Last year, I wrote about my belief that we should abolish snack time for children. France, one of the few places resisting the obliteration of taste and health that occurs where commercialized, ultra processed food becomes the norm, has until now condemned snacks. There is the afternoon goûter for young children, but beyond that snacks were considered shameful. Depending on who you talk to, it seems, sadly, more permissive attitudes toward snacks are taking root.
This year, I wrote for The Federalist about my conviction that school lunches need an upgrade. I’m not yet taking on the industrial complex of federally subsidized school lunches (short answer there: John Oliver is unequivocally wrong. The reason France and Japan have kept poor quality and nutritionally deficient food out of schools is through local control and the principle of subsidiarity. Big government cheese does not a good lunch make!). For now, I am concerned with those packing a lunch from home and the social pressure to affirm as good and worthy the junk food lunch.
As if snack time were not bad enough, parents increasingly pack a “lunch” consisting of an assortment of packaged snacks with little nutritional value and heavy emphasis on high fructose corn syrup, soy derivatives, and food dye. Most of us have at one time or another defaulted to a crummy meal for our kids. It happens. But I cannot condone the insane claim in a time of abundance and nutritional diversity like no other that “fed is best.” Making sure your child has a pack of Doritos and a sugar beverage is not praiseworthy.
As I observed in my article at The Federalist, what is most concerning is that parents so often do not believe they have a choice. They feel such a lack of agency that they think they have to pack “safe foods” and go along with whatever super sweet, artificially colored nuggets are masquerading as food. We are reassured in many of these “trending” posts proclaiming “fed is best” that we can assume that the same children eating the junk lunch will have a “well-balanced dinner.” No, we cannot assume that. A more likely scenario is that, like countless children living in one of the most prosperous and resource abundant times in human history, there are also “safe foods” for dinner, likely some varietal of fried chicken and fried potatoes. Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” What you eat for your daily lunch is what you eat.
Why does it matter? Once you understand how people learn to eat, you come to the startling conclusion that what children eat each day trains them to like and desire those foods more. Habits are setting in and taking root. If we want our children one day to be adults who have a functioning liver and a full life lived with vitality and zest, we would do well to introduce vegetables, ordered meal times, and flavors beyond sweet and funny colored.
This isn’t a hill worth dying on; it’s a lifestyle worth living! Read the rest of my thoughts here.
