The Waldorf Kindergarten Snack Book [Spiral-bound]

Lisa Hildreth (Author), Jo Valens (Illustrator)

Product Details

• Spiral-bound: 50 pages
• Publisher: Rudolph Steiner Pr (January 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880105631
• ISBN-13: 978-0880105637
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #302,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

89 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Recipes Are Solid, Framing Text is Mush, February 6, 2009

By 

Matthew Wall (Monterey, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Waldorf Kindergarten Snack Book (Spiral-bound)

This is a lovely little book, and the recipes are great. Creative, fun, and nutritious, and many of the recipes if not most of them can be prepared with the kids' participation.

But the best feature of the book is that it's spiral-bound, which means you can rip out pages 1-10 and responsibly recycle them. These are ostensibly about "Planning Your Snacks" but are full of unreconstructed giblets of residual anthroposophic philosophy about food that has far more in common with folklore or urban legends than it does with any modern understanding of food science and nutrition. This leads to the authors wholly digesting and extruding such thoughts as, when recommending against feeding children tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and potatoes, "The normal protein forming process in the seed, takes the abnormal course of making alkaloids, and the nightshades have an above-average nitrogen content. As adults with an ego fully incarnated, we are able to deal with this influence, but for a child whose ego is in the process of incarnation and body building, it is a different matter." You might as well start blaming malaria on bad vapors from tomatoes once again. Or, in recommending against eating them: "Bananas contain good nourishment but not much vitalizing force."

The introductions to each section are similarly baked with falderal and topped with a fine grating of phooey. For example, an erroneous blanket statement about the historical (well, "cosmological" to use the book's own word) origins of the names of the days of the week, and disturbing pseudo-science such as "Rice...acts more on the digestive system than the nerve-sense system and therefore does not stimulate a wakeful consciousness" followed immediately by the statement "Rice is one of the main foods of peoples in India and the Far East," which could be construed as racist (rice doesn't stimulate a wakeful consciousness, and those people in the far east eat a lot of rice.) I suspect the authors did not mean to imply such, given the general universal humanism of the Waldorf approach, but it is a sign of foggy thinking that blanket statements about the food without a grounding in chemistry or nutrition science pepper this tome. (See Harold McGee "On Food and Cooking" for some actual science.)

Why the heck do I still give this four stars? As noted, the recipes are good, simple, nutritious, and many of the sidebar activity suggestions are great. In this sense, there's a parallel to Waldorf education itself: the basic core practices and ideas are incredibly sane and humane, but the metaphysical mush, if taken without the context of the intervening century of psychological and developmental research, threatens at times to overwhelm that strong core of decent educational practice.

So, I do recommend it: just read the recipes and skip the framing text. The book will go down easier and your ego will have less trouble incarnating it.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected, May 28, 2009

By 

Displaced Yankee - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Waldorf Kindergarten Snack Book (Spiral-bound)

I was really disappointed when I received this book. It is a very thin cookbook and the first 10 pages are not even recipes, they talk about "incarnating foods" and whatnot. Even though I am a strong supporter of the Waldorf philosophy, I have to agree with the previous reviewer who stated that these pages are worthy of a trip to the recycle bin.

The recipes themselves are healthy, as expected. However, very few of the recipes give yields and some don't even really tell you how much of the ingredients to add. When I buy something that says it has recipes in it, I sort of expect that it will tell me how much of the food I am making and how much of an ingredient to add. Something more descriptive perhaps than, "lots of apples." Also, one of the "recipes" tells you to go out and buy some particular pancake mix and make biscuits with it, which just seems ridiculous to me.

I was happy to see that there are some different recipes in here, one for "Millet Squares" is something that comes to mind.
The recipes I've tried are decent. Many of them call of things that you probably don't have hanging around your house. Rice syrup, millet, and rose essence come to mind. But if that is what you're after, (it was what I was looking for, something a little different), than you may enjoy this book. I was disappointed that it was so thin and half-hearted. In my opinion, it is not worth the money.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very practical resource, January 17, 2007

By 

MamaG - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Waldorf Kindergarten Snack Book (Spiral-bound)

This is an extremely useful and practical book full of simple ideas and recipes for snacks and lunches. The information on planning snacks definitely comes from an anthroposophical bent, which might be troubling to some readers, but overall it is a wonderful resource. It includes sample snack menus, information of eating "a grain a day" (as well as the energetic properties of the grains), and sections on bread, soup, fruit, birthday cakes & muffins, and special foods for the festivals. We use ours daily!