Food Journal

Kids often need a dozen tastes before a food flips from "no" to "fine." Food Journal turns those tastes into a book a kid fills in.

Parents know the fix: keep offering, stay neutral, don't bargain. Doing it a dozen times for hundreds of foods without it turning into nagging is the hard part, and every tool built for it, from the chore chart to the sticker tracker, is in a drawer by week three. Zach's family ran it for a year on a wall calendar, one new food a day with a 1 to 3 written on the line. It worked, and it started to feel like collecting. Food Journal is that calendar turned into a catalog.

The book does the writing; the kid stamps a number

Every other food journal for kids asks the child to make an entry: write the food, draw it, give it stars. A 4-year-old won't do that twice. This book prints the whole list up front, about 1,000 foods organized by kind, on landscape pages that lie flat and paper a crayon can live on. Each food gets a row of squares filled left to right, so a long row is a food that kept coming back, and "1, 1, 2, 1, 3" is broccoli over a year. There is no date column and no percent complete. Write-in pages at the back use the same rows, so grandma's pimento cheese sits next to the printed entries as an equal.

Foods

About 1,000, organized by kind, with an alphabetical index

Pages

Roughly 70, landscape, wire-bound

Row

10 to 20 squares a food

Scale

1 don't like it · 2 okay · 3 love it, three self-inking stamps included

The grocery store is the game board

Pokémon GO's trick wasn't the Pokédex. It was that a sidewalk you'd walked a thousand times suddenly had things on it. The grocery store already has the nodes, changes with the season, and you're going anyway. Hand a kid a green olive and the first job is finding it in the book. Is it near the pickles or near the fruit? They guess, they're wrong, they find it. That is a minute of curiosity in front of the bite, and it works at a restaurant or at grandma's as well as in the kitchen. Browse by kind in the aisle; look it up in the index when someone hands you a rambutan. Blank rows aren't unfinished either. Pawpaw is hard to find in August and impossible in Oregon.

Can you find it in your book? What do you think it's near?

A lick counts

Two spreads of front matter tell the parent three things, written as permission rather than homework:

• A 1 is a real answer. If a kid thinks you want a 3, the ratings turn into a performance.
• A lick counts. The moment a square needs a swallowed bite, the bargaining is back.
• Don't chase pages. Going months without opening the book is allowed, and that permission is what keeps it out of the drawer for good.

The method is Cooke et al., 2011: twelve daily pea-sized tastes of a disliked vegetable raised liking, and the children who got a small tangible reward were the only group still eating more three months later. The stamp is that reward, and unlike a sticker sheet it never runs out.

12 tastes turns "no" into "fine"

It plays like an i-SPY book for food

Collins' i-SPY books are a pre-printed list of 140 birds or cars that a kid scores, with 30-plus titles to collect. Food Journal works the same way: the list is already printed, and the game is finding the next thing on it.

Twenty families Zach doesn't know will decide if it's a product

The open question is whether a kid's fun is in filling in the squares or only in the trying. The first is a product; the second is a nice family ritual. The test is 25 proof copies, 20 of them handed to strangers, and a count at day 30 of which books have more than 30 squares filled and whether the kid, not the parent, reaches for it. It hasn't run yet.