Hilary Boynton is on a mission to educate people about nutritional healing. A certified holistic health counselor, cook, and co-author of the best-seller The Heal Your Gut Cookbook, Boynton passionately spreads the word about the profound impact our food and food system has on our health and our world. “I feel hopeful because people's eyes are being opened to a degree that has never happened before,” she says about today.

Boynton recently sat down with our founder, Nichole Perkins, over Zoom to talk about one of the greatest missions here at PrimaFoodie: educating children about their food. It’s a topic close to Boyton’s heart given that she’s spent the last several years working as the head of nutrition services at the Manzanita School in Topanga, California. (They call her ‘the lunch lady.’) Most recently, Boynton launched The Sol Box through her business School of Lunch, which delivers local, farm-fresh foods direct to your home—making healthy eating more accessible for individuals and families.

The two mothers covered a lot of ground, from how to get kids engaged in the kitchen to why all parents need to go a bit easier on themselves. But one of the most profound parts of their conversation is also one of the most alarming: The need to open kids’ eyes to the harmful tactics of food marketing. “Our children need us to speak up for them because they're being duped around every corner, as well,” says Boynton. “We are the only person, as parents, between our kids and the medical system.”

A Conversation with Hilary Boynton

What are some of the biggest obstacles we face today when it comes to children's food and their health?

Where do I begin? One of the biggest obstacles is reconnecting kids to their food and the local food system. Even as adults, we are so disconnected. We may shop for organic or get farm-to-table to some degree, but I don't think we really know the stories behind the farmers and the energy and the systems that go into producing the food that lands on our table. I think once we reconnect people back to the core information and the core human connection to the land and the animals and our food system, that's when the lightbulb will start going off. 

We're so broken, our taste buds are so hijacked, and our microbiomes are very compromised. People don't know what it feels like to feel good. We're just really out of balance on so many levels. We need to get a clean slate and start fresh.

How can we educate and empower our kids around food?

It's a teachable moment for parents to just sit down with their kids and say: This is really important. If you want to stay healthy and strong and not have to be afraid of viruses, then your immune system is the headquarters. And this is how you eat to feed a healthy immune system. Yes, kids are going to go and do their own thing. They're going to have to make their own choices, but you hope that they circle back, and that ultimately you’ve given them a really solid foundation that they can launch from. You hope that you've given them that confidence and that trust that their body wants to be in homeostasis.

A lot of it is trust. You have to trust that you've done a good job in selling these core values and that they will stay with it.

What has our society lost in terms of teaching kids good health?

Cooking is a lost life skill that children just aren't part of anymore. I think it's our generation that really missed passing on that knowledge. It’s sort of lost, unless you had a mother or grandmother that really was passionate about it. 

Sondeep, a friend of mine, said to me that traditionally, children always played a role in the family meal. They were always participating in some aspect of the food preparation for the family. They were invested in it and had a certain sense of pride. And it was something that everybody partook in. It wasn’t just mom cooking dinner and that's it. Now I feel like sometimes my kids just walk in, want to get fed, walk out, and then they come back for the next meal.

And I think some of that is because we are busier as a society.

Yes. It's just totally different. So I don't expect it to necessarily go back to a hundred years ago, but for children to understand that they can play an active role, if you make it fun and engaging and you involve them and you get them in cooking as young as possible. Then that confidence is developed in the kitchen. So it's not like all of a sudden they're twenty-five and they don't even know how to turn on a stove, or how to make an omelet or scramble an egg. You want to just give them that confidence so that they'll know they can whip together pretty simple, basic meals without too much effort.

We have access to so much information and beautiful videos and food magazines and cookbooks, and it can be this pressure to have to create something that's photo worthy. But it can really be quite simple, like a soup and a piece of sourdough with butter, or a slow roasted pork shoulder with a couple of vegetables on the side. It doesn't have to be fancy or complicated to be nutrient dense.

That is what I’m working to show with PrimaFoodie: That it can be simpler, because it is a big challenge for people to transition to a healthy food lifestyle. What is your insight on how people can start to eat clean and healthily in an accessible way?

I've gained a whole new perspective on that now. When we moved out to California, which we did for my husband (he was going through his cancer treatment at the time and we wanted to get away from a stressful way of life), my cookbook had just come out. All of a sudden, I was in this city filled with people from all over the world. Everybody I would meet from another country, was like, Oh, this is the way we ate growing up, and we were never sick. And they specifically would notice that their children or their grandchildren were not as strong and healthy as they were as children. And that we had lost that connection to our food. I had this goal of interviewing people from around the world, including our elders, and capturing it all. I feel like once this generation dies, they say the library burns down, you lose all that information.

I met this one woman named Rose. She was buying bones at the butcher shop and I heard her accent. I introduced myself and said: ‘Tell me about your life and how you ate growing up.’ We became fast friends. She said to me, ‘Hilary, we cannot dismiss that we have a lot of single working moms now. And it's just hard. It's a struggle to put food on the table, let alone healthy food and they're lined up at the grocery store getting prepared foods.’ She told me that simplicity is gourmet. It's so true. In the good old days, of course they valued what they ate, and they sourced it all locally, but it wasn't occupying every moment of every day. 

I think that today we're so obsessed with where our next snack is going to come from, or meal, or that our kids are going to starve if they don't have something to eat every hour. Back then, they just nourished themselves simply. They were probably surrounded by community and family and grateful for what they had.

What advice would you give to people who want to get their kids more involved in cooking and eating healthy?

If you’re in an area that has farmer's markets, take the kids and let them pick things out that are intriguing. Before I became ‘the lunch lady’ I was the snack lady. I had to kind of push my way in. And I basically outshined the lunch program because I would bring in all these cool farm fresh things like teeny mini bananas or a Chestnut that's all prickly on the outside or zucchini to make zoodles. I was always looking for that different thing at the farmer's market that was engaging and an educational point.

But not everybody has access to farmer's markets, but even just going grocery shopping with your kids and teaching them about hitting the outside of the grocery store, the perimeter, and shopping that way. And teaching them to see all the processed or packaged foods and ask them: What does this mean and what are in these things? Those little talking points.

Or even in the kitchen, just get them cracking eggs. Just saying yes to those opportunities when they want to engage. And then always modeling for them by making things a habit. That no matter what, we're going to sit around the table together. Even if you can't do it every night, establishing one night, like Sundays, where you’re going to make something special that engages them.

You have said that one of the important ways to get kids to eat healthily is for them to have other mentors besides the parents. You have also talked about creating a group or a community to lead by example. How do you do that in a geographically challenged city? 

The head of the Manzanita school, on the first day that we entered, said: ‘Your children need mentors other than you.’ I was so struck by that. Of course they do. Like they don't listen to me anymore. So it's really important to surround your kids with mentors, whether it be at school, or a coach, or anyone who will influence them. It is challenging. I think supper clubs are really fun. We used to do that back in Massachusetts where you bring four or five couples together. It’s about switching your mindset from, oh I have to put on this dinner party, to asking, hey could you bring this? And can you bring the dessert and you bring the salad? It just takes this pressure off and it becomes more about gathering.

To learn more about Hilary Boynton and her latest endeavor, visit mysolbox.com.