Children. Vegetables.

These are two words you won’t often see in the same sentence, unless of course they are linked by “hate” or “will not eat”. How can you turn that “hate” into “love”?

Simple: show children where real food comes from. Their imagination will do the rest.

The easiest way to bring the cycle of life into your own backyard is to start your own vegetable patch. Get your kids involved from the beginning: choosing the best location, digging up the plots and preparing the soil, researching which seeds and seedlings are ready to plant and when, visiting a nursery for seeds and seedlings which are in season. For kids, the process is a fantastic adventure, rich with learning possibilities.

A home garden need not be a full veggie patch, either. Some potted herbs on the doorstep, tomato plants in window boxes, pots of parsley and basil on the kitchen bench. This shows kids that what we put in our mouth can be sourced locally and seasonally (goodbye to strawberries in July).

Alternatively, take your children for a weekend trip to a working farm to see it for themselves: milk comes from a living, breathing cow, not a bottle; eggs from chickens, not a carton on a shelf; fruit and veg from the trees and from the soil, not on hygienically sealed trays under fluorescent lights.

With an appreciation of where things come from comes a respect for whole food and nose-to-tail eating. A prevailing culture of wastefulness is the curse of modern society, but it can be turned around if we teach our children to honour the sacrifice made by the animal by using every last bit.

Good nutrition and good health are so closely linked with eating seasonally, sustainably, and organically – it is as relevant to our wellbeing as regular check ups and vaccinations. The extent to which prolonged exposure to preservatives and pesticides will impact on our health may not be evident for years to come, but it’s our children who will pay the price. And how can they not, when something as seemingly harmless as a French fry from a popular food chain can now contain as many as 19 ingredients (and we know that most of those ingredients will have had their genesis in a lab, not in the soil).

But getting to the basics of getting your child to eat their vegetables. I have discovered an amazing peccadillo amongst children: when allowed to harvest their own veg – even if it is just being allowed to choose their own from the market – and having a hand in its preparation, children will demolish the lot like so much hot buttered popcorn.

It has become a game in our home for the kids to each choose a vegetable, chop in up with a safety knife, then nominate what seasoning or sauce it will be dressed with and the method of cooking used: steamed, stir-fried, roasted. Each chooses their own but the deal is that they each have to eat the others’, too. So we have four different vegetables on their plate (soon to be six), all of which must be eaten.

Let each mealtime become an opportunity to tell a story: a story about the food you are serving, its provenance and its seasonality. Pique their interest and get them involved and you will have set them up for a lifetime of good eating habits, as well as a healthy respect for what they put on their plate. There is nothing more satisfying, as a parent, than knowing your children eat in a manner that is not just good for their bellies, but good for the planet.