Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #180650 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• 50 pages

Customer Reviews

Recipes Are Solid, Framing Text is Mush
This is a lovely little book, and the recipes are great. Creative, fun, and nutritious, and many of the recipes if not most of them can be prepared with the kids' participation.

But the best feature of the book is that it's spiral-bound, which means you can rip out pages 1-10 and responsibly recycle them. These are ostensibly about "Planning Your Snacks" but are full of unreconstructed giblets of residual anthroposophic philosophy about food that has far more in common with folklore or urban legends than it does with any modern understanding of food science and nutrition. This leads to the authors wholly digesting and extruding such thoughts as, when recommending against feeding children tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and potatoes, "The normal protein forming process in the seed, takes the abnormal course of making alkaloids, and the nightshades have an above-average nitrogen content. As adults with an ego fully incarnated, we are able to deal with this influence, but for a child whose ego is in the process of incarnation and body building, it is a different matter." You might as well start blaming malaria on bad vapors from tomatoes once again. Or, in recommending against eating them: "Bananas contain good nourishment but not much vitalizing force."

The introductions to each section are similarly baked with falderal and topped with a fine grating of phooey. For example, an erroneous blanket statement about the historical (well, "cosmological" to use the book's own word) origins of the names of the days of the week, and disturbing pseudo-science such as "Rice...acts more on the digestive system than the nerve-sense system and therefore does not stimulate a wakeful consciousness" followed immediately by the statement "Rice is one of the main foods of peoples in India and the Far East," which could be construed as racist (rice doesn't stimulate a wakeful consciousness, and those people in the far east eat a lot of rice.) I suspect the authors did not mean to imply such, given the general universal humanism of the Waldorf approach, but it is a sign of foggy thinking that blanket statements about the food without a grounding in chemistry or nutrition science pepper this tome. (See Harold McGee "On Food and Cooking" for some actual science.)

Why the heck do I still give this four stars? As noted, the recipes are good, simple, nutritious, and many of the sidebar activity suggestions are great. In this sense, there's a parallel to Waldorf education itself: the basic core practices and ideas are incredibly sane and humane, but the metaphysical mush, if taken without the context of the intervening century of psychological and developmental research, threatens at times to overwhelm that strong core of decent educational practice.

So, I do recommend it: just read the recipes and skip the framing text. The book will go down easier and your ego will have less trouble incarnating it.

A very practical resource
This is an extremely useful and practical book full of simple ideas and recipes for snacks and lunches. The information on planning snacks definitely comes from an anthroposophical bent, which might be troubling to some readers, but overall it is a wonderful resource. It includes sample snack menus, information of eating "a grain a day" (as well as the energetic properties of the grains), and sections on bread, soup, fruit, birthday cakes & muffins, and special foods for the festivals. We use ours daily!

Yummy and healthy snacks
Though this is a thin book, it is full of good ideas for healthy snacks for kids that adults will also enjoy. The recipes are clear and easy to follow. I appreciate that there are plenty of egg-free and dairy-free snacks, which works well for us (household of food allergies). If you are used to lots of mainstream, store-bought junk food, the food might taste funny to you, but if you are into healthy foods and healthy snacks, it is a great book. The kids and I have been having fun with the recipes, and modifying some of them to add our own touches. I bought one as a gift for a friend, too.