Hello!
You’ve found a very early version of Food & Family, a simple web application to help families plan their meals each week. We’re not ready for paying customers yet but you’re welcome to sign up, look around, and let us know what you think.
Feeding a young family is often stressful. Food & Family is focused on reducing that stress. We’ll help you plan your meals for the week so you can get your shopping done early and not worry what you’re having or if you have the ingredients.
Food & Family also has a handy checklist to keep track of foods your kids are finding troublesome. Research shows humans need to be exposed to foods as many as 15 times before they'll like it. Add your new foods to the list and we’ll keep track of them for you.
Accept this will take time
Find what works for you
Be easy on yourself if it doesn't work all the time
A few ideas our team have found helpful with feeding their own families.
- Maintain consistent meal times. (Schedules aren't just for infants!)
- Eat your meal together as a family.
- Talk about the food before, during, and after the meal. Normalise the new foods before they even make a plate!
- Talk about what flavours you can taste.
- Get your kids involved in the meal planning and preparations.
- Make meal times short, pleasant, fun, and food exciting.
- Make vegetables a child’s first food.
- We eat breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner. We provide one snack a day during afternoon tea time. Otherwise, we do not snack between meal times, which means we are all hungry by the time dinner time comes.
- Serve your kid smaller serves of new foods.
- Serve new foods in different ways.
- Ask your child to just taste it.
- There are no “kids” foods. Everyone eats the same thing. We all eat the same foods, and we do not substitute foods.
- Keep foods in rotation.
- You choose the foods, they choose the quantity.
- Keep your meals varied with different foods, prepared in different ways, and with a variety of colours.
- Drink water instead of sugary drinks. Sugary drinks are for special occasions like parties.
- Looks matter. Everyone is drawn to appetising looking food.
- Get past "I don't like it" by talking about the different flavours, and textures.
- Sweets are occasional treats to be enjoyed in controlled doses.
About Food & Family
We’re a small company made up of parents of toddlers. Feeding our own kids the way we wanted to took planning, organisation, and a great deal of reading. We wanted something to help us stay on track and, after a while, shared text files were no longer cutting it. So we’re making a service for us; and hopefully, for you.
We hope you like it.
Our team live on, and benefit from, the colonised lands of the Boon Wurrung, the Darkinjung, and the Wurundjeri. We acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of these lands and recognise their enduring connection to land, waters, and culture. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present.
We are grateful we share this land today. We hold sorrow for the costs of that sharing, and we hope for a reconciliation to bring us to a state of equity, justice, and partnership together.