Are You What You Eat?

My toddler’s behaviour around food can only be described as fickle. Some nights when I make spaghetti bolognese, he laps it up at the dinner table, shovelling the noodles into his mouth with joyful energy and staining the skin around his lips with red sauce. Other times, he looks at his plate with suspicion and mild disgust, poking around the meaty chunks before declaring, “I don’t like spaghetti.”

These words often trigger a response by me and my husband where we’re awkwardly dancing between encouragement (“But you liked spaghetti last time you had it. Why don’t you give it another try?”), trying to play it cool (“You don’t have to eat it, but that’s what’s for dinner”), and masking our frustration and annoyance.

Pour Some Sugar on Me and My Lucky Charms

Of course, the ‘90s were a very different time when it came to views of feeding your family. Parents regularly pressured their kids to clean their dinner plates, “or else, no dessert,” they’d say. Sometimes, that warning would escalate to, “You’ll sit at the table until you finish your plate,” or “You’ll go to bed hungry.” And then if all else failed and you were still pushing around that broccoli: “There are starving children in Africa!”

Did these threats work? Often. Did they leave many of us with weird guilt – or worse, eating disorders – over “wasting” food, even if we were full, for years to come? Absolutely.

Yet, the ‘90s were also a time when so much of what we ate was unhinged. Refined sugar consumption was at an all-time high. From technicolour cereals like Fruit Loops, Dino Pebbles, and Cocoa Puffs for breakfast, to popular recess snacks like Gushers, Jell-O chocolate pudding, and Dunkaroos, cavity-inducing sweeteners were turned way up, as were artificial dyes. I still remember getting to eat full-sized chocolate bars for dessert, and hitting up 7-11 for Slurpees every other day to quench my summer thirst. For many of us, brand-name pop flowed freely at family events, and when we weren’t gulping Mountain Dew or Orange Crush, we were mixing Minute Maid frozen juice concentrate to make “fruit juice.”

Everything in Moderation – Even Moderation!

Nowadays, I do my best to minimize the amount of sugar, processed foods, and things on packaging I can’t pronounce that I give to my kids, but I also make it a point not to villainize “bad” foods. We try to stick to mostly whole foods, but we buy boxes of Annie’s Homegrown mac ‘n’ cheese in bulk. We have both all-natural peanut butter and the more sugary Kraft kind in our kitchen, and I’m unbothered about which one any of us wants to eat. And because I have toddlers, “juice” is typically cold water with a splash of real fruit juice or a squeeze of citrus. I’m sure they’ll be asking for pop in just a few years, and who am I, Queen of the Fridge Cigarette (aka Diet Coke), to say no?

Like many Millennial parents, I try to adopt a relaxed ethos around food, stressing moderation and balance to my kids over completion and perfection. It’s good to eat some broccoli and chicken for dinner to counter all those snacks we ate at the party earlier. Let’s all try a bite of each food on our plate to see which ones we like. I want them to learn to listen to their bodies when they feel full, and to not just eat something because they feel guilty about it.

Sure, sometimes we still dangle the promise of dessert if dinner is mostly eaten – because who doesn’t love a little sweet motivation?