Child-Friendly?

I got an interesting note from a good friend this morning. They've recently moved to the country, themselves, and like us have been eating in a more "crunchy" manner. Their children don't have the allergy problems that ours do, but they've noticed that their kids have been much healthier on a more natural diet. What they apparently hadn't realized is just how unusual (even radical) people like us can appear in the eyes of other parents.

He writes:

On a separate topic, we're watching a friend's child for the next few days. The mother asked if we could feed her more child-friendly food. We weren't quite sure what she meant, as we had watched the daughter before and fed her what our kids ate. So we asked the mom, and she said nevermind; she would just send some food along. So, when the daughter was dropped off at our house, we saw what her mom brought. She packed 2 1-gallon bags of Fruit Loops and 2 boxes of macaroni and cheese. Oh, now we understand.

While we probably don't eat as healthily as your family does, we were somewhat pleased that we probably do eat reasonably healthy foods, or at least avoid the truly over-processed foods most of the time. At the same time, we also felt a little disturbed that our friends lived on fruit loops. Probably ranks up there with Twinkies on the processed food spectrum.

I can only really add one thing to this: sometimes it's heartening to get a good reminder that, even though our approach to nutrition may not be perfect, we sure have come a long way and are at least getting the big "child-friendly" picture a lot more right than we did before.