It’s a fact: Kids are going to snack. From toddlerhood – when most pediatricians sanction two snacks a day – all the way to college and beyond, kids will consume between-meal nibbles. It’s often up to you whether these snacks contain nutritional value, or whether they’re just sources of empty calories. The snacks you choose can also keep the planet in good shape, as well as limiting your child’s exposure to potentially harmful chemicals. Let’s pit some standard snacks against their greener alternatives.
In The Not-So-Green Corner: Trader Joe’s Fruit Crushers
In The Green Corner: Revolution Foods Organic Mashups Squeezable Fruit
My son loves fruit sauce – specifically, Trader Joe’s Fruit Crushers. They’re packaged in a cool squeezable pouch with a little spout. I’d make my own fruit sauce – it’d be cheaper, and I’d be adding less packaging to the waste stream – but without the special pouch, my son just isn’t interested.
Enter Revolution Foods’ Mashups fruit sauces. They feature the same individually packaged pouch-and-spout design as Crushers, and they come in tropical, berry and grape flavors. Unlike Crushers, Mashups contain only organic fruits. They have no fat and they’re vitamin-rich: for example, the berry flavor blends organic apple, blackberry, strawberry and blueberry purees. It has 40 calories per pouch, and 10% of the RDA of Vitamin C. It’s delicious – take it from me, who tasted my son’s Mashup and liked it so much that I ran to the fridge to get my own. (Luckily, they come in packs of four.) Plus the cap, spout and pouch are all recyclable. If your child is refusing to eat whole fruit – kids can sometimes decide they’re on “fruit strike”– Mashups can function as a tasty, nutritious, fun and ecologically sound alternative.
In The Not-So-Green Corner: Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Crackers
In The Green Corner: Annie’s Homegrown Organic Cheddar Bunnies
At first glance, these two snacks look very similar. Goldfish have 140 calories per 55 crackers: Bunnies have 150 calories per 50 pieces. Goldfish contain 5 grams of fat, and Bunnies contain 7. Neither contains cholesterol or trans fat. Both use annatto, a natural food coloring derived from South American achiote nuts, to give their crackers that golden cheddar hue. Neither contains substantial amounts of fiber, vitamins or minerals. In short, these snacks are purely for fun rather than nutritional value, and OK to munch on in moderation.
The difference is in the ingredients. Annie’s Bunnies are almost 100% organic – even down to the spices. Their use of organic wheat flour saves your child from possible exposure to 16 different types of pesticides commonly used to grow wheat. Even though spices are usually used in tiny amounts, organic spices are still much healthier: conventional spices are often “sterilized” with ethylene oxide gas, which kills E.coli, but might also cause cancer. They can also be irradiated, which changes their chemical composition and might make them toxic or carcinogenic. As well as protecting your kids from even the smallest amounts of toxins, your choosing organic spices protects the environment. In the past, some spice farmers clear-cut, or removed all trees, from pieces of rainforest land in order to plant their crops. Organic spice farmers agree not to continue this destructive process.
The only non-organic ingredients in Annie’s Bunnies are annatto extract and yeast. Organic yeast is a controversial topic: the USDA’s National Organic Program says yeast can’t be certified as organic, because it’s a non-agricultural substance (i.e., not a plant or an animal.) Others argue that yeast’s production often involves harmful chemicals and produces polluted wastewater, and that conscientiously produced yeast should bear an organic label. Perhaps because of this ongoing argument, many organic foods contain conventionally produced yeast. US-certified organic annatto has only been available since last April, and so won’t have made it into many foods yet. It’s true that Annie’s Bunnies would be a better snack food if it were 100% organic, but it’s still the greener choice of cracker.
In The Not-So-Green Corner: Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar
In The Green Corner: Chocolove Organic 61% Cocoa Chocolate
Kids like chocolate. And, no matter how much you try to stop them, they’ll find a way to eat it. Why not offer them something better than a sneaky trip to the vending machine for a Hershey bar? Chocolove is a small company based in Boulder, CO. It’s dedicated to eco-conscious business practices: its organic chocolate bars have wrappers made of recyclable and renewable materials, it runs its company truck on biodiesel, and it asks vendors to limit their packing materials.
Dark chocolate is better for your kids than milk: the more cocoa content chocolate has, the more flavonoids it contains. These are antioxidant chemicals that promote heart health. A Hershey bar contains only about 11% cocoa. If you’re worried that darker chocolate might be too rich or strong for your child, watch the cocoa percentage, and go as low as you can. Good-quality milk chocolate has around 33% cocoa content.
Recently, companies like Hershey have come under fire for buying from chocolate suppliers on the Ivory Coast, where child labor is rampant. Chocolove founder Timothy Moley has a supplier on the Ivory Coast, but says on the company Web site: “Our policy states that we will not buy chocolate or ingredients from firms that use or reinforce the use of exploited labor of any sort. Our chocolate supplier does not engage in and does not support forced or exploitative labor practices.”
