Child nutrition: from the family kitchen to the plate

The situation

Nutrition messages for children are usually delivered as numbers: so many grams of protein, so many portions of vegetables. At home those numbers are not what decides anything. What a child eats is decided by what is in the kitchen and how the food is served.

Who it was for

Mothers and carers of children under five who mostly cook for the family themselves. They read on a phone and trust examples of food they know more than they trust measurements.

Approach

I built three panels running from the kitchen to the plate: what needs to be in the kitchen, how a balanced plate is put together from everyday ingredients, and how to get a child to eat fruit and vegetables. Every panel uses food that is bought at the ordinary market, not ingredients that are hard to find.

Craft and compliance

Each panel is 1:1 and the same family appears in all three, so they read as one story. The plate is drawn as a single plate of rice, animal and plant protein, vegetables and fruit with its portions, not as a table of numbers.

Outcome

Three panels were published as one sequence through the institution's official channel.

Evidence The only evidence is the published material. Children's food intake was not measured, so an improvement in nutritional status cannot be claimed.

Reflection

The third panel first carried a list of healthy snacks, and I replaced it with three lines about how to serve the food, because the problem is not that parents do not know which foods are healthy but that the child refuses to eat them.