Eat Your Words

‘Oh you’re a good girl, eating yer fruit!’

How I hate that sentence, directed at my three year old daughter.

We hear it when she eats fruit. We hear it when she eats an avocado handroll. We hear it when she eats rice and veggies at the Chinese noodle shop.

I don’t like the whole ‘good boy / girl’ thing with its implication that a child might be bad if they behave in a way that we don’t like, but in this instance it is the implication that one would only eat real actual food if coerced into it, or in order to please a parent. It’s as though I’d spent the previous ten minutes berating her into performing such a feat of healthy eating, and her eventual capitulation must be praised to encourage future compliance.

I hate it because I don’t want her to absorb the idea that real food is something one must suffer through to gain the reward of adults’ approval.

Actually, Finna just likes fruit. If we take her shopping, and say, ‘get yourself a treat!’ she will trot straight off to the fruit and veggie section and load up on apples, grapes, cherries, mandarins, berries, carrots (current top of the pops is a bunch of baby carrots) and bananas. Yum-o! Her beaming little face and busy happy hands choose and organize, peel and arrange, sample and snack. “Mum!” she’ll call from the back of the car, “I want an apple.” She loves the green ones best.

There was a study released this week that was reported on across Australia. Published in the Medical Journal of Australia by Zhou et al, it reported that (extrapolated from a sample of 13,000 Adelaide children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds) Australian children eat way too much saturated fat, mainly from dairy products, milk, biscuits, cakes, and breakfast cereals, and far too little fibre. It also found that about one third of pre-schoolers are overweight or actually obese, but that this is probably from lack of physical activity rather than too many calories.

I have to say that I’m not exactly prone on the floor with shock at these revelations. I would go further and say that my experiences as a teacher have left me convinced that this study was pulling punches. I think the problem is worse.

The report said that the children tested did have adequate levels of iron, calcium and zinc, but I have to wonder whether these are from genuine food sources or from ‘fortified’ products. If so there are two concerns; one that artificial supplements don’t act the same way in the body that food derived ones do, and two that there are hundreds of other nutrients that are vital to a resilient thriving growing body and the best way to get these is by eating a diverse range of (mainly plant derived) real foods.

In my pre children life I was a teacher, and worked at one rural secondary school for five years. During that time, the Issue Of The Coke Machine popped up regularly at staff meetings, persistent as an unwanted suitor. The thing hulked in the 500 student strong school’s canteen, hogging a whole corner and dispensing an array of teeth – rotting beverages that appalled many of the teaching staff (no doubt partly because it made our job that much harder; taming coke – addled adolescents after their lunchtime caffeine and sugar bender was no joy). That wasn’t the only Issue, the canteen sold solid crap too, cakes and lollies, fatty fried foods and white bread rolls and bags of chips.

Why was it so? Clearly the voices of the teachers were ignored, and parents can’t have been complaining too loudly. The principal’s reason for the Coke vending machine’s continued presence among us was simple; the school needed the money. And that was why the food at the canteen remained enticingly crap also; apparently the sugar drugged little tykes in our care would rather starve than buy healthy food at school. The School Needed The Money.

The school’s attitude to its role in promoting healthy eating habits in kids wasn’t the only reason I make the claim that the situation may be even worse than reported. The contents of children’s lunchboxes, revealed to me over eight years of teaching in a variety of Victorian schools, were not uniformly but certainly generally appalling. The average kid was dragging along a white bread plastic cheese sandwich and a bag of chips, along with canteen money for lollies. Seriously. In fairness, some also had sweet biscuits with icing, a bottle of cordial, a little baggie of some junk food. Some certainly did have a piece of fruit, and the ‘brain food’ initiative in some schools (with a scheduled midmorning break for the consumption of fruit or nuts) helped. A minority of kids definitely had healthy, actual food in their lunchboxes.

Getting back to my beautiful daughter. How on earth did we get her to eat these things? Regular threats and beatings? No, actually, it was down to two basic things.

Firstly, we offered her a range of real actual food (things that grew somewhere, not long ago, some of them in our garden) from when she became interested in eating (at about eight and a half months old).

Secondly, we never forced, cajoled, tricked, bargained, berated or bribed her to eat anything, and we never stopped her from eating any time she felt like it. No sitting down to ‘finish your tea’ if she’s not hungry. No smothering veggies in tomato sauce, no eating races, no bargaining about eating dinner so you can have desert. Just, here’s some food, eat what and when you want. Nowadays, (she’s 3) we sit down to eat meals together at the table, but she still eats as much or as little as she wants. We occasionally have treats (too many hot chips when we’re out due to gluten and dairy allergies, dammit, but Finna will just as often choose an avocado sandwich given her druthers), but the vast majority of the food we have in the house grew somewhere recently, and even through several moves of house we always chuck a few veggies in the garden. This morning she lit up with excitement, ‘Yes! Let’s pick some broccoli!’ We grew it, and that makes it that much more magical.

Finna is completely self regulating, she stops eating when she’s full, and many times we’ve observed that she consumes exactly what her body needs. I’m guessing that our exact way of going about things may not be for everyone, but certainly children learn most powerfully by example and immersion; they learn what to do and how to be by observing what’s normal in the folk around them. Reason number five hundred to be really careful how you go about schooling your children; if they are in a school environment where the norm is eating rubbish, then you can bet your lunch that will become your child’s preferred norm too.

So what do I reply the next time someone says, ‘Ooh, you’re a good girl eating that!’? Suggestions welcome ;-)