Food Coloring Pages

What did you have for lunch? These food coloring pages turn that question into a page to color. Printing them costs nothing, and nearly every dish has a small smiling face: a burger winking over its sesame bun, a taco standing on two legs, a sushi roll in a chef's hat, a cup of bubble tea with a star on its straw.

The menu covers a whole day:

• Breakfast: pancakes, square waffles under a jug of syrup, a sleepy croissant, a sesame bagel, a fried egg with toast fingers.
• Fast food: burgers, pizza slices, a hot dog, a paper cone of fries, a club sandwich, a pretzel and a bucket of popcorn.
• Asian dishes: nigiri and sushi rolls, a rice ball, ramen, dumplings, spring rolls, curry, bento boxes and bubble tea.
• Fruit and vegetables with faces: cherries, grapes, a carrot and broccoli, a corn cob, a watermelon slice, an avocado.
• Desserts and drinks: cupcakes, a doughnut, churros, a cinnamon roll, a wobbly jelly, cotton candy, a milkshake and lemonade.

Kawaii food coloring pages: why the food has faces

The style is kawaii, the Japanese word for cute, which also names a whole way of drawing with dot eyes, a small curved mouth, round cheeks, a heart or a star nearby. The face stays small, so the food is still easy to recognize. The ramen keeps its halved egg and fish cake, and the three stacked macarons each get a different look (a smile, a wink, a laugh).

That is why the same pages work for two very different colorers. A preschooler likes anything with a face. A teenager or an adult who collects kawaii stickers likes the soft, round style and the small details, like the charm hanging from a bubble tea cup on its strap. The kawaii coloring pages carry the style over to teapots, animals and everyday objects.

Character bento, the Japanese lunchbox

The bento box with a panda rice ball and two octopus-shaped sausages is modeled on kyaraben, the character lunches Japanese parents make by shaping rice and cutting food into animals. A second, two-tier lunchbox has a face of its own, packed with a panda rice ball, an apple, broccoli and tomatoes under the stars. The real animals are in the panda coloring pages and the octopus coloring pages.

Fast food coloring pages: burgers, pizza and fries

Burgers come in several moods. One smiles over three chips with a heart above, one sits on a checkered napkin with its cheese slice hanging over the edge, and one big winking burger fills most of the page. The pizza slices wink and smile, with pepperoni, mushrooms and cheese stretching away from the crust.

Around them:

• a hot dog seen from above, with a wavy line of mustard;
• a paper cone of fries on a wooden table beside a smiling dip pot;
• a club sandwich cut into triangles, a cocktail stick through each half;
• a twisted pretzel dotted with salt;
• a striped popcorn bucket with smiling kernels bouncing out.

The hot dog and the burgers suit a cookout page alongside the 4th of July coloring pages. The popcorn, the cotton candy and the toffee apple belong at the fair, with the rest of the carnival coloring pages.

Sushi, ramen, dumplings and bubble tea

The Asian dishes are a favorite with older kids. Two pieces of nigiri sit on a plate next to a bowl of soy sauce that is smiling too. A bamboo steamer is full of little smiling dumplings, chopsticks reaching in. Spring rolls stand upright in a paper cup, and a mound of rice on a plate of curry has been shaped into a face.

Bubble tea has several pages to itself, round cups and tall ones, with smiling lids and straws. The drink comes from Taiwan, where tea shops began adding chewy tapioca pearls in the 1980s. Color the tea brown, pink or green, and the pearls at the bottom dark brown or black.

Healthy food coloring pages and a MyPlate sorting game

Many teachers look for healthy food coloring pages for a nutrition lesson. The trick is to mix healthy foods with treats, then let the children do the sorting. The USDA's MyPlate divides a meal into five groups:

1. Fruits: the cherries, the grapes, the strawberries with blueberries, the watermelon slice.
2. Vegetables: the carrot and broccoli, the vegetable skewers.
3. Grains: the pancakes, the bagel, the toast, the pretzel.
4. Protein: the fried egg, the dumplings, the burger patty.
5. Dairy: the wedge of cheese beside its grater, the milkshake.

Color everything, cut the foods out and glue them onto a paper plate divided into five parts. A second round sorts them into "every day" and "sometimes" foods. The corn cob in its husk starts a good debate. Eaten fresh it counts as a vegetable, but dried and ground into cornmeal it is a grain, and popcorn is a whole grain too.

Coloring food so it looks good enough to eat

• Pizza: pale yellow cheese, orange-yellow where it stretches, red pepperoni and a tan crust with a darker rim.
• Burgers: tan bun, green lettuce, yellow cheese, dark brown patty, and white sesame seeds left uncolored.
• Sushi: white rice, very dark green seaweed, and orange-pink for salmon.
• Pancakes and waffles: golden brown, darker on the raised grid and edges, amber where the syrup runs.
• Dumplings: steamed, so pale cream with a light shadow in the pleats, and a straw-colored steamer.

Faces can stay the color of the food, with a touch of pink on the cheeks. That one pink spot is what makes a kawaii drawing look finished.

Easy food pages for preschool and a play restaurant

Most of these sheets show one food drawn large with thick outlines, which a three- or four-year-old can fill without help. Choose Quick to color to see the lone smiling foods on a plain page, like the burger, the rice ball or the toast with its pat of butter:

• A salted pretzel on a paper tray
• A hot dog with a zigzag of mustard
• A stack of smiling macarons

Kids who are happy staying inside small spaces can try the fries in their cone, the lemonade tray full of lemon wheels, the smoothie ringed with kiwi slices or the corn cob with its rows of kernels.

For a play restaurant, color a burger, a pizza slice and a bubble tea, cut them out and glue them on card. Add a menu written by hand and the children can take turns being the waiter. The preschool coloring pages have more big, simple shapes for the same age.

Fruit, sweets and ice cream: the rest of the food family

Several foods here have whole collections of their own. The apple with a worm peeking out leads to the apple coloring pages, with orchards and pies. The winking strawberries lead to the strawberry coloring pages, and the fruit coloring pages draw every fruit realistically, whole and cut open.

For dessert, the smiling cupcakes and the doughnut with heart sprinkles have relatives in the cupcake coloring pages and the donut coloring pages. The two scoops with faces on a criss-cross cone open onto the ice cream coloring pages, and the cotton candy onto the candy coloring pages. The apple pie with a scoop melting beside it fits November and the Thanksgiving coloring pages.

Printing a food coloring book for the restaurant table

A small food coloring book keeps kids busy while waiting for a table or on a car trip. Pick breakfast, lunch and dessert with Add to pack, download the menu as one PDF and staple the sheets along the left edge. Every dish is free, in A4 at 300 dpi. A4 paper prints it unchanged; for US Letter, turn on fit to page so the fries at the bottom of the cone are not trimmed. If that option is hard to spot, the printing guide tells you where it sits in the print dialog.