VegMoms

Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: Encourage your child’s pride in his or her vegan lifestyle. Here are some fun ways you can support that:

1) Buy her a cool veg-message T-shirt or bag from PETA’s catalog online.

2) Offer a great vegan snack he can take to call.

3) Visit a farm sanctuary, and help your child create a class report about it.

4) Volunteer together at an animal shelter.

5) Help her write a letter to the editor of your newspaper or a kids’ magazine about why she’s vegan and why others should consider it, too.

6) Help him get politically active by writing letters to politicians about law changes.

7) Let her choose a veg-positive bumper sticker for the family car (or her bike, guitar case, locker, etc.)

From Chapter Three of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids. (Photo Petacatalog.com)

Wednesday’s Veg Kids: Do you have a vegetarian or vegan kid who hates most vegetables? Sounds like an unmanageable paradox, but I’m here to tell you it’s not. I have one daughter who loves all veggies and fruits. All of them. I have another who is strictly the most-common-fruits-and-veggies-only type: Give her anything but bananas, apples, grapes, carrots, peas and corn, and I’m out of luck. This can be worrisome, especially on days when I’m serving meals made up of other fun, more daring foods like mango or pineapple, or even the dreaded broccoli. Those kind of days are when Voots come in handy. Sure, I’d rather have her eat her full servings of organic, raw produce every day of her life from age 2 to 18, but let’s get real. Sometimes, certain kids just don’t do that, and certain weeks are more survival by any means necessary in the family nutrition department than others. That’s, again, when Voots will come in handy for many families like ours. They contain no refined sugar, yet they disguise a cropful of fruits and veggies (including prunes, raspberries, zucchini and green beans) into chewable sweet tart-like candy and provide 3 servings of fruits and veggies in two little tarts. Can you believe that? Neither can my daughter, which is why she loves them!