What is Food Neutrality?
It is very common to assign labels to foods such as “good” or “bad” and “healthy” or “unhealthy”. Often, this means that “healthy” foods – foods that are unprocessed or high in nutrients – are considered “good”, and foods that are ultra-processed or lack nutrition are considered “bad”. Diet culture has taught us to attach moral value to foods. As a result, children may feel that they are “bad” for eating “bad” foods. Using these terms in front of our children perpetuates diet culture mentality and can interfere with a child’s ability to eat intuitively by responding to their internal hunger and fullness cues. As a generation who grew up with a mentality about food and health deeply rooted in diet culture, we may unintentionally relay moral values about food to children.
Food neutrality means that all foods have the same moral value regardless of their nutritional content. All foods contain nutrients, and beyond food as fuel, food can help to foster connections with family, friends, cultures, and food traditions. Food neutrality is about not attaching moral value or judgement to the food or to the person eating that food. We can practice food neutrality by changing our language. When talking to your children, instead of saying, “Eat your carrots; they will help you see better,” you can try, “These carrots are orange and crunchy.”
What can we teach children about food?
Proper nutrition is crucial to a child’s ability to grow, develop and thrive. Menu Planning Guidelines, such as www.odph.ca/child-care-resources, are valuable for adults to consider in planning menus and offering foods to children, but we don’t need to glorify nutrients to raise intuitive eaters. Children tend to be concrete thinkers and cannot grasp the concepts of nutrients or health risks, so teaching about nutrition to young children is no longer recommended.
Diet culture can get in the way when we try to teach about food, but children can learn to love a variety of foods and have a positive relationship with food and their body. We can encourage children to explore the physical properties of foods using their five senses (sight, smell, sound, touch and taste), rather than a focus on nutrition.
The division of responsibility in feeding is an excellent guide. Adults decide what foods to serve, when to provide food, and where to serve the food. Children decide if they eat (i.e. are they hungry?) and what to eat based on the food offered. As adults, we can normalize eating a variety of foods by serving them, calling them by their names, and eating them, creating a positive eating environment. Let the children do the rest!
Refer to www.healthunit.com/uploads/hs-trust-my-tummy.pdf for more information.
For more information visit: www.healthunit.com/childcare-educators#h-eating.
Submitted by Ginette Blake BASc RD on behalf to the Middlesex-London Community Early Years Partnership
