Thanks to her two girls, Kim Zachman spent a lot of time making popular American foods like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, chicken fingers, hot dogs, and pizza. Her girls are adults now, but when they were young, Zachman also learned a lot about books written for children. “I just got hooked on children’s books myself, I just really love ‘em,” she said. Zachman wrote for newspapers and magazines, but she wanted to try writing a children’s book. With the recent publication of There’s No Ham in Hamburgers, she has. Zachman said it was not easy to learn how to write for children. She had to learn to use clear vocabulary and shorter sentences. She said, “it’s been a long process, a learning process.” The book is about the history of American foods like cookies, chocolate, and cereal. When Zachman first had the idea of writing the book, most publishing companies were not interested. But that was before chefs got famous and television was filled with cooking shows some of which featured children. “Now, times have changed, and kids are interested in food,” she said. One of her favorite “kid food” stories is about the first breaded boneless chicken pieces, now known as nuggets. No one had found a way to cover the chicken pieces with a bread mixture that could be frozen and then stay on when cooked. When that finally happened, chicken nuggets started selling at McDonald’s restaurants all over the world in the early 1980s. “You know, we had fried chicken for hundreds and hundreds of years, why not the chicken nugget? And it really was that that was a technological challenge. … It was actually that really required a lot of technology to make it happen, so that surprised me that this little chicken nugget was such a big deal, and we didn't have it sooner.”