The Green Parent
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Feb 24 2009
The Art of Unfooding
I am exploring some ideas around unfooding and wondered whether anyone had any experience of this? Have you tried it with your own children? And what were your experiences? I like this idea – we follow a similar approach to education at home so I’d like to find out more about the un- or defooding process.
There seems to be quite a lot of talk about this in the States at the moment. The way I understand it you leave your children to completely govern their own food choices; when, where, what and how much. This follows on naturally from child-led breastfeeding, where the baby determines when he wants food and how much he needs. I guess I am part way towards providing an unfooding environment for my children. Mealtimes tend to be a big hotchpotch of raw goodies, some homebaked stuff, salads and a main dish like risotto or pasta. Everyone just chooses what they fancy eating at that point (and sometimes that’s quite a lot of food and sometimes barely anything). I try hard to suppress the anxious mother that resides deep inside and is eager to see her children eat nutritious food, and to trust their natural instincts instead.
So, in a sense they get to eat what they want (or what they want from the limited food selection we have in the house). However, the choices around when and where they eat is not so simple. I like all food to be consumed around the kitchen table (except for extenuating circumstances – think popcorn and occasional family movies, raw chocolate icecream and a deep bath and so on) because it means less tidying up etc. And family mealtimes are usually one of the best times of the day – we all get together to talk, laugh and eat at least twice a day. I love mealtimes for their sense of coming together and feel so lucky that as home educators we sometimes get to share all three meals with each other in a day. I wonder if choosing to unfood would affect this.
Another issue that I have is that I believe that we need a certain amount of nutrients and the right balance of foodstuffs to realise our full potential. I don’t think that I have managed to achieve the completely nutritionally perfect diet for either of my children yet (and certainly not for myself, although I am well aware of what it is!) although I keep trying and making adjustments. So, would allowing them free reign with food undo all the work that I have done over the years to try and establish this wholistic diet?
I’d love to hear from anyone with any experiences of trying defooding. Am thinking about putting an article together for The Green Parent once I have tried it myself and it would be great to speak with others too.
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5 comments in response to this post
Melisaa I posted about this on my own blog - here a while back!
http://mamauktalesfromwales.blogspot.com/2007/06/food-and-un-food.html
We do this in as much as I can, meaning only that I am trying constantly to ‘forget’ as it were my own conventional and often unhealthy attitude towards food. It *does* work, but I think it takes a huge amount of trust that over time the different sorts of foods your child consumes even out… for example at first given free reign (like any controlled person I suppose) they try to eat as much ‘junk’ as possible (be that home made shortbread to shop bought crisps). Ideally one would start this way of looking at food from birth, but ovioulsy it is not always possible since ideas come and go——I notice now that I do have input into what they eat - after all I make the shopping lists, I buy the food, but as unschoolers my kids get to be in the kitchen a LOT and they shop with me so it is a family process and thus decisions are made be everyone. I hardly even think about it now! It does go hand in hand with autonomous family living.
BUT here is my niggle atm. One of my son’s has developed eczema - I had never even seen it before and we are stumped as to what is causing it. An unsuitable food is an obvious cause and so we are embarking on another food journey right now trying to figure out if it may be one food or another. It is certainly a talking point here and my son is thankfully (to all of our sanities!) very willing to eliminate verious foods (he is almost 8). Un fooding and food intolerences/allergies and how families cope with that would be an interesting article! It is certainly challenging!!!
Claire
With regards to the idea of a ‘perfect’ wholsome diet and nutritional profile being ‘ruined’ I think it is worth considering : 1) the there is no ‘perfect’ ideal, not really. Ideas wax and wane about what we ought to eat (for example pre industrial people ate something like ten times the amount of fat soluable vitamins A and D than we do today (in the form of animlas fats - butter and lard in this contry) and suffered significanlyt lower levels of tooth decay and obesity and heart problems and yet the current diet dictocrats do not encourgae these foods, and instead point us towards vegtable based oils which, with the exemption of nut oils, have seen a huge array of increased health problems….. ‘Cholesterol Myths’ is a wonderfully researched book about this.
We are encouraged also from another angle to eat ‘superfoods’ of which non can be sourced locally! I don’t think persobnally a diet filled with far flung foods is ‘healthy’ either for myself, family or planet. Unless I actually move to Hawaii and become a ‘local’ to these foods….
2) ‘Ruined’ - well… a friend once told me a story (vegan turned ‘traditional ’ fooder and home steader) about how she was deep into her pure veg based lifestyle and had an old friend to stay. this friend in time honoured tradition brought out some cinnamon pop tarts to celebrate their ‘sllep over’ and my frined refused them on the basis that she no longer ate processed foods. Fair enough she thought. But actually she saw her friend’s face drop and *something* from their meeting, their friendship was dulled. Later, much later she said how she wished she had eaten the pop tart, had smiled and enjoyed them with her friend. That the further she travelled on her foood jouney she saw food was made up of so much more that the nutritional components. That there were other aspects of food that deeply nourished. Soul food. And not necessarily of the salad variety!
It is so true. Our food choices are so diverse and varied and depend not so much on logic but on emotion too often enough. I hope my own children take this on, recognise it, in fact I think it ought ot be part of every human’s food ‘education’ that ‘good’ foods and ‘bad’ foods are not so black and white in regards this.
After all guilt ought not to be tied in with our food choices.
Know what I mean?
Claire
My family are in the process of a huge change in our food lifestyle, we have decided to live without money! So all food that we will be consuming will be foraged, we have bought our field guide and are making preparations to make this huge step. We will be giving away all our belongings and heading out with just a few basics. We want to reconnect to Gaia and our vegetable minds and feel this is an amazing time to go out there and do it. We realized that the best way to educate our children and ourselves it to be wild and free, after all, the world is our home, not this box that we find ourselves living in. This is the first step in the process, as this is the very beginning, perhaps, The Green Parent might have an interest in an article on our families adventure with food and survival too.
With 2 very fussy eaters (highly sensitive children who are funny about tastes, textures and arrangements of food on the plate), I have recently been experimenting a bit with this approach - not that i had a name for it. I have just realised that preparing a load of stuff, some cooked, some raw, some mixed into cooked dishes, some plain (pasta or boiled rice) and putting it all out on the table in separate bowls and allowing everyone to choose what they want and how much has really helped with this. I have stopped - to some extent - tearing my hair out over trying to cook one dish that everyone would eat. Both children have started occasionally and cautiously trying foods outside their normal range, and each child eats how much they need on that particular occasion.
As I feel family meals are important, I wouldn’t really go any further down the path of letting them choose the timings of food, but then again, meal-times are set around the times they need to eat anyway, so to some extent, they have controlled that too.
An interesting topic, but as with many, I fear that crystallising it into a single ‘approach’ with a name can take away from its flexibility and hence its usefulness.
Liz
Hi there, it’s my first time visiting this website and came across this intresting article on unfooding. But I don’t get it. What is the point of this type of feeding? Won’t it turn a child into a fussy unsociable eater? If they eat what they want, they won’t experience (or get used to) all the wonderful tastes this world has to offer. As they get older you wouldn’t be able to take them anywhere because they wouldn’t be prepared to try anything new. Won’t it turn them into a selfish person if they have always been allowed to eat whatever they want (an not considering the people around them at a mealtime)?
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