Katherine Pryor's favorite books to get kids excited about eating

When I used this book to research my book's backmatter, it kept disappearing because my kids kept stealing it off my desk to read it.

A lift-the-flap book made of sturdy, board-book-style paper, it’s accessible for young kids, but any age kid would enjoy it. It also talks about what foods are important to eat for growth and energy, and made it waaaay easier to have conversations with my kids about why we eat certain foods for dinner (yay, vitamins and minerals!) and why we limit certain foods to special occasions.

Adults and kids alike will learn something!

I was on a panel with Aliza when this book came out, and I immediately bought a copy to take home to my kids.

It’s full of facts about various healthy foods, but also has spaces for kids to draw or doodle things like their meals, what their face looks like if they eat something icky, or their dream garden. It helps kids understand why colorful foods like fruits and vegetables make bodies feel good without being preachy.

It’s fun to see a non-fiction book where kids are encouraged to draw and write their thoughts. It almost feels more like a journal than a book, in the best possible way.

This wild ride of a book guides readers as a bite of food makes its way from a mouth on a long journey to…the other end of the digestive system.

Every stop along the way gets a chapter full of interesting facts in kid-friendly language and gives kids enough weird facts to keep the pages turning. I recommend this to older kids and tweens who want to understand what’s happening inside their bodies but don’t want to ask. (Conveniently, it also works the same way for adults.)

This is the first book I ever read that truly helped me understand food as a power source.

So often, we hear about “good” foods or “bad” foods, but this book talks about how different attributes impact how we feel and perform. Cynthia wrote it after watching her daughter’s soccer games and noticing how often other parents brought processed snacks and sugar-sweetened drinks for team snacks. She wanted the team to understand they could play longer better by eating and drinking differently.

While it’s written for tweens and teens, my husband used the strategies and recipes when he ran ultramarathons (why, yes—that was before we had kids) and needed to fuel up for long runs. I love recommending this to any kid in sports because it gives them tools to both help them both on the field and in life.

I have never seen another book like this.

A board book designed for ages 0-6, How We Eat shows photographs of how a variety of kids eat. Some babies nurse or are nourished through feeding tubes; some kids eat with forks, chopsticks, hands, or specialized feeding devices. It features photographs of a diversity of kids, some with limb differences or specialized feeding needs.

The book is a celebration of eating, however you and your family do it. It is joyful, inclusive, and a really beautiful way to help kids understand that we are all a big, human family who loves to eat, no matter what our differences may be.