>>2465007A lot of parents literally give their children brain damage by feeding them an improper diet and using improper cooking techniques. Remember that whole cultural thing where everyone was like "why won't my kids eat their vegetables?" because you fucking steam them into mush and don't season them you goddamn trout. The reason kids like their lunchables and mcdonalds is because it's actually seasoned and doesn't taste like a towel. There is next to no nutritional value in steamed vegetables with no seasoning, or boiled broccoli, or fucking baked ziti. The reason people end up spending all their cash on eating out instead of cooking isn't because "cooking is hard" or "I don't know how to cook" it's because in their mind they don't think home cooking is worth it because their parents were garbage cooks. I've cooked for children before, they love my cooking, I don't dumb anything down for them. 5 year olds have loved my broccoli and balsamic vinegar salad, they don't need their taste dumbed down after age 4, it's not fucking worth it. The mere concept of feeding a 10 year old fucking lunchables every day is insulting, they deserve better and actually need it. This type of shit is not made for growing children, it's nutritional value barely meets the standards of a 6 year old and definitely no one older. There have been studies done that families who eat nothing but processed canned garbage or go out to some fast food every day for their meals have lower IQs, are less healthy in general, and have more diseases than kids who eat all natural. I was fed a strict diet of organic vegetables and the highest quality fish my parents could get, and I skipped highschool entirely and started community college at 14. The other kids I knew who had no food standards, most didn't even graduate highschool. Same thing happens with water, the lower quality water someone has, the more prone to disease, mental conditions, and general lack of health. Feeding kids the shit some parents are is literally causing their brains to develop wrong, it's actually making them stupider and decreasing their lifespan and increasing the difficulty of their entire life, just because they weren't fed properly during their youth. The concept of garbage food being given because it's "good enough for kids" is sickening and frankly should be counted as child abuse. There are plenty of ways around this but the easiest and one of the simplest is microgreens. They're cheap to grow yourself, don't even take a week per batch, and are chock full of 10X more nutrients than most school lunches per serving. They can be made to taste good, go great on pizza, and when you're not growing them the seeds just sit in the back of a closet in a can. You need very little specialized equipment and what you do need doesn't total above $30, and children frankly don't give a shit what they eat as long as it tastes good. You just need to learn to cook with them and they'll pay for themselves 20 fold in health benefits. But there's some fucked up stigma against giving kids "adult food" for reasons I will never understand. Microgreens themselves are even seen as "hippie food" because people don't' actually know what they are. They're literally just tiny vegetables, chock full of vitamins and easier and faster to grow. They're conceptually identical to buying stuff like a "green tomato," it's not fucking hippie food it's the natural progression of having so many seeds available due to industrialized farming. It's like how ghetto kids bring eachother down by calling the ones who actually do well in school "bitch ass nerds," the general public thinks the new wave of food is hoighty toighty nonsense because they were raised on garbage and can't accept progress unless it's been deep fried and cooked until it has the same health benefits as sand. Even stuff that's existed for centuries like kombucha is thought of as "hippy shit" because people don't understand how much a healthy gut biome helps your entire life, you can even homebrew kombucha relatively easily and cheaply. All this shit and the same people still get fucked up when they see "monosodium glutamate" or "modified cornstarch" or god forbid "fructose." They think "all natural" cooking means "not adding fucking anything" then they narrow their selection to actual worthless garbage that doesn't benefit anyone except whoever fucktard is making the product. It's sheer ignorance and it's a cycle perpetuated by the parents of these people not understanding how to make half decent food without relying on siracha, old bay, or martha stewart mixes. It's causing the fucking widening of the social glass gaps and it's something that could easily be rectified if people understood what the new wave of food actually was.