Starved For Ideas On How To Feed Vacationing Kids?

Getting kids to eat healthily at home can be a struggle. On a family vacation, it can be a losing battle.

Most children’s menus at restaurants and airlines offer hamburgers and fries, macaroni and cheese, hot dogs and pizza as the standard fare - with ice cream, cookies or brownies for desert.

Menus like that make sugar, salt and fat into major food groups, as do the fast-food restaurants that line U.S. highways and the convenience stores at gas stations - veritable palaces of processed, greasy and sugary food.

Kids will gobble this stuff if it’s what’s around them and what’s offered. And it will help push them a little farther down the road to crummy eating habits and obesity, fast becoming one of America’s most common health problems.

But, thankfully, some restaurants are putting healthy alternatives on children’s menus.

On a recent visit to Harrison Hot Springs in southern British Columbia, I watched some kids at the Harrison Hotel restaurant gobble a plate of raw vegetables with dip, ordered from the children’s menu. They even ate all their broccoli.

On the other side of the continent, the Four Seasons hotel in Boston includes a fruit bowl and vegetables with a low-calorie dip on its children’s menu, good alternatives or at least supplements to the usual hot dogs and grilled-cheese sandwiches.

Even if a children’s menu offers some healthy choices, it still encourages kids to expect the same bland food wherever they go. Of course, most children are not adventurous eaters. But if they’re never even exposed to different foods, they’ll never try them.

A trip is a good time for kids to see and sample different foods - and experience some cultures’ culinary differences.

Here are some suggestions on how to get your kids to eat healthily - and a bit more adventureously - on the road.

Let them eat appetizers: Order burgers or spaghetti if your kids are clamoring for them. But order an appetizer, too, that the kids might like. They’re usually small-sized and low-enough priced that you could experiment.

Get some greenery: Order a salad or vegetable plate and share it out. Don’t insist that the kids eat it; that’s the quickest way to turn kids off any food. But make it available.

Check on airline meals: Before a flight, phone the airline and ask what the children’s meal is. If it’s the usual fatty, non-fresh stuff, avoid it. Order a vegetarian meal instead, which usually contains cheese, fruit or vegetables.

If your kids will go ballistic if they don’t get the airline’s special kid’s meal, at least supplement it with some fresh stuff from your plate or bring along some snacks of fresh fruit and carrots.

Curtail the fast food: McDonald’s and other fast-food chains are everywhere. Eat at them when time and your kids’ temperament makes it the best solution. But go to some ethnic restaurants, too, when you’re traveling in North America - Japanese, Greek, Mexican, Chinese - so the kids can try other food.

Have a picnic: Eating in restaurants three times a day with children can be exhausting. They fidget and whine while the meal seems to take forever to arrive. Eating out for three meals a day with a family also gets expensive.

Instead, go to a bakery, a farmer’s market, a delicatessen or a good-quality supermarket and let the kids choose the food. (In Europe, shopping for food at the various small stores can be a cultural adventure in itself.)

On the highway, have your picnic in a rest stop or park. In cities, even the most urban such as New York or Rome, there’s always a bench in a square, a park or the steps of a museum - someplace to picnic.

Dine in your room: If the weather is too crummy to picnic and your family is too tired for a restaurant, eat in your hotel room. Room service for all the family can be too expensive, so get takeout food from a nearby restaurant or get food delivered. Cut breakfast costs by feeding young children fruit and cereal such as Cheerios in the room. Pack a couple of plastic bowls and spoons for in-room eating; keep the milk cold in the room’s ice bucket if there’s no mini-fridge.

Keep grazing: There’s no particular virtue in eating three meals a day. For young kids on the road, more and smaller meals may be the way to go, as long as they’re snacking healthily.

For munching on the road, or for hotel-room snacks, pack non-messy, fresh food: apples, grapes, carrot sticks, low-fat pretzels, crackers and whole-grain chips.

For drinks, the mini-size juice boxes (with their own straws) are handy; just make sure the kids don’t squeeze them and turn them into squirt guns.

Bust out: With all this virtuous, economical eating, bust out every so often - both parents and children. Head to the ice-cream store or bakery for something rich and sweet; indulge in the dessert section of the menu. But just make sure it’s a special treat, not a daily diet.