Food related activities help increase your child’s familiarity with food. With familiarity comes comfort and with comfort comes a willingness to try new foods.
But playing with food can seem like a waste (I assure you that any food used in activities with a fussy eater isn’t going to waste – the positives far outweigh the negatives of food that can’t be eaten) so which food related activities can we do that don’t involve actually using food?
Do you have a play kitchen or some toy food? If so, how about preparing a ‘meal’ together or preparing a teddy bear’s picnic? Talk about what you might make and what you need to put it together or just let your child’s imagination run wild and discuss what they are concocting. Don’t forget to tell them how delicious it is and practice hiding your disgust!
Get crafty. Grab a paper plate (or a piece of card cut into a circle) and design a meal. You could cut pictures of food out of magazines or from junk mail, use scraps of paper or wool in different colours to represent different foods, or simply draw them.
Now is the perfect time to be planting salad items or vegetables and watching them grow. If you can’t get hold of any vegetable seeds how about planting pips from an apple or orange, the sprouted end of a spring onion or the core of a lettuce, the stone from an avocado or even more whacky, the top of a pineapple?!