Independivore: Parenting, peer pressure, politics of food
Interesting development over here at Action Academy: We might have to revise our vegetarian menu. My daughter Dangerg!rl, aka Independivore, came home from Pre-K last week declaring herself a meat-eater.
This is potentially a family crisis: I've been a vegetarian/pescetarian for 15 years, ever since a complicated cocktail of influence first conspired to inspire me in that direction:
1) I lived and worked on a farm as part of an altogether life-changing high school program I was involved in called Senior Field Studies. Lots of the ideas behind Action Academy have their genesis in this program and its superhero leader/teacher extraordinaire Mark Leachman, and I actually worked on a pretty great little farm, but some of what I saw out in the rest of Colorado farm country made it hard to stay stoked on a meat-based diet.
2) A lovely girl I was involved with around the same time went veg, and we learned together that a lot of our heroes in bands like Fugazi were also veg, so what the heck. And, most importantly,
3) I spent freshman year on a college campus in a corner of Colorado where the cafeteria options mostly featured Grade D meat from the same catering company responsible for the hot dogs at the football stadium. I lived on the salad bar and cereal station, mostly as a Lucky Charms-atarian, until I could beat a retreat out of there for Washington, DC, where I promptly met a small army of punk rock vegans and vegetarians and never looked back. I've since come up with a lot of other perfectly good political, economic, nutritional, and environmental reasons to explain myself, but that's where it all started.
Anyway, I've also worked pretty hard to hash out some cool-dad parenting practices, and one thing I always said was that if my kids wanted to try eating meat – or try just about anything at all, for that matter, within reason – then the choice would be theirs and I would back them. I had a good friend all through elementary school and junior high whose mom and grandparents were Nepalese Buddhists and vegetarians, and they had a similarly enlightened parenting plan, with the end result being that as a kid I frequently got to swap my cold-cut sandwiches for all kinds of exotic and wondrous vegetarian Nepalese delights. Thanks, Ms. Arjal!
When I first sent my superheroes to school, I told the teachers that I was raising the kids as vegetarians but that it wouldn't be the end of the world if they got something served to them by accident or wanted to try a taste of something. For the first year of the two-year Pre-K program my daughter is enrolled in, Independivore proudly declared herself a vegetarian and the staff dutifully prepared special meals for her and a few of her friends. But this year something changed: Her closest friends were loving pepperoni pizza and chicken nuggets, and Independivore wanted to break with Action Academy tradition. Peer pressure in the Pre-K! Believe it. She tried something one day last week, and... she loved it. Somehow I didn't see this coming quite so soon: She's now had Sesame Chicken and Szechuan Beef from the local Chinese joint, several slices of pepperoni pizza, a piece of bacon, even a hamburger. Huh.
Mostly what I want is for my kids to be healthy, happy, and... humane. Although some of my more hardcore vegan and vegetarian friends might argue with it, I know it's possible to be omnivorous and all of those things. But I'm curious and I've been loving getting some comments on this website, so here are some pointed questions/conversation starters:
- How have other folks reading this navigated similar experiences as parents when it comes to the family food plan?
- How are other parents talking to their kids about food, where it comes from, and the personal/family choices they make about it?
- How have other parents reacted to their kids going veg, or, in my case, its reverse?
- To the extent that you are or are not hyper-conscientious about what you eat (where it came from, how it was raised, etc.) when you're making your own purchases and planning your own menu, what do you do at the level of, say, the school cafeteria, where you're likely to have very little info or say about it?
- Marginally related: I'm terrified about eating disorders and that whole side of the world I'm sending a daughter and a son into, doing my damndest to do battle with the culture that creates it, and trying to make sure that my own family food choices don't somehow send some fucked-up psychological signals down that pipeline and come back to haunt me some day in the form of therapy somewhere down the line. So I'll ask it again, with a little twist: How are people talking to their kids about food so that they don't end up obese, anorexic, bulimic, pumped full of crazy hormones, or with the insane industrial agriculture system's abuse of animal life on their hands?
For now my answer is that I'm sticking to my vegetarian menu here on the Action Academy home campus and I'm going to give some more thought to how to talk about my own food choices with my kids, as well as the many other options that are open to them. My kids are healthy as can be – have I mentioned that they are superheroes, and that we spend hours at the playground on my watch? – so I'm going to try not to sweat it too much. I'm also going to try to find out a bit more about what they're serving for lunch at the school, where they're sourcing the ingredients, and whether I can influence them to be smarter about it (maybe not a bad idea for any parent), but I'm going to try not be too pyscho about it.
When we go out to eat or spend time with the extended family, I suppose a whole new world of menu options opens up for my daughter now. That's what we want for our kids, right, the whole world to choose from? As for her bro, the Cheesetarian Veggie Chomper, he's not having it... until the day when maybe he is, and starts trading his exotic vegetarian lunches with the kid with the cold-cuts.
Life just keeps coming at you, doesn't it?
– Colin Bane
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Kerry Lauerman
Louis Bayard
Kirs
Liz Emrich
Caruso Wegie
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
When I was growing up, one of the most/only positive things my parents did was provide me with the opportunity to eat lots of healthy food. I grew away from that as a teenager to a certain degree (yay, lucky charms), but as an adult I crave the fresh veggies and brown bread that so many others I know eschew. So I think providing that opportunity is enough, both in terms of the actual food and knowing where it comes from.
Also, although my kid begs for it, I can't stomach letting her have school lunches. They are better than they used to be, which still is not saying enough.
Good luck to you and the Independivore.
http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=2990
Based on the ridiculous amount of therapy I've been through, I can give you a bit of insight on how to keep your kids right in terms of how not to send messed up signals to your kids.
1) Don't pressure your kids to eat/not eat. Your job is to provide healthy food choices, theirs is to decide how much to eat. Don't focus on volume, focus on HOW they eat. Are they chewing thier food completely? Are they staying at the table until everyone is finished eating?
2) Don't make foods mandatory or verboten. The more emotion you put into a certain food, the more emotion they will put into it, and then you have a recipe for emotional eating issues. When eating is about emotions, you set yourself up for obesity issues.
3) Your daughter especially should know that you love and accept her exactly as she is. As her father, you are the lens who teaches her how men should see her. Teach her that you think she is beautiful just the way she is, and she will have less cause to doubt that or try to turn herself into a pretzel to make herself acceptable to other men.
I think you'll be fine. When someone loves their kids as much as you, you'll find a way.
When he was 4 months old and of course only being breast fed, I got myself a delicious lush ice cream cone. I was holding him as I was eating the cone.
He went crazy. Starting trying to pull up his head aiming for the cone. Making all kind of desperate grunting noises. In that moment, I forgot all my good intentions and let him have a taste.
That was the moment I realized, as Stella so succinctly put it, he had some opinions that were clearly different than mine and he was going to let them known. That was 25 years ago, three more kids followed him, and all I can say is the food thing became the least of my worries.
You sound like a fantastic father and your children are fortunate to have you.
Liz already gave you great advice on the eating disorder, so I’ll stick to my experiences as an omnivore mom with a veg kid.
My daughter has tried the vegetarian lifestyle twice. First when she was about 11 and stick with it for a year. Second time when she was about 13, and stuck with it for short time. My husband who is the family chef, and an awesome one at that, did his best to accommodate her. We just felt that we needed to support her in her decision as long as she ate well and remain healthy. Her decision was based on ethics, she simply didn’t feel right eating animals. She did eat eggs and drink milk.
To accommodate her, we would shop in the vegetarian section of the grocery store and try to purchase entrees from vendors such as Amy’s for her. My husband would occasional fix veg meals, but my son is a dedicated carnivore, and neither my husband or I was interested in pursuing the veg lifestyle for ourselves. So usually he would fix 2 side dishes that passed veggie muster and she would have a separate entrée from the rest of us.
She finally quit the first time when she looked at the slab of meat husband cooked for dinner one night and confessed that it looked “really, really good.” The second time, she simply was not eating in healthy manner, so we put the kibosh on separate meals for her. Through out the whole thing we put the onus on her to eat healthy, and emphasized health, health, health. She still doesn’t eat a lot of meat, enough though she is not officially vegetarian anymore.
For us the school cafeteria was not an issue, since she preferred to take her lunch.
Next, I'm going to pretty much agree with Liz. Just let her be herself. Right now, she's trying to figure out how she fits in in this world and who she is. Let her do it. Maybe steer her (crap, pun unintended) towards responsible meat-eating. For example, not beef so much. Real free range chicken. etc. etc. But let her think about these choices on her own. Show her the effects of the factory farm but don't push these things on her or she'll shoot off in the opposite direction. Let her find her own way on this one. I would also say make sure her choices at home are still the ones you want to instill in her. In other words, vegan/vegetarian at home.
Also, think about taking her into the kitchen, if you haven't already, and show her some really cool meals to cook for herself, ones she can put in her lunchbox. If her food looks amazing, and she cooked it herself, her friends might start asking her for what's in her lunch. You might influence some other kids to think responsibly about eating choices as well as your daughter.
And of course, don't take advice from strangers. ;) You sound like you've got it well in hand.
About the only conversation we've had with the children about the source of their food is connecting the dots between the animals they see in the fields when we drive through the country, and what ends up on their plate. They're 6 and 3 1/2, I'm not really interested in trying to engage them on the ethical nature of food.
We haven't had any signs of the children going vegetarian, but they are both sufficiently broad minded about what they try that we'd certainly try to accommodate it - being a "vegetarian" who only eats cheese pizza and fries doesn't really count, after all.
A lot of this was driven by my wife's upbringing where at one point she was the only non-vegetarian in the house; her father generally prepared vegetarian food but would make her some chicken for some variety, and her sister was a militant who hectored people at every chance. (Hasn't changed much in that regard...) The missus would rather operate on her father's model than her sister's model, put it that way.
As for cafeterias... we went through this last year when my older girl was in kindergarten. The local school district buys food made with whole grains etc., but it's all still pizza and nuggets and that sort of thing. She enjoyed the food initially, partly to be sociable, partly because she could get chocolate milk, and partly for the control of being able to punch in her PIN and walk away with the food. As the year went on, she got tired of it, and we've eased back into taking lunch 90 - 95% of the time.
As for food issues - we keep an eye on the older girl because she's got a hollow left leg and will eat more than she probably needs if she's enjoying the dish in question, but generally speaking we put nutritious, relatively clean food in front of them, and explain away junk foods with the phrase "it doesn't help you grow." They are bright kids, but getting into the process and ethics of industrial meat production is above their cognitive pay grade right now. I'm content with keeping the fact that we're imposing our thinking on them under wraps for the time being.
In your case, this may be more than you are willing to put up with, but perhaps you could re-direct your daughter away from poor quality cafeteria food by buying her something better. The meat at Chipotle, for instance, is of good quality for fast food and relatively cruelty free - and as you probably know, they essentially work up custom kid's orders and charge them as a side, so you could get the Cheesetarian Veggie Chomper a quesadilla. That's one way to put her off crap school cafeteria food without getting into a fight over meat.
I've spent so much time thinking of how I'm going to get my (future) kids to eat vegetarian, and to like it. Someday, I'll get to find out whether any of my ideas would really work.
I wouldn't describe my peers' reactions (in my childhood) to my various dietary choices as "pressure". I would describe them as open hostility.
I grew up eating meat until we moved to a small new-age community, where nearly everyone was vegetarian. I remember one of my classmates in maybe the third grade saying to me: "YOU eat MEAT?!!! YOU'RE going to die EARLY!!! Meat is BAD!!!"
I ignored her. That was before I went to public school and experienced truly Bad Food. As you surely know, Bad Food isn't limited to meat, but even the kids who ate it every week speculated on what the actual content of their meat might be.
My mom always cooked fresh healthy meals for us at home. She was a great cook, and although we did eat meat it wasn't as if we had cheeseburgers for dinner. In fact I would say meat wasn't even a staple of our diet.
I attempted to eat the public school lunch for exactly one week, then decided I'd rather have PBJ sandwiches for ETERNITY than ever eat anything from the cafeteria again. In fact, I decided, I would become a vegetarian. I think I tacked that one on mainly because I naively believed it would make me thin. (I was thirteen. I already was thin. It was silly.)
And then I found out just how angry a bunch of midwestern farmers could get about the issue. Many of my classmates, now that I was attending public school, raised cattle or pigs. Their general position was, "What, our meat ain't good enough for you?! You think you're better than us, 'cause you're a fancy-pants vegetarian?"
I was accustomed to peer rejection by then, so their comments didn't faze me. Besides, excellent reasons for the veggie lifestyle abound, and I quickly learned what they were. I think my becoming a vegetarian, regardless of my parents or peers' feelings/choices, was inevitable once I knew all the facts.
Maybe your kids will have similar learning experiences later on. Maybe not. It always amazes me how many people who do still eat meat know all about the horrors of the meat industry.
We, too, have deteriorated in the food department. The first (as a toddler) took baggies of green peppers and broccoli to munch on at his dad's softball games, and the amazement of the bleachers-sitting parents only fueled my contempt: "Just only offer them healthy stuff!" I'd fume to hubby later, "It's not that difficult!"
At another kid's 4th birthday party, there were little cups of M&M's at each place setting, and my two-year-old cried with enthusiasm, "Look, Mom Food!" He promptly turned it over to me, never imagining that kids are supposed to eat that stuff.
Well, 18 years later, that kid had friends over to play poker last night and the frozen pizzas and oreos were a great hit.
I love what Stellaa says about control--it's true--and what marytkelly says about food ending up the least of our worries. But you know what? You still have your role to play. I remember agonizing over cloth v. disposable, and while that seems insanely insignificant to me now, my thoughtfulness over that issue helped shape who I was as a parent and ultimately how I relate to my kids. Keep up the good work.
It was Novemberish and we were visiting a nature center here in northeast Ohio. As they looked at the turkeys wandering in their habitat, the oldest, 5, turned to the second, 2, and said, "See, JJ, there's two kinds of turkeys. There's the animal and there's the food we eat at Thanksgiving." And I thought, Damn, that's what we all do, isn't it? Just compartmentalize, so that pink stuff in the styrofoam at the store has no connection whatsoever to the cows grazing along the road.
Speaking of turkey, you should really go and read an excellent--well written and thoughtful--article from salon a year or so ago, "Diary of a Turkey Killer." Here it is: http://www.salon.com/mwt/food/eat_drink/2006/11/21/killing_turkey/index.html
What I don't see in your commentary is whether or not you eat the meat "substitutes" in your household. It's a lot easier, I find, to not worry about pepperoni on pizza if you bring your own veggieroni, for example. It gives the child some conformity to the "norm" without having to conform totally, and the stuff actually tastes half-decent, unlike back in the early 90's when it was all cardboard.
Have my wife and I discussed the "child omnivore" option? Yes. At any point one of our children (just the 7 year old so far, one coming any week now, another being adopted from China next year) may turn around and say "thanks, Dad, but I want a cheeseburger". However, by being open about our beliefs on a child-centered basis and answering the "why don't we eat this" question as best we can, I'm hopeful.
It's not easy, but it is workable, I think.
You are doing everything well. Your Independivore is growing up and taking those important first steps towards free thinking and trusting her instincts. You must be incredibly proud of her. Take the time to pat yourself on the back, too, because she wouldn't be able to articulate her feelings and thoughts with you if she hadn't learned those skills at your knee.
The comments you've been offered are all deliciously on the mark. As long as her diet is balanced and healthy, let her taste buds run wild. Insist that she be part of the choosing and preparation of what she eats so she can gain the knowledge and perspective to continue making excellent choices in the future.
Don't try to gross her out with stories about slaughter houses or make her watch you disjoint a chicken. (That is why I went vegan at age nine - watching Mom cut up a fresh chicken for Sunday dinner.) Save that sort of information for later, when she is mature enough to understand the topic.
Let being vegetarian or vegan be her choice for her own reasons.
We live on 3 critter-packed acres--my Olivia-Walton-back-to-the-land fantasy that my family begrudgingly shares.
We have lots of chickens and geese, turkeys, potbellied pigs, and some goats, as well as more cats than the law allows and four yappy dogs.
I stopped eating meat about a dozen years ago when my daughter convicted me as she made the connection between animals we pet and animals we eat. I decided that if I was not willing to look into some brown eyes and turn them into dinner--well the rest of the animal rather than the eyeballs, but you know what I mean--that it wasn't really fair to let someone else do the dirty work for me. Shrink wrapped on a styrofoam tray is a long way from scratching a pig under the chin, and it didn't mask what was really going on for me any more.
So I gave it up, except for a smattering of fish or seafood once in a while. (My rule has been shrimp don't have eyelashes.)
And my daughter? She was back on hamburgers in a few days. The rest of the family happily munches meat and thinks it's hilarious to throw chicken bones to the chickens. I sulk in a corner with my tofu stir fry and console myself with my low cholesterol.
I grew up in a household that wasn't at all tolerant of my switch to vegetarianism when I was 14/15. My mother still thinks it is okay to use chicken stock in dishes I might consume. (Passive aggressiveness is her game). My vegetarianism is one of many things on the must-not-speak-to-father-about list- along with my atheism, political beliefs and baseball, else we end up in a shouting match. It was an incredibly hostile environment when I was a teenager. I was forced to purchase my own food (and get a job to pay for said food). I was constantly made fun of by my own family. And it's been a strain on our relationship every since.
So... after this long diatribe my advice is this: let them eat and experience meat if they want it. There is a huge social pressure to consume the stuff- and I can attest to the burdens of trying to push off that social pressure. I think there's a good chance you'll end up being pleasantly surprised in a few years when they come home and declare they are tired of the whole meat experiment.
Also, one point of clarity: I'm celebrating my daughter's independence, on this food issue and in everything else she does, and my favorite authority to question is always my own. I feel like that comes across pretty well in the post, and in her new superhero name, Independivore, but is maybe lost a bit in translation from the front page headline pointing to this story if anybody here is telling me to get out of her way or calling me a food Nazi. Believe me, getting out of my kids' way is my favorite part of being a dad! I hadn't meant to ask "What should I do?" and throw my hands up so much as I was just curious to know what others were doing around similar issues.
I'm very pleased with the answers so far, and proud to have been able to initiate such a conversation. Cool community here! Thanks again for stopping by and joining the fray.
– Colin Bane
Let her try something organic, grass-fed, even if it means that you have to cook it outside on the grill. And in bad weather.
Fwiw, I tried being an ovo-lacto vegetarian and my body rebelled. I gained weight (edema?). And only lost it when I finally had to give up both wheat and dairy (and then soy, too). In the process, I had to deal with a very severe case of anemia (partly iron-deficiency, partly absorption). I wish I'd never tried being a vegetarian. Until then, I could eat pretty much whatever I wanted. Life was better then.
Needless to say, I didn't eat the turkey sandwich that fateful Thursday lunch. I have no idea if what he said was true- but I do know this: Greeley, CO is one of the foulest smellin' places on earth- and it's because of all those cows.