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Eating healthily is vital for everyone, but it’s even more essential for growing kids. With their legs and arms sprouting, children need a healthy and varied diet in order to shoot up. We at the Secret Seed Society believe healthy eating for kids is a top priority. After all, keeping little Seed Agents in tip-top condition is very important! Thankfully, it’s now easier than ever to make sure that children are eating healthily, whatever they’re doing.

More and more schools and food outlets are providing customers with healthy, low-fat alternatives to fast food and sweets. So why should the kitchen be any different? With a little imagination we believe parents can encourage their little ones to get rooted into good eating habits that will see them growing up fit and healthy.

We want children to make friends with their vegetables, so the Secret Seed Society has created a fantasy world full of vegetable characters such as Chrissie Cress, the Brussell Sprout twins and Mayor Okra. Through our range of activity books, kids can follow their new found friends into ‘Seed City’, the setting of so many fantastic adventures.

What’s more, the Seed Agents Club rewards good habits and celebrates kids’ successes in the garden and kitchen – helping them through inevitable setbacks. We encourage members to send in photos of their activities, share stories, and undertake exciting Seed Agent Missions. Healthy eating shouldn’t seem like a chore, and with our help it never will.

Childhood is a great adventure, one which every one of us is entitled to. Our range of books, seed packs and the Seed Agent Club provide another exciting episode in the journey which parents and children can enjoy together. By encouraging healthy eating for kids, we at the Secret Seed Society can help set them on their way into their teens and beyond; the next adventures.

This week we will notice the range of foods in our supermarkets begin to shrink and just how much food we import from abroad will become apparent. It is a good time for us to enjoy locally produced food. So what can we expect in the way of vegetables? There will be tasty English leeks, purple sprouting and cabbage but we also produce some lovely red peppers and the early asparagus will just be coming in. Fruit wise we still have English apples available and oranges and lemons from the continent are at their best, so good news we won’t starve and perhaps we will become more aware of where our fresh food comes from, support our local farmers and grow our own.

Our Seed Agents, our favourite members of the Secret Seed Society, are very young children learning about vegetables and how they can grow their own and have fun making some tasty food. The present crisis is undoubtedly stressful but it could also be a great reminder to the nation that we need to get all young people growing food and learning about how their lifestyle impacts their health, global communities, and the planet!

Click here to enrol any young children you know in the Seed Agent Club. Free for all children.

Designed for the ecologically curious, Green Sundays is a regular event in Dalston’s Arcola Theatre that gets better every time. This Sunday 11th April 2010 the plan is to explore sustainable food.

The Secret Seed Society gang will be there creating some child-friendly magic. We are running two Story-telling sessions (12 and 2pm) and a Dip workshop (1.30pm) in which we reveal our simple formula: Good + Taste = Dip! Hope to see some of you there to design your own mouth-watering concoction!

The day will be bursting with food for thought: artists-at-work, guerilla gardening tour, talks on tackling food waste, live music and a film screening. Have you seen the award-winning documentary Food Inc yet? Come by 5.30pm if you want to watch it with a bunch of great people.

We all know how difficult it can be to get kids to show an interest in the origins of the things they eat and the health benefits that a food product may provide. It is commonly thought that the best way to achieve this is to involve them in the process, by encouraging them to roll their sleeves up and get their hands dirty. Fortunately this has just been made easier, following the release of a new range of fun and informative gardening activity books for children from us at the Secret Seed Society, which entertain and educate in equal measure.

Each activity book comes with a set of organic seeds, growing instructions and a recipe. So not only is a great story on offer, but the growth and subsequent eating of the end product adds a real element of reward for children and adults alike.

The beautifully illustrated books are set in the magical world of Seed City, where the reader follows the antics of Rudi Radish, Chrissie Cress and their friends. Rudi’s latest adventure is entitled Bong Bong Bongity Bong, where he competes in Seed City’s very own Battle of the Bands. This story comes complete with organic radish seeds, a ‘how to grow’ guide and a recipe idea.

The series offers an introduction to traditional and new vegetables that many kids (and adults) may not have experienced before, and the accompanying recipes are an excellent way to incorporate these into your diet. The books are available to purchase from our online Secret Seed Society shop, along with a range of seeds and related sprouting products.

Research has shown that when your child eats healthily they perform better in every aspect of their life, from learning to sporting activities. Activity books for children make food education fun and enjoyable, and will arm children with the necessary skills to transform a humble seed into a delicious meal.

We all understand the importance of providing a well balanced diet for our children on a daily basis. Yet, when it comes to Easter, birthdays and other special occasions it is inevitable that they will be bought chocolate, sweets and treats. As this Easter approaches, how about leaving the treats to friends and family, and instead purchase one of the unique children’s gifts that will keep kids occupied for weeks, not just Easter Sunday.

We have recently launched a new range of books for children that aim to teach kids the importance of eating healthily by showing them how to grow and cook their own fruit and vegetables. Truly eco-friendly children’s gifts, each activity book is printed on recycled paper with vegetable oil based inks and contains a fully illustrated story book, a packet of organic seeds, growing instructions and an easy to follow recipe.

We at The Secret Seed Society believe that making healthy activities more fun for children, is often a much more successful means of getting them to eat healthily. Our activity books take children on a journey from plant to plate, allowing them to get their hands dirty in the garden and the kitchen.

Priced at just £5.50 each, we think these books are an excellent alternative to an Easter egg this April and packs can be purchased easily through the Secret Seed Society shop on our website.

The Secret Seed Society experience doesn’t have to stop with the books, we also have a Seed Agents subscription club. Kids can subscribe for free by logging on to the website, from there they can get involved in activities, enter our competitions and submit their own illustrations.

To browse these children’s gifts or to learn more about the principles behind our organisation and how you can get involved, visit our website. You can also show your support by following one of our popular fictional characters, Peter Parsnip on his Twitter page or how about starting your own Seed Agents club.

Today from our friend Sateen we learnt about yet another horrific fact about junk food … its not even food! Well, at least its not the kind of normal food that would decay over time. This picture below is a McDonalds Happy Meal after one year sitting on a shelf.

The photo was taken by Joann Bruso, author of Baby Bites, aimed at toddlers. Like us at the Secret Seed Society, she is trying to get children to develop good eating habits from the start. This is what she had to say about her Happy Meal experiment:

” My Happy Meal is one year old today and it looks pretty good. It never smelled bad. The food did not decompose. It did not get moldy, at all. The next time you’re tempted to purchase a Happy Meal for your child, think about these photos. Food is supposed to decompose, go bad and smell foul…eventually. Flies ignore a Happy Meal and microbes don’t decompose it, then your child’s body can’t properly metabolize it either. Now you know why it’s called ‘junk food’.” Read more…

Surely we’re smarter than flies, ants, and mice! They don’t touch this stuff, maybe we shouldn’t either.

The question: Why is it so cheap to be unhealthy?

A bag of mushrooms can cost the same or more than as a box of frozen burgers. If you’re feeding a hungry growing family, fruit and vegetables can start to get expensive. But how does this make sense? Surely a lot more time, effort, land, chemicals, money and carbon goes into creating a burger than a mushroom?

The answer: government subsidies.

Its perverse because on the one hand we’re told to eat more grains, fruits and vegetables, but on the other hand there are huge government subsidies on products high in meat, dairy, sugar, oils and alcohol. At the Secret Seed Society HQ we were looking at these figures that Stephen McDaniel has worked out about the US system, and nearly fell off our stools!

Does anyone have equivalent figures for the UK economy?

In the following chart McDaniel rearranges the numbers to show how the US government would have to adjust their subsidy spending to be in line with their own nutrition guidelines.

This calls for a 900% increase in fruit and veg subsidies! Highly unlikely, but perhaps the current interest in growing your own is sending the government the right signals: we will choose to be healthy, with or without your help!

Reading is an extremely important activity in any child’s life; it enables parents to spend quality time with their children and books are an excellent means of teaching young people new vocabulary. Of course, with such a wide selection of books for children on the market, it can be very difficult for parents to identify which will be best for their child’s development. There is one new range of activity books that are both fun and educational. They aim to teach children the importance of healthy eating by enabling them to grow their own vegetables.

The books in the Secret Seed Society range are set in Seed City and follow stories about the adventurous individuals that live there. The books aim to take children on a journey from plant to plate, with each book containing a packet of organic seeds, growing instructions and a tasty recipe. The Mighty Messenger and No Hens In The Pen are just two of the books currently available in the range.

Children between the ages of 3 and 7 can really get their hands dirty by learning how to grow their own vegetables, with or without the aid of their parents. They can then learn to follow recipes, by using the vegetables that they have grown to create a meal for the whole family.

The Secret Seed Society isn’t just about books; there is an entire world ready for children to explore on their website. By joining the online club, children can take part in seasonal missions, learn more about growing fruit and vegetables and enter competitions.

To learn more about the educational books for children available from these publishers, feel free to browse their website. Books can be purchased easily through their website and signing up to the online club is absolutely free. Start your journey today!