Mother-in-law pushing powdered soup mix

westchestermom

Sun, Feb 21 2016, 8:52 pm

Meat and vegetables naturally have salt already. But my inlaws also bring tons of snacks like cookies, crackers, sugary yogurts so the kids get enough salt even if I don't salt their dinner. And my 4 year old daughter recently fell in love with pickles! She lets the baby have some too and they dribble them all over the living room lol

spring13

Sun, Feb 21 2016, 9:50 pm

The best you can do is try to treat the soup like a snack, and make sure to give the kids apple slices or carrot sticks or something ahead of time if you can. You're not going to change someone like that, as annoying as it is. My MIL uses all kinds of ingredients that make me cringe (both in terms of taste and health), but there is NOTHING I can do about that. If she hasn't figured any of this out by now, she's not going to. I'm just doing my best to give my kids a taste for better quality food.

wiki

Sun, Feb 21 2016, 10:12 pm

Some of your MIL's dietary ignorance is a generational thing. (You grew up in a health-conscious home and now they are common, but when you were growing up they were more rare.) With the Internet today, people are far more aware of what they should be eating, and the peer environment for kids has allowed the parents to enforce more healthy eating rules than they could have enforced in the past (without kid mutiny). But when I was growing up, we all brought lunches to school that, looking back on them, were all loaded with junk and fairly devoid of nutrients! It was a different nutritional culture--and MIL was one of the moms back then, and still seems set in those ways.

I also get mystified/frustrated by my MIL's idea of a balanced menu and how out-of-balance her idea of starches/meats to vegetables is--not to mention the amount of oil, salt and sugar she adds to the vegetable dishes. It's really not the way I cook.

But seriously, as long as you are doing the bulk of feeding your children, and as long as what she's feeding them doesn't spoil their taste for what you feed them, there's really no harm.

You can let your reputation as a health-nut be known over time in a good-natured way. Let MIL know that you LOVED the snap peas and sweet potatoes, when they appear--then they will appear more often when you come!

BTW, maybe people can teach me something--soup mixes are still junky chemicals, but I thought they are better than they used to be? Most don't have MSG anymore. Is a spoonful of them in a pot of soup really so different from adding a similar amount of salt?

Sarah f

Mon, Feb 22 2016, 3:36 am

"BTW, maybe people can teach me something--soup mixes are still junky chemicals, but I thought they are better than they used to be? Most don't have MSG anymore. Is a spoonful of them in a pot of soup really so different from adding a similar amount of salt?"
I was actually reading in a low GI recipe book that a tsp of soup powder is sometimes better than all the salt you need to add to get that same taste?

westchestermom

Mon, Feb 22 2016, 8:56 am

I don't think they are much worse than salt. It just drives me nuts to carefully cook for my father in law's specific kidney issues only to have them dump salt on it and eat cold cuts out of the fridge. He's not allowed to have tomato sauce either because of the potassium or cheese because of phosphates but they beg for me cook my delicious eggplant parmesan for them. She is 49 but he's almost 70 and I want him to live to 100.