CHRISTINE AND PENNI DO TAG NUTRITIONAL WRESTLING.....
Duncan,
I make my own salsa. We eat tons of it. It's easy and extremely healthy. Has nothing but tomatoes, peppers, onion, garlic, spices, and a jalapeno in it.
When the choice is having the kids eat something junky and ignoring vegetables altogether, I would rather they load a tortilla with cheese and salsa anyday. Even if they use chips--they know they're expected to eat huge mounds of salsa on them; so surely this is better than getting a bag of chips from a machine because the school lunch offers spinach.
True story. In the Blue Ridge Mountains where I grew up, schools frequently had collard greens or kale on the menu. This is a poor relative of spinach. It's served drowned in vinegar, a soggy, overcooked and stinky, stringy mass of goo. I had never tasted this strange stuff before-my father being English- my mother from Conn.- but the smell was enough to make my stomach roil. Our fifth grade teacher for some reason decided that we had to clean out trays, regardless of personal preferences. (Children were starving in India.)Every day it appeared on my tray, I carefully stuffed the gooky glump into my milk carton until one day when the teacher snuck up behind me and caught me in the act. She made me eat it out of my milk carton!!!! All of it. It was child abuse at its most embarrassing and cruel. I gagged and choked, but since I have a stomach of steel, I at least did not throw up in my tray. All my mother said was, "It was probably good for you." She had obviously never eaten kale. |
