When Catie Gett’s 10-year-old started school, she ate up the highly nutritious lunches her mum prepared. But when she got older, she wanted her lunch to look like everyone else’s – i.e., processed food.
Changing tack, the Melbourne naturopath now mostly concentrates on the “book ends” of her children’s diet – a healthy breakfast and dinner. When you’re packing cut-up fruit and veges for a school lunch, she says, a thermos for school lunch is a “game-changer”.
“I started putting her grapes and carrot sticks and cucumber and things in a thermos and it gets eaten,” she tells RNZ’s Saturday Morning.
Catie Gett is a single mum and the author of The Staple Store Cookbook Vol. 1.
Sticky toffee pudding can be pretty expensive, so to bring the cost down, this recipe cuts the butter, replaces eggs with grated apple and substitutes brown sugar for treacle.
If you’re going to concentrate on one end of the day to get some nutritious food into your child, a protein-and-fibre-rich breakfast is Gett’s recommendation.
“It stabilises their blood sugar, which impacts everything from their resilience in the schoolyard to how they concentrate for the rest of the day.”
Her own daughter usually starts the day with avocado toast and a smoothie but porridge will also deliver kids “a really wonderful start”, she says.
“Oats have between 18 and 21 grams of protein per 100 grams … If you can afford it, some nut butter on there mixed through would really great as well, or some yoghurt. Frozen fruits are awesome because they’re much cheaper and much more accessible. If you can get hold os a little bit of those, that is the most perfect breakfast.”
A breakfast of porridge topped with fruit, nuts, and yoghurt will give kids a “a really wonderful start”, says Catie Gett.
Posh Porridge
Gett, who grew up seeing naturopaths and eating a very wholesome diet thanks to her caterer mum and fine dining chef dad, worked in health food shops while she trained as a clinical naturopath herself.
But 15 years ago, working in private practice, she missed being part of “community health” and opened The Staple Store.
Looking back, Gett sees that around this time, the “Instagram bubble” around wellness was starting to form. Only later she realised she’d become part of the problem.
“[Wellness] essentially became something that said health was something that you purchased and was only available to people who could afford it.
“All of a sudden, I was sitting at this cool kids’ table where health was really, really cool. When I started, it was like brown paper bags and hippies.”
Catie Gett writes a Substack called Catie’s Unsolicited Life-Changing Advice.
Jana Longhurst
During Covid, Gett closed the Staple Store for a couple of years. One day after she’d opened it back up as an online-only outlet, the courier didn’t show up and she delivered some food packages herself… to mansions.
“I got home, and I was like, I’ve come really far from home. I don’t know how I got here.
“I started with a really big heart and great intentions and got swallowed by this aspirational wellness bubble and was inside of it.”
Caity Gett’s social media following got a boost when Jennifer Garner shared her recipe for Not So Dal – a red lentil mix that’s cheap and quick to make.
Karolina Grabowska / Unsplash
The day after Gett posted the Staple Store’s most profitable recipe – Not So Dal red-lentil mix – on Instagram, she woke up to 10,000 new followers after American actress Jennifer Garner had shared it.
“I was getting all of these DMs from people saying, ‘Thank you so much. This is really meaningful. I’m experiencing food insecurity.”
Now, as well as her work as a naturopath, Gett is in the business of sharing other simple, cheap and nutritious recipes – on Instagram and in the new Staple Store Cookbook.
“I want people to know that good food is health food. It doesn’t need giant price tags. It doesn’t need to be a superfood.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand