What does ‘Food-Neutral’ mean to you?
This term is not often used, especially in classrooms. Food-neutrality is an important concept to understand and embrace when working with or feeding kids.
Food neutrality is about acceptance, appreciation, understanding, being curious and seeing the value in differences – all traits we encourage our children to embrace.
Children are not born thinking one food is better than the other or that they need to stop eating a certain food or that they need to change their body to “be better”. This is all taught by society and is damaging to their development of a healthy relationship with food. The focus on obesity and diabetes prevention in schools is causing harm. Too many kids are being weighed in schools, taught about bad foods,
This year especially, we are seeing higher rates of eating disorders in kids. Schools and educators have the potential to positively influence kids’ relationships with food and bodies.
Food Neutrality is:
- Believing all food is morally equal;
- Removing judgement of food; and
- Eliminating value-based labels on food.
But what about nutrition?
- Yes, foods have different nutritional value;
- Food neutrality is about stopping the judgement of the food, and those eating it; and
- Remember, all food provides nutrients.
So what does food-neutrality look like in a classroom?
In your classroom, you can start making changes to how you talk about food right away. It’s not easy to change this language as most of us were raised and taught about food this way. Changes you can make are:
- presenting all foods as good foods;
- Avoiding sorting or splitting foods into two groups: healthy vs. unhealthy, every day vs. sometimes foods, good vs bad, treat vs. healthy etc.;
- Approaching food by exploring with the senses and being curious about food;
- Allowing students to eat their preferred foods first;
- Never attaching shame or judgement to foods, the kids, or their adults who make their food choices.
Steps you can take right away:
- Review your classroom library.
- Remove books that have themes of food/body shame (i.e. Gregory the terrible eater, too much junk).
- Add books that talk about food/cooking in a neutral way. See our book list here.
- Use the actual names of foods in your classroom.
- i.e. Chocolate is chocolate, not a treat/snack/dessert.
- Snack is a time, not a type of food.
- Allow kids to eat the foods that they bring to school. Allow them to eat them in the order and amount of their choosing.
- Talk to the kids in your class that you are changing things. Acknowledge that this is new and you are learning too (growth mindset!).
- Consider putting up a visual reminder acknowledging your commitment. See our poster on Teachers Pay teachers here.
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