Turning lunch into a food fight

'Mummy, mummy, can we buy the Barbie beans?" pleads my five-year-old daughter as we make our way past the shelves piled high with baked beans and tinned pasta shapes packaged as Thomas the Tank Engine, Postman Pat, Bob the Builder, Barney and the ubiquitous Barbie. "And please can we get these yogurts?" she adds, pointing to a six-pack of fromage frais with Winnie the Pooh smiling out at us.

Shopping for food with your children in tow has become a game, every aisle you turn into grabbing their attention with everything from fruit juices to cheese colourfully packaged with familiar cartoon characters.

While toy promotions emblazoned across cereal boxes have been around for decades, branding staple foods such as cheese, beans, yogurts and juices with the latest cartoon craze is a relatively new phenomenon. And, whether you like it or not, it works.

Most children want to buy the food branded with their favourite cartoon character, giving no thought to the taste of the product, never mind its nutritional value. Often, parents who succumb to pleas will later find themselves throwing out a half-finished yogurt or a miniature cheese that has barely been tasted.

"We believe that children's mealtimes should be enjoyable and fun while at the same time ensuring that children eat food that is wholesome and made from the finest quality ingredients, free from artificial colours, preservatives flavours and fortified with vitamins and iron," says Linda Dillon of the marketing department of HJ Heinz, which makes Barbie and Thomas the Tank Engine pasta shapes.

Sweet words. But isn't linking food with entertainment a crass way to encourage children to eat? Just think how fast-food chains entice children into restaurants with "collectable" toys. And isn't it based on the increasingly widespread assumptions that you have to persuade children to eat and that they won't naturally feel hungry and look for food?

"It is up to parents to look at the labels on food and compare products before buying them. In these Celtic Tiger days, there is a bigger market for specialised products. Many people don't even know the price of the foods they are buying or whether such character-branded foods are more expensive or not," says Olive Nolan of the Irish Nutrition and Dietetic Institute.

In her book The Food Our Children Eat, the food journalist Joanna Blythman says we live in a world that assumes children must be catered for separately, from a repertoire of food designed to please their distinctive palate. These foods, she says, usually consist of a small selection of highly processed, long-life foods heavily loaded with fat, sugar and salt.

"The pressure on children to eat junk is so strong and so widespread that many parents simply throw in the towel," she writes. "And there's succour to be had from the feeling of safety in numbers. If all those freezer cabinets are full of pre-fried, re-formed bits of cheap animal protein targeted at children, surely they can't be too bad." Instead of being given the best food available, Blythman suggests, children are getting the worst.

So how do we break out of this habit of feeding children with special foods that are increasingly being marketed at them? Blythman says, simply, that we should reintegrate children into mainstream eating. She believes they can come to appreciate and desire a wide range of good, wholesome, unprocessed food if the adults who feed them are committed to the idea.

An Bord Bia, the Irish Food Board, is promoting a similar message. It wants to discourage parents from cooking special meals for their children, encourage them to turn off the television during mealtimes and remind them that children will mimic the eating habits of their parents.

These points and many others are outlined in a new series of leaflets on healthy eating for young children, which will be available from An Bord Bia next month.

Marian Rollins, an education officer at the Airfield Trust organic garden and farm in Dublin, cites the school gardens project as another way to try to counteract children's bombardment by processed-food manufacturers. Rollins was the co-ordinator of the project, which began in 1996, with 150 primary and post-primary schools around the Republic setting up a garden.

"When children get the chance to plant vegetables, see them grow, nurture them, harvest them and eat their own produce, they do learn the value of good food," she says. Rollins now runs a schools programme at the Airfield Trust, whose hands-on approach involves pupils spending a day in the organic garden and on the farm.

"Food Dudes", fruit and vegetable cartoon characters who attack junk food, have been one marketing device used by An Bord Glas, the horticultural development board, to encourage children to eat four or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day.

Teresa Brophy of the board says school poster competitions, in which children draw fruit and vegetables as cartoon characters, have helped to build up an awareness of the nutritional value of fruit and vegetables. Tastings in supermarkets also lead to leaps in sales in the following weeks. Whether such initiatives can beat the multinational food companies at their own game remains to be seen.

An Bord Bia, the Irish Food Board can be contacted at 01-6685155 (www.bordbia.ie). An Bord Glas is at 01-6763567 (www.bordglas.ie)

Blackrock Education Centre, in association with the Airfield Trust, continues to offer school-garden courses for teachers (01-2984301)

The Food Our Children Eat, by Joanna Blythman, is published by Fourth Estate, £8.99 in UK