S2 Ep9: Hungry? The Kidsburgh Podcast gets inside advice on inspiring kids to love healthy foods

Photo above by Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash.

Inspiring kids to try new foods and love eating vegetables isn’t always easy. For some great advice on that subject, the Kidsburgh Podcast team sat down with Aimee and Dave DiAnoia, who run the popular Strip District restaurant DiAnoia’s Eatery and are also parents to Florence, who is just 3 years old.

Dave and Aimee both come from food-loving families (you can thank Aimee’s grandfather for the delicious recipe behind DiAnoia’s beloved meatballs), but they know that kids don’t always embrace new foods easily. So they’ve already introduced their daughter to the fun of cooking and begun talking about the ingredients they cook with at home.

“You have to think about food from their perspective, right? We’ve been around all these foods forever and, you know, we look at a bell pepper and we just think, ‘OK, bell pepper.’ But for them, it’s such a foreign concept and a foreign idea. I actually found that with Florence talking about color or texture or things that are really fun for them helps them get excited about food,” Aimee says.

“We obviously always want our kids to eat tons of vegetables. And one of the things that we did to get Florence interested is we talked about kind of the basics of how the colors of food help our bodies … red foods make your heart beat really strong or orange foods can help you see in the dark or things from a kid’s perspective that gets them excited and interested.”

Those conversations have had a happy outcome: Florence now loves bell peppers.

“She likes to talk about the colors of them or she talks about how crunchy they are,” Aimee says. “When she takes a bite, can it be so crunchy that everybody hears it at the table? … When we’re all sitting down at the table, we can talk about that together as opposed to putting a food in front of them and just letting them eat it without any context or any information.”

Hear this entire conversation, along with details on all the (yummy) family destinations you can find in the Strip District and honest comments from the Tea with Teens team about how they manage their own eating and wellness habits, on the latest Kidsburgh Podcast episode. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Pandora and Spotify, at the SLB website, or listen right here:

S2 Ep9: Exploring the Strip District, real talk about family dinner with the couple behind delicious DiAnoia’s Eatery, and teens share how they manage their wellness

This week on the Kidsburgh podcast, join hosts Yu-Ling Cheng, Melissa Rayworth and Kristine Sorensen as they describe their favorite places in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. Also, learn how Aimee and Dave, founders of Pittsburgh’s popular DiAnoia’s Eatery, approach healthy food habits with their toddler and hear from local teens about their approaches to eating and their own wellness habits.

Links: DiAnoia’s Eatery 

Download episode | Play in new window | File size: 31.9 MB

Our podcast is hosted by the Kidsburgh team — Kristine Sorensen, Melissa Rayworth and Yu-Ling Cheng — and recorded by SLB Radio Productions. Get all the details here.