Good Enough to Eat: A Kid's Guide to Food and Nutrition ANNOTATION
Describes the six categories of nutrients needed for good health, how they work in the body, and what foods provide each.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Did you know that Carbohydrates supply most of the energy your body uses? You should drink at least 5 glasses of water every day? The mineral iron is found in foods cooked in iron pans? 3 slices of bread contain 200 calories?
Jam-packed with fascinating facts such as the ones above, Good Enough to Eat is uniquely designed to satisfy kids' love of food, and their curiosity about how their bodies work.
This book offers all of the basics found in an adult nutrition guide in a format designed specifically for kids. Lizzy Rockwell has filled Good Enough to Eat with funny speech bubbles, detailed illustrations, and an engaging cast of children who munch their way across the pages while explaining everything from why your body needs protein to the food pyramid and how to use it. You'll even find hands-on experiments that test food for fat and reveal the differences between starch and sweet carbohydrates, and recipes using the nutritious foods that children need in their daily diet.
Author Biography:
Good Enough to Eat, Lizzy Rockwell's first book as both author and illustrator, reveals much about its talented creator. Lizzy's love of food, sense of fun, and interest in education are apparent from the very first page.
On any sunny day, you might find Lizzy and her two young sons out in their garden in Norwalk, Connecticut, picking vegetables for dinner. Later, you might find Lizzy inside whipping up a yummy, nutritional dish, such as "Full o' Beans Soup," a recipe she composed for Good Enough to Eat.
But most of the time, you'll find Lizzy in her studio, illustrating books for children. Lizzy first learned to draw in her parents'studio. She continued her artistic education at New York's School of Visual Arts. The first picture book Lizzy illustrated was a combined effort with her parents entitled My Spring Robin.
More recently, Lizzy and her mother, veteran author and illustrator Anne Rockwell, have paired their talents on a series of books: Show & Tell Day, Halloween Day, and the forthcoming books Thanksgiving Day and Valentine's Day. Written by Anne and illustrated by Lizzy, this series is set in cheerful Mrs. Madoff's classroom. According to Lizzy, each book conveys to children the allimportant lesson that "you can be part of a group but still be yourself."
Lizzy's sons, Nicholas and Nigel, also play a role in her books—as occasional character models and certainly as real-life inspiration. It was their curiosity about the world around them that helped inspire Lizzy as she illustrated A Nest Full of Eggs by Priscilla Belz Jenkins and On the Move by Deborah Heiligman, two books in the Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science series. And, Lizzy says, part of her inspiration to create Good Enough to Eat came from being a dedicated mother: "One of the most important things I want children to learn by reading Good Enough to Eat is to enjoy eating good food with family and friends." When's dinner?
SYNOPSIS
Eating is the most important thing we do each day, and Good Enough to Eat makes learning about eating healthy fun. Kids will learn where food goes after you swallow it, why you can't eat only candy, and much more. The simple explanations and adorable illustrations help teach kids about everything from B complex vitamins to how to make "Fizzade" and "Yogi Pops."
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Rockwell (illustrator of My Spring Robin; On Show and Tell Day) serves up a simple but often bland introduction to nutrition. Watercolor and colored-pencil illustrations offer close-up views of a variety of foods and introduce a cast of smiling, wide-eyed kids whose comments (presented in balloons) supplement the facts in the text. The compositions are cheerful and sometimes playful, as when a boy dressed in a skeleton costume delivers a message about the value of calcium in building and "repairing" bones. The palette, unfortunately, is muted or shadowy, so that the pictured foods never look very appetizing. The author discusses such basics as the importance of eating a balanced diet, the process of digestion, sources of various vitamins and minerals, etc. She concludes with a handful of nutritious, carefully written, kid-friendly recipes. The only other hands-on aspect of the volume is a vaguely outlined experiment "to find out where fat is hiding," which entails rubbing foods (no specific varieties are suggested) on a piece of paper and examining it for grease stains the following day. Given the book's targeted audience, Rockwell has perhaps gone too far in streamlining her information; those above the beginning-reader level may well find the tone of both the art and the text (with the exception of the recipes) somewhat babyish. Ages 5-9. (Feb.)
Children's Literature - Barbara Youngblood
This is an agreeable addition to children's nutritional information. In simple, straight-forward terms, the reader can gain a better understanding of the relationship between eating and health. Proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals are presented in simple terms with illustrations of the various items that make up the food groups of the Food Guide Pyramid. Recipes are given for Full O' Beans Soup, Alphbread, Non-fat Veggie Dip, Fizzage, and Yogi Pops and all are simple to prepare.
Home
