Flickr/dailyfood

a bagel -- with goat cheese

The headline of Josh Ozersky's April 4 Time broadside "Are Foodie Kids the Sign of End Times?" is so weird it almost made us choke on these morels and white asparagus tips in abalone dashi we're scarfing down for breakfast. To keep it brief, Ozersky thinks that there is a trend of kids getting too posh about food. In his mind, parents are obnoxiously encouraging their children to have gourmet tastes before they're old enough to tie their shoes; fancy restaurants are catering to them; and mainstream media outlets like The New York Times are peddling annoying, cheery stories about the whole thing.

Ozersky seems to consider it snobbery, another way for elitists to peer down the edges of their brandy snifters at the rest of us. He suggests that it's "wrong" to "encourage prepubescent epicureanism in a country where 46 million people are on food stamps," and thinks kids ought to spend more time in kitchens and less in restaurants.

"I'm not against kids enjoying good food, even grown-up food like sushi or goat cheese risotto balls ... [b]ut being a foodie means having an aroused and rarefied interest in unusual foods," Ozersky writes. "And that, inevitably, means an implicit detestation of regular, crappy foods."

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Welcome Books

Funny Foods

​Sure, the intended audience for Funny Food: 365 Fun, Healthy, Silly, Creative Breakfasts, to be released later this month, is a few decades younger than we are. But hey, we could all use a little more food fun in these days of infinite online cassoulet critics, no? And it is pretty funny how those two fried eggs sporting a crazy kale toupee and that topless sunbathing strawberry lounging in a pool of steel-cut oatmeal look an awful lot like your (lovely) new neighbors.

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Rob and Ben Kimmel/Wandermonster

"What Happens When You Bury a Toy?"

​This week, most Los Angeles-area kids return to school -- back to assigned seats, over-stuffed backpacks, and 30-minute lunch periods. Those whirlwind lunches are particularly hard on those who don't bring food from home. They stand in line for half the period, obtain a tray brimming with beiges and browns and squeeze into a dirty, grease-slicked table to pick at whatever they can stand the smell of. Even kids who pack a lunch often have to put up with cold, congealed leftovers.

To sweeten the midday charade, one Western Massachusetts-based dad and his precocious son have turned school lunch into a time for bonding and collaboration. Each morning, Pratt Institute graphic design professor Rob Kimmel draws half a comic on a sticky note affixed to the inside of his son Ben's lunchbox. At school, in between bites, Ben completes the comic and shows it to his father in the afternoon.

Compiled on the site Wandermonster, the comics are clever and whimsical, shot through with the sort of goofy, perfect logic only children really possess.

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Scenes from LudoBabyBites.

​How does a top-notch chef known for his incredible culinary talents and mercurial temperament feed his own kids? We're about to find out.

Chef Ludovic Lefebvre and his wife Krissy, the recent parents of twins, will launch LudoBabyBites, a 12-episode web series designed to "promote healthy eating for modern families." Partnering with upscale stroller manufacturer Bugaboo, the show will offer a new episode every Tuesday following its December 6th debut.

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Ellie Strikes Weird/flickr

A vegetable lurks within.

​Late Monday, Congress released the final version of a bill responding to new school lunch standards proposed by the USDA. The Obama administration wanted to make school lunches more healthful, cutting back on the endless procession of potatoes, corn, refined flour, and sodium. One such provision was that a mere two tablespoons of tomato paste -- the quantity required to blanket a slice of pizza -- not be considered a "vegetable." (Anybody remember the Reagan administration's failed attempt to reclassify ketchup from a condiment to a vegetable?)

No, said Congress. Two tablespoons of tomato paste is a vegetable, and a slice of pizza serves as its conveniently filling transportation device. The U.S.D.A. had slyly suggested that a brimming half-cup of tomato paste might work, an amount even a lunch line pizzaloo would find excessive. The idea was to cut back on the pizza, but Congress didn't blink.

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Even with the world being a brutal, violent place and people generally malevolent and scummy, peace will always get more of a chance than wrinkly green nubs from the freezer. On his latest album, Give Peas A Chance, famous children's musician Tom Chapin (brother of Harry, father of semi-locals Lily and Abigail, a.k.a. The Chapin Sisters) lends his voice, guitar and storytelling acumen to the advocacy of good food, not least of which is the oft-maligned pea.

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​Once upon a time, Girl Scouts received badges for staying fit, enjoying nature, and peddling cookies. Now, for the first time in 25 years, they can also win a badge for achievement in a wide variety of increasingly relevant fields. In an October 12 All Things Considered report, Girl Scouts of the America spokesperson Alisha Niehaus told host Guy Raz that scouts could earn a badge for Financial Literacy, Website Design, Entertainment Technology. There is also a Science of Happiness Badge and -- naturally -- a badge for being a "Locavore."

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Sur la Table

spoon as paint stick

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Shopping for cooking gear can be breathtakingly expensive. Copper pots! French sauté pans! Espresso machines! But sometimes it can be pleasantly cheap, especially if you like to hang out at hardware stores and garage sales and thrift shops. Sometimes even the fancy cooking stores have stuff that you can actually buy these days, like these seriously fun nonreactive silicon stir sticks from Sur La Table. Do they do anything a normal wooden spoon doesn't already do? Of course not, but they're cool and they won't melt or scratch pots and they're $6.95.

Another thing they have going for them is that kids love them. "It's just like a paint stick. Awesome," said one such kid recently, when dragged into the store in search of far more boring stuff. "Jackson Pollock," murmured the other kid appreciatively, the one who still throws spaghetti on the ceiling to demonstrate Newton's law of something-or-another, despite repeatedly being told that it is not a good way to test the doneness of pasta. In any event, a good way to get your kids to stir the risotto.

Flickr/MGShelton

high school classroom

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In our spare time, we teach -- nothing too crazy, just six periods a day, most days a week. Our students -- 9th graders -- are caught in that weird, fuzzy maelstrom of very early adulthood, a liminal period to be sure. They are full of bravado. They recount heavily embellished sexual exploits to classmates and bray at rivals. They write graffiti, probably drink, perhaps smoke, curse, and bury their heads in their hoodies. They're also still kids. They clutch stuffed animals and cover their binders with colorful stickers. They are short, skinny, squeaky, and sweet. While we love and respect our students, their eating habits disgust us. To cope with our revulsion -- and to help banish the rage we feel every time we must lean over to scoop up a wrapper or peel -- we've compiled a list of the Top 5 Snacks Most Commonly Enjoyed By 9th Graders. Enjoy.

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Photo by Anne Fishbein

Is there a pediatric burn specialist in the house? Soot Bull Jeep.

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Sometimes eating out with kids is all about the path of least resistance, which if you peruse OpenTable Diners' Choice list of the country's 100 most kid-friendly restaurants, seems to be the prevailing philosophy of those who voted. In response, the SF Weekly published a selection of San Francisco's Most Kid-Unfriendly Restaurants. Turns out we can think of quite a few of these in our town, too, and not just ones that routinely win Most Romantic awards.

We understand wanting to expand children's horizons and push comfort zones. That's great -- until they push back. And when that happens, parents and caretakers feel it, hard. So let us spare you some pain by sharing our picks for L.A.'s top 10 least family/kid-friendly restaurants, aka where people without children are sure to keep going.

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