What the Heck is Food Neutrality?
When I started blogging about feeding little eaters, I had no idea what the term “food neutrality” meant. The term is rather obscure. It doesn’t have a Wikipedia page and I struggled to find any information on its origin. However, if you spend a little time in the realm of mommy bloggers or look at #kidnutrition, it pops up quite a bit. I decided to do a little digging into this idea in hopes of better understanding the concept and to see if there were lessons I wanted to apply at home.
Food Neutrality: the Basics
In a nutshell, food neutrality means that food is just food. We do not need to assign a moral value to the foods we eat. Foods are not inherently “good” or “bad”; they are not inherently “healthy” or “unhealthy”.
As one blogger put it sugar cookies are not poison and kale is not a miracle. Cookies are cookies and kale is kale.
In the US, diet culture is all around us and can seep into the way we think about our own diet and how we talk to kids about food and health.
It’s common to use words like “good”, “bad”, “junk”, “naughty”, “trash” and “healthy” when we describe food. These words can also describe how eating those foods makes us feel. For some, eating can feel like a personal moral battle laden with judgment, guilt and shame.
Does Food Neutrality Go To Far?
Some people might feel that this idea is too “new age” or “granola”. Obviously different foods do have different nutrition content with some being higher in sugar, fat and calories while others are packed with fiber and vitamins.
Clearly there are certain foods that if eaten in excess will not contribute to our physical health. Fudge and tomatoes are not nutritional equivalents.
While eating more vegetables and less sweets is good for our health, the goal with food neutrality is to look at the relationship we have with food and eating…and the relationship with food that we may be inadvertently passing down to our kids. We are after all trying to foster a positive relationships with all foods, not just the superfoods.
Food choices are complex and many factors contribute to what we choose to eat including nostalgia, joy, novel experiences and shared social experiences. The joy of birthday cake is a real thing and that joy matters. Food neutrality encourages people to make food choices based on physical, mental, social and environmental factors instead of simply always trying to stick to the “good” foods list and avoid swerving into the lane of “bad” foods at any cost.
Practicing Food Neutrality with Kids
One of my biggest goals is to raise my boys to have positive relationships with food and eating. A key to achieving that goal is keeping the judgement, guilt and shame out of eating and feeding as much as possible.
Kids think in very literal terms. Telling them that they are eating “bad” or “good” food might be interpreted as “I’m acting bad” or “I’m acting good”.
You may want to take stock of the language you use when talking about food.
I have to admit that when I saw some of the lists of terms that are not considered food neutral, several jumped out that I had recently used on the blog or on instagram posts.
It can be hard to eliminate every “moral” description from our talk about food and it’s probably not even necessary. I don’t agree that every word I saw online as non-food neutral needed to be banned from my kitchen, but I do think it’s helpful to examine our food and diet lexicon to see if the use of certain terms could be scaled back.
Here are 3 simple tips if you want to try to make your kitchen more food neutral:
Bring excitement and enthusiasm when talking about all types of foods with kids. Don’t let on that kids aren’t “suppose” to like vegetables or that you feel guilty when you eat ice cream. “Carrots help our eyes work well!” “Chocolate chip cookies always make me think of Grandma!” (This is also a great tip for trying to avoid picky eating habits too!)
Rather than teaching kids that certain foods are not ok to eat, focus on all sorts of different foods having a place in the diet in moderation. Explain that our body needs some foods more often and other foods less often.
Become more aware of the words you use to describe foods to your kids. If you are constantly discussing which foods are “good” or “bad”, try to scale back.