In a few weeks, Aviva Goldfarb will be making zucchini noodles with a puppet named Zach Zucchini. A crusader for healthy family dinners, Goldfarb will guest star in a cooking video for Super Sprowtz, a New York-based children’s edutainment company, with a band of veggie superheroes such as Curtis the Carrot, whose stores of beta-carotene give him supreme vision, and Zach the Zucchini, who is, for some reason, a surfer. (The fact that Zach will be pulverizing his own people in the upcoming production is likely to be lost on the target audience.)
While Super Sprowtz marks a new foray — one of many — for Goldfarb, she’s long been spreading the joy of sharing healthy, homemade meals.
“The best thing you can do is to try to step back, most likely on the weekends, and plan ahead,” says the Chevy Chase, Maryland, mom of two teens and creator of The Six O’Clock Scramble, an online family dinner planner. Plan a few meals to make for the week ahead, use a grocery list to avoid extra shopping trips and food waste, and make it fun, she advises.
A sense of adventure can help prod picky eaters to test their palates, says Goldfarb, who suggests getting kids’ input in choosing and ranking a new dish, and praising them for trying out foods. Whenever one of her kids liked a healthy, new food, she and her husband would perform a celebratory chicken dance and add the item to a running list of kid-approved foods on the fridge.
They also reserved dessert for Friday night dinners — Goldfarb tired of the power struggle surrounding sweets — and the kids’ favorites (mac and cheese, for example) for babysitter nights.
“They’re not overnight going to start accepting every new food on the table, but if you don’t start somewhere, then you’re going to lock yourself into years of your kids having very limited diets, because you’re not helping them evolve,” she says.
A former health care reform activist, Goldfarb’s current career resulted from the common challenge of making fast, healthy meals for her own family. As she swapped recipes and shared stories, co-authoring her first cookbook in 1998, “Peanut Butter Stew and Couscous, Too,” she realized that food provided her with a better path toward public health.
“It’s such a communal thing that everybody wants to talk about,” she says. “It was like the antidote for me working in D.C. politics.”
In 2003, Goldfarb launched The Six O’Clock Scramble, which is both practical and advocacy-oriented, documenting the decline of family dinners in America and linking their regularity to such benefits as healthy weight, improved academic performance and less risky behavior in children and teens.
Four cookbooks later — she just completed one for the American Diabetes Association, due in January — the site has given Goldfarb a public health platform. Among other roles, she advises Real Food for Kids — Montgomery, an organization that presses for healthier food in Montgomery County, Maryland, Public Schools, and contributes to the “Today” show and The Washington Post.
Still, she crafts new recipes, often trying to use up fresh foods on hand — a recent effort yielded sweet potato topped with broiled Gorgonzola that’s now on her site.
Speaking of sweet potatoes, Goldfarb has been serving them to her son, 18, and daughter, 15, for ages. Last year, they decided that they do like them.
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