Eating Rainbows

Recently I led the morning circle at my daughter's preschool, hoping to teach them their fruits and avoid the situation in Jamie Oliver's video. Here are the basics of what I said:

Me: Do you like food?
Preschoolers: Yeah!
Me: Do you like rainbows?
Preschoolers: Yeah!
Me: Do you like to eat rainbows?
Preschoolers: Wah?
Me: Did you know that it's healthy to "eat rainbows"? And why do children want to be healthy?
Preschoolers: So that they don't get sick and they grow big and strong.
Me: Well, one way to make yourself more healthy is to eat every color of the rainbow.

We talked about all the different-looking fruits that are out there. Then we made our very own rainbow smoothies. I put several colors of fruits in a blender and blended it up to see what color the smoothie became. And finally, we all tasted.



It was a great experience, and I think everybody was pretty excited about it. I literally made smoothies until I ran out of fruit. Before I knew it I had passed out smoothie samples and recipes to all of the teachers in the school. And this is still posted on the classroom bulletin board:

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Make Rainbow Smoothies at Home

You’ll need:

• 2 cups of orange juice
• ½ cup yogurt (optional, any flavor)
• 1 banana, broken in half
• 16 whole frozen strawberries
• 2 handfuls frozen blueberries
• 1 handful frozen peach slices

Place all ingredients in your blender bowl. Pulse until the large pieces of fruit have broken up, then blend until smooth. Stir once or twice, and add more liquid if the blender has trouble breaking up the frozen fruit.

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So tell me, do you eat rainbows? If not, you just might try!