids progressively like had their first sweet or dessert later in life. My youngest, he was three before he really even knew what desserts were. But I'm thinking of a mom who was asking me just the other day in our picky eating membership. She's like, listen, my husband is not on board. He won't do it. Like he will get up and make himself a hamburger or he will bring the sweets into the house. If I say, well, I don't think we should have, you know, this or that junk food or, or whatever. It's a super tough situation. It's very common that one or the other partner is not fully on board. And it makes a massive, massive difference in the kids progress toward building a good relationship with food. I told that mom, I said, you know what, get a black opaque tub. Put all his stuff, like agree, like, don't just do this to the husband, but like get him to be a little bit on board. Like, you don't have to change your eating. You just can't let the kids see you do this. This son was like maybe 10 or 11, he was a little older and he was really struggling with his own sort of sweets addiction. And like mom said, I can't do anything. I can't finish this process. I can't even start the process when they're all in the house. So I'm like, just have him like, this is dad's tub. It's unmarked, unlabeled, and he's just got to wait until the son's in bed or at school. That's not a long term solution. But I believe so strongly that our kids see what we do, they see what we do a lot more than they listen to what we say. They're going to emulate it for sure. I've got a lot of parents who are emotional eaters too, and they come in really worried, like, I don't want to pass this to my kid. Like, I see this deficit in myself and I'm very, very concerned that I will pass emotional eating onto my kid. I said, but you're in a good place because you see it, you recognize it, and you're going to be able to, you know, have conversations with your kids when they're older, but also keep that at bay in the primary part of family dinner. And that's one reason family dinner is so important, because modeling is how kids learn to eat, which is another change from ancestral eating. Right? Because we're so busy, sometimes we're doing the kids meal. Shoop. Here you go kids. Have your chicken nuggets and Mac and cheese. Or even if it's the meal that everyone's eating, the parents are buzzing around, you know, one parent might not even be home yet from work and the kids are eating separately from the adults. That is a recipe for problems. And so another thing I do is talk about we've got to have family dinners. We gotta have at least one adult and one kid eating together. If you can't have the perfect like family dinner where everyone's at the table and the candles are lit, like, that's okay, you don't need that. But a child needs an adult to be eating with them. That's how they learn.

I think these are some really strong takeaway points. I love that you're not just about diet, you know, like that you're not advocating a specific Diet that you're more about the skills and the practices, how we as a family nurture these skills. What I'm hearing, big takeaway is family dinners. We very much take this seriously. It's no phones at the table. We sit all together at the same time. We even sometimes recount. Give me the high of your day and what you're grateful for and what you learned. Like we, we sometimes do round robins, you know, around the table. So I love that as a really important takeaway towards supporting not only the health of the family, but the health of your child and what they're eating.

The Benefits start at 2 per week. So I think if people aren't eating family dinners and they hear that, they're like, oh, James and Katie, you're telling me something that's way too hard. Like, we can't do it. It's okay if you can't do it. Seven days, you got 21 meals a week. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. They all count.

That's a great starting point. Everyone two per week. If you're not doing any, two per week. And I love also the focus on involvement, like get the kids involved in the cooking. You have a program that is designed for specifically that. Will you talk about that?

Absolutely. Well, first of all, if people want to get knives in the hands of their children, because that is the trick to unlocking the produce section, Right. We gotta be able to cut up the fruits and vegetables and the meats and everything. Go to kidscookrealfood.com everydayancestral because I love giving away our knife skills class. It's always our members favorite. For ages 2 to teen, we teach the same way to hold the knife and the same way to hold the food. And so when your kids can start to build those basic skills, they feel super empowered. Their confidence raises and they're encountering those fruits and vegetables in a way that they can make friends with their food and build that healthy relationship. So that's what I do. I mean, that's what I do for families. I change the way kids interact with food. Whether that's learning to cook or helping picky eaters. It's a blessing. It's a blessing to be on this mission. Really.

Yeah. Well, you're on a fantastic mission and you're doing such great work reaching so many people. It's just such an honor to get to talk to you and learn more about how you support these families and of course your own family. Because I love the fact that that idea of walk your talk, right, you have four kids of different ages. Like, is there something that they have taught you that maybe is new, you know, and that you're now bringing into your program because of something that they showed you?

Oh, I learned from my kids and my failures all the time. I'm thinking of one incident, I think, because I do what I do, we talk about food a lot more than your average family. And even maybe mention, you know, I might be talking about picky eating. And so my little guy one day hadn't eaten his main course, and he walked over to me with his plate, and he said, mom, am I a picky eater? And he was so sad. He was morose. And I'm like, oh, buddy, like, what do you mean? He said, well, I took a chicken wing. We had, like, air fried chicken wings. He said, I took a chicken wing because I knew you'd want me to, but I didn't want to eat it. He's like, I don't like chicken, and I think I'm a picky eater. It was nice because I was able to use what I teach in my program. And I said, you know, you like barbecue chicken when we have it, right? Oh, yeah, I do. Basically, he doesn't like chicken that's hard to chew, which is super common for kids. Things that are hard to chew are just. They're difficult. And you don't like to do things that are difficult. I don't. As an adult, you probably don't. You're like, oh, the most difficult thing on my list. That's where I want to start. No, we like to do the easy stuff. So I just. I tried to, like, open his mind and say, okay, it's not that you don't like chicken. You just don't like this chicken with the bone and with the crunchy stuff. I said, it's okay. Do you like vegetables? Yeah, most of them. Okay. Would you try new foods sometimes? Yeah, that's okay, too. I'm like, so, buddy, like, don't worry, you're not a picky eater. That's what I like to do for parents is give them phrases that they can pull out, you know, when food instances happen or when power struggles are about to occur, to just settle that down. And I could see that his nervous system just settled. He kind of leaned into me and just breathed. I thought, okay, phew. Like, the crisis has passed.

That's awesome. Before we go, I want to just touch base about the textural side, the kind of the what we're seeing more and more. You know, kids are the canary in the coal. Mine. And we're seeing more and more kids with something different than what we maybe have labeled it in the past. It might have still been there. We just didn't have a label for it. I don't know. How are you working with parents with those kids?

We know that sensory processing disorder is an actual disorder, but there are a lot of kids who just struggle with sensory processing. And you're right, it's getting much, much more prevalent. My personal theory is that it's an overload of environmental toxins and or psychological stress. Our bodies are just crying out and saying, this is not okay. How does that come into play with eating? First of all, parents need to understand that sensory issues with eating aren't just the texture of the food. It's not just, you know, taste and touch. But even if kids are overwhelmed by a lot of sounds, imagine an elementary cafeteria, right? If you have a sound sensory processing struggle, you probably are just going to shut down and not eat. If you have a visual sensory processing struggle and you're served a plate with a bunch of food on it, you're going to shut down and you're not going to be able to eat. So all of our senses play into eating. So that's for sure, like step one for parents to understand and then that we want to work with our kids sensory struggles instead of against them. In years past, people might have said, like, just eat it. Like, it's fine. Like, you just need to eat this. But you like chicken. You like barbecue chicken. Why aren't you eating the chicken wing? I've pulled that too. Like, hey, wait, you like sauce on your pizza. Why aren't you putting sauce on your pasta? This is ridiculous. It's the same stuff. So I do think it's great for parents to understand that from a kid's point of view, what we see as chicken or tomato sauce is not assessed by the child's body. In the same way you got a, you know, honeycrisp apple versus kind of the, like, I don't know, multi, like sort of soft, like a Macintosh or a Red Delicious. Completely different foods to a child. Whereas the parent, we're speeding along going, just eat the apple. It's just an apple. You ate an apple last week, right? Completely different foods that air. Fried, crunchy chicken wing with the bones in it. Completely different food from a slow cooker. Shredded chicken thigh with barbecue sauce. And so that is definitely something my kids taught me and something that I have to work with a lot of parents on is never assume that because your child ate something in one form that they can access it in another form. And so when we talk about working with a sensory sensitivity, a lot of parents realize after, you know, hearing me speak and after thinking about this, oh, my kid really struggles with super crunchy things, or they struggle with meats that are hard to chew, or they struggle with, you know, mushy textures. And so, okay, they struggle with mushy textures. So we're not going to do refried beans. We're not going to do mashed potatoes. We're going to do crispy roasted chickpeas. We're gonna do hash brown potatoes fried up so that they have that crisp, you know, brown edge. Same food, completely different presentation, completely different experience for the kid. And it's good for kids to hear, too. When I talk to my son, you know, it's not that you don't like chicken, buddy. It's that some forms of chicken you prefer more than others. That allows the child to have a relationship with food. Instead of this black and white dichotomy of like, I like this, or I don't like this, or my parents are making me eat this. We need a lot of empathy and a lot of creativity when it comes to our kids with sensory struggles.

What this brings up, though, I absolutely see the point. And I know that it's something that is important to be mindful of. And then there's that other side of, like, well, this is first world problem. Like, that we should be just grateful that we have food and that, yes, it might be hard chicken tonight because it was white meat chicken, and we normally would use dark meat, which would have been softer, but one of the kids doesn't like dark meat. So this is what we did to make it so that everyone would eat. But then it makes the chicken hard. So I get it, buddy, that you don't like the hard chicken, but we have to eat because this costs money and money doesn't grow on trees. You get what I mean? Like, so where does that kind of being sensitive and mindful of your child's perspective and particulars, how does that mix with. Also the realities of the world is sometimes we don't get what we want, and yet we still have to endure.

And that harkens back to that ancestral eating, too, you know, where a lot of people will say, oh, there aren't any picky eaters in India because they have to eat what they have. First of all, it's not true. There are picky eaters everywhere. But does it tend to be higher in first world yes, because we're pushing that snowball down the hill every time we acquiesce and give the kids exactly what they want. So I do think there's a difference between, like, oh, you won't eat the main course. I'll go make you Mac and cheese, and, oh, you don't like these refried beans. I'm sorry, honey. This is what we're eating tonight. And then later that week or the next week, you try some crispy roasted chickpeas just to see if you can get your kid to encounter legumes in a different way. I do tell parents definitely not to make a second meal. And again, we cannot force our kids to eat. We can tell them this is what there is, and that's reality. Like, it's an unfortunate side effect of prosperity that we don't have to say, this is what there is. You know, 100, 200 years ago, most families, this was what there is. You want to starve, Go for it, kid. You know, that was reality. The side effect of prosperity and our culture and convenience food and cheap food and everything is that we don't have to say that anymore. Which means that parents get, like, constricted with fear that if I ever say, I'm sorry, this is all there is to eat. You can either eat it or you can go hungry. That's like a faux pas that they're going to be put in parenting jail if they say that. Not true. Not true at all. Should we try to make sure there are a number of options on the table? Yes. Might there be a meal where your kid just doesn't eat? Yes. Do you have to save them? No. Because life is life. Like, it actually kind of makes my day when we run out of something that my kids love, because I think it's good for them to feel a little bit of reality, you know, a little bit of scarcity. We don't always have everything we want, so how does that balance? It's just a dance, you know, it's just a dance. And it is a balance of sometimes saying or always saying, this is the meal that I have chosen. This is the meal I have served. You may choose what you want to eat and how much you want to eat, but you're not going to go get something else out of our first world pantry. Like, I do think that is the best. The kids have to have those boundaries to feel safe. On the other hand, should we be creative sometimes and make foods that we know our kids will love and help them to understand? Oh, I don't want to encounter potatoes in a mushy fashion, but I actually do like potatoes in a crunchy fashion. Or I don't really like the bitterness of raw broccoli. But when we roast broccoli, it brings out a little sweetness. And that's really interesting. And I can encounter that food in that way. See, we're building that relationship, but within boundaries.

Yeah, I like that a lot. And I feel like, to a degree, if you are getting the kids involved and you're eating together as a family, some of this stuff will naturally play out. Like, I'm thinking specifically last night, my youngest was like, the chicken's really hard. And I'm like, you know what? You're right, it is. That's a bummer. I don't like it either. But this is what dinner is tonight. So how about we just eat what we have and then next time we'll make sure we don't do it this way again, you know, so it's like this awareness of, like, yeah, you are right. Like, you're right to feel whatever you're feeling and acknowledge whatever they're experiencing. And it's like, we're not gonna waste the food. Sometimes we just have to eat what's in front of us.

And that's part of modeling too, you know, is that sometimes we eat things that are less preferred. I do try to encourage kids and families to serve small servings of new foods because I don't want kids to feel that pressure of like, oh, my gosh, my parents said I can't waste any food. So everything that hits my plate, I now have to eat. Because again, that interferes a little bit with that relationship. But I hear you. Sometimes we just say, this is what we got.

I love that, though. In general, it feels like there's just a mindfulness and an agreement that as parents, we don't want to be shaming our kids. And a lot of us that grew up in the 70s, 80s, we were shamed. Let's just be honest. We were. We were shamed. And we were taught to not leave the table until we finished the plate. And then that caused a lot of avalanche of other stuff. And I think that's why there's such a knee jerk reaction of just like, well, let the kids rule the house. Because we don't want to input, you know, all these phobias and issues that we all grew up with, you know, on them. But I think a healthy dose of boundary and listening and mindfulness really does go far.

That, like, clear your plate stuff. And the Shaving that you're talking about in the 70s and 80s, it's pretty deep seated. My dad was raised in the 40s and 50s and a couple months ago he said he went out to eat and he couldn't finish his meal. He apologized to the waitress that he didn't clear his plate. Like that is pretty. That's deep inside his being.

Oh, you're reminding me.

Wow. I know. I was like, dad, it's okay, just get a to go container.

You're reminding me though of like how my dad was always so proud that his plate was cleared.

That's generations. That's a number of generations. And I do think the current generation of parents is trying to change that. As with many changes, we tend to push the pendulum too far. We go, oh, this was way far on this side. We have to completely shift it to the other side. It's like, no, the other side is too permissive. We really want to go in the middle. But sometimes that's hard to do without a little adjusting, a little failure. Right. We're failing as a culture and we can pull it back to the center as a culture.

Thank you so much Katie for joining me today. Where can people find you kids cookrealfood.com or Katie Kimball?

Kids cook on Instagram.

We're going to put all of the links in the show notes and as Katie mentioned, you can get her free knife skills class. Just click that link. Thank you so much, Katie. I look forward to more TED talks from you in more classes. And I think actually we've already discussed in 2025 I will be participating in one of your summer classes, correct?

Yeah, life skills now summer camp. So definitely watch for that. No more TEDx talks, I don't think, but maybe a book. I have a book or two on picky eating. That'll be the next things to be birthed from here.

I can't wait to help promote that. Thank you for joining us and thank you for watching or listening Everyday Ancestral. Make sure to check out our other episodes. Share it with your friends. Share it with your family. If you enjoyed this episode, stay curious. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode episode hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links and resources mentioned@eatpluck.com that's e a t p l u c k.com and hey, if you know someone who gets something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well and keep it Ancestral.