Soccer Snack Attack

It’s soccer season across this great land, and with that comes ‘snack duty’ for moms. It’s a duty fraught with dilemmas—you want something fun that the kids will actually eat while healthy enough that the parents won’t frown on you (all the while avoiding common allergens, excessive packaging, etc.). Throw in the fact that you often don’t remember it’s your snack day until the eleventh hour, and this seemingly straightforward task becomes less than simple.
This season I am lucky to have Lulu Cohen-Farnell as a mom on my son’s soccer team. She’s the founder of Real Food for Real Kids, a wonderful children’s catering company which provides childcare centres, schools and camps with a daily delivery of fully-cooked lunches, prepared snacks, and fresh fruits and vegetables, all free of chemical preservatives, artificial colouring and sweeteners, synthetic ingredients, and factory-farmed meats. Lulu shared some ideas with our team for easy and healthy soccer snacks that kids will actually eat:

• Mini wholegrain ‘party sandwiches’ with apple butter and no-nut butter
• Fresh fruit—bananas, sliced apples (add lemon to slow oxidation), sliced oranges, sliced watermelon are always popular and in season and you can try apricots, peaches and plums, too
• Wholegrain crackers (Finn Crisps, Kavli, Kashi, PC organic crackers, PC multigrain crackers, or rice crackers and natural cheddar cheese curds or cubed cheddar cheese
• Dried fruit such as organic raisins, apricots, dates, figs, dried apples, bananas, or cranberries and wholegrain or spelt pretzels
• Homemade, low-sugar muffins or cookies
• Fresh cut veggies such as cucumber slices, carrots sticks or wheels, zucchini slices, celery sticks, cherry tomatoes, or red pepper strips and crackers (Lulu notes that after sustained play/exercise, kids are often at their hungriest which is the best opportunity to introduce veggies)

Thanks Lulu—now all we have to do is actually remember when we’re on snack duty!