Meals and nutrition

What is actually served

Breakfast until half past eight for anybody who wants it. A cooked lunch — one main dish for everybody, with the components separated so a child who does not want the sauce can eat the rest. Two snacks, morning and afternoon, mostly fruit, bread and milk or water.

There is more rice and there are fewer sandwiches than in a typical New York nursery, which is Sunita's doing and reflects the families who are actually here. A child who recognises the food eats the food, and a menu built on an idea of what children eat rather than on who is in the room produces a lot of full plates going back to a kitchen.

The week's menu is posted. It is the menu we cook — if something changes, the board changes, because a posted menu that is aspirational is worse than no menu at all.

How mealtimes run

Children serve themselves where they can, from bowls on the table, using real crockery and metal cutlery. Things get spilled and broken and that is the price of a two-year-old learning to pour from a small jug.

Adults sit and eat with them rather than standing and supervising. A meal is a social event and the conversation over it is one of the better language opportunities in the day.

Nobody is made to eat anything, nobody is praised for clearing a plate, and nobody is offered pudding as a reward for finishing. Those three habits reliably produce a worse relationship with food and they are easy to avoid.

What we tell you about eating

What they actually ate, in the daily note, including when the answer is almost nothing. A run of days where a child eats little is worth knowing about and is frequently the first sign of something else — a tooth, a cold, a bad fortnight socially.

We will not tell you your child ate well when they did not. This sounds like a low bar and it is the single most commonly softened piece of information in this trade, because it is the easiest thing to say at a door at half past five.

CACFP, which we are not in

The Child and Adult Care Food Program is the federal programme that reimburses licensed providers for meals meeting USDA standards — up to two meals and one snack, or two snacks and one meal, per child per day.

A for-profit centre qualifies only where at least twenty-five per cent of enrolled children are from low-income families. We do not claim to participate, and we are naming the programme rather than quietly omitting it because a family choosing between centres benefits from knowing it exists and from being able to ask each one directly.

Where a nursery does participate, that is a genuine positive and worth asking about. It is also worth knowing that participation brings USDA meal-pattern requirements with it, which is a real standard rather than a logo.