Healthy Snacks

Thing 2’s elementary school instituted a new district wide school nutrition policy which was explained in detail at Back to School Night. It aims to combat the childhood obesity epidemic afflicting this country, where one out of three American children under the age of 18 is overweight.


It’s a good policy, one that prohibits snacks whose first ingredient is sugar (i.e., everything in our pantry) and encourages others like low fat cheese sticks, raw veggies and fruit, low sugar apple sauce and rice cakes.

I haven’t had the chance to cavort in the Devil’s Playground since I learned about the policy, so I am scrambling to put together permissible snacks. This morning Thing 2 asked me for a fruit kabob. So I looked around the kitchen and pulled together what I could. Here is what I concocted:

It’s made up of (five day old) grapes, (not quite ripe) honeydew and bottled cherries. The bottled cherries are for color, to make the kabob appealing to a 10 year old. The second ingredient listed on the label is high fructose corn syrup (just linked to pancreatic cancer), while further on down the list is Red Dye #40, aka “Coal Tar Dye.” Those of you with really sharp eyes will notice my red cutting board (likely crawling with poisonous microbes and deadly bacteria). Also of note is that I didn’t have any long skewers, so I used toothpicks which I found stored in a bag with a drippy bottle of Elmer’s glue.

I just want people to know that I am making good use of my time during unemployment.