Healthy nursery menus – 5 tips for eating and learning without restrictions

By Becky Johnson, Play and Learning Director, Eureka!

School dinners have been on the agenda for a few years now as concerns about childhood obesity grow. Jamie Oliver has championed healthy, interesting meals for school children and now a new Government report is calling for guidelines for nursery menus.

The new report suggests a bank of example menus to provide more detailed voluntary guidance for nursery and childcare facilities. Whilst this may help some nurseries as a rough guide for what a healthy menu looks like, there is a danger of making guidelines too restrictive and unaffordable.

The Soil Association responded to the report by saying that some foods should be banned all together and mandatory standards put in place. But is this practical and will it help children develop healthy eating habits later in life?

Here at the Eureka! nursery, we recognise that meal times are a crucial part of children’s learning and provide opportunities for small group discussions, empowering children to make choices and encouraging them to experience food from around the world. No food is a bad food – a healthy, practical menu needs to be flexible.

Here are some simple tips for ensuring that nursery children eat healthily and learn about it in the process…

1.       Use local, seasonal foods in nursery menus: Local, seasonal foods are easy and cheap to get hold of and provide learning and talking points for the children. Knowing where their food comes from and keeping them in tune with the time of year will help them develop good habits and keep them healthy.

2.       Make meal times a social event in nurseries: Meal times should be a social event for children and seeing adults sitting down and eating healthy food gives them positive role models and sets a good example in terms of eating habits and manners. Not only is it important that nursery staff eat with the children, it is also important than they eat the same things.

3.       Try something different with your nursery menu: We recently made chocolate chilli at the Eureka! nursery. It was a healthy recipe, got the children excited and provided a talking point about experimenting with what foods go with others. It is a really simple way of making lean meat and vegetables interesting. Also, if the children have focussed on a topic in the nursery, such as countries of the world, it can be translated into meal times through the menu to help their learning.

4.       Get the children involved in cooking and preparing for meal times: Where possible, involving children in cooking will not only teach them valuable life skills but also show them where the food that ends up on their plate comes from and get them thinking about what they put in their bodies.

5.       Listen to feed back from parents and give children a choice: There is no point in serving healthy, interesting food that the children don’t like. Providing an element of choice and listening to feed back from parents about what is and isn’t working will help children develop tastes and make choices about what they eat now and later in life. If it is dictated to them, they will only find ways of eating the foods they want outside of nursery – like the parents passing fish and chips through the gates on Jamie’s School Dinners. Working with parents on the menu will help them to understand the importance of preparing healthy, varied meals at home as well. And, of course, it is important to stick to the cultural and other dietary needs of the children.

In terms of guidelines for nursery menus, I’m not convinced that we need anything more than what is already out there – the Eatwell plate and 5-a-day advice. What is really needed is advice on how to make meal times as engaging as possible for nursery children so that they develop a good relationship with food from an early age. What do you think?