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Intro music: Bags are packed, are you ready to go?…This time tomorrow we’ll be on the road…riding with you into sunnier days…I wouldn’t want it any other way. 

Julie: It’s time to name the neglect from typical food advice. Welcome to the Find Your Food Voice podcast, hosted by me, Julie Duffy Dillon. I’m a registered dietitian with 20 years of experience partnering with folks just like you on their food peace journey. What have we learned? Well, cookie cutter approaches exclude too many people, and you don’t need to be fixed. It’s not you. It’s not me. It’s all of us. Only together we can start a movement and fix diet culture. And we will. Let’s begin with now.

Transition music: I want to see how the world turns round…Let’s go adventure in the deep blue sea…home is with you wherever that may be…home is with you wherever that may be.

Julie: Hey there, welcome to episode 334 of the Find Your Food Voice Podcast. I am Julie Duffy Dillon, registered dietician and welcome to the school lunch edition of Find Your Food Voice. Yes, it’s that time of year. And if you have been listening to the show for a while, you probably already know that I am cringing because it is back to packing lunches. Now, I actually find some pleasure in finding the lunch box and you know, the cute little containers. Um but there’s something about the chore, especially 10 o’clock at night when I really should be already going to bed, um, and packing the lunch. It’s just like I’m all out of decisions. 

Julie: So this is the time of year where I try to start to think about how can I actually help future Julie out? A lot of times that includes making a grocery list that’s gonna include some more foods that are easier to pack, that some people like to judge. And yes, my kids have been told that they have something bad in their lunchbox and, you know, I did not respond favorably. And I have every year, um I don’t know if I did it last year, because now my kids are getting older and let me tell you when you raise your kids to be fat positive and that all foods are just fine, they can do a pretty good job at vocalizing when someone shames them about their, their lunch choices. But I digress. Part of what I always used to do when they were younger before they had words to express themselves is I would put in a kind of a, a similar document, this little card that The Feeding Doctor um has on her website and I’m gonna put a, a link to it in the, in the show notes, but I also gonna put a link uh on my website. If you go to julieduffydillon.com/schoollunch, you’ll read about all the card that I make every single year. Um And again, my kids are getting older, so this is an older blog post, but it was a very important way just to start things off right. And so check those out. 

Julie: But what this podcast in particular is about today is imagining a world like a sort of food utopia where people were encouraged, as they are going through their school years, when they’re a school age, to continue to connect with their own food voice. What would we, what would we need to do differently as a society? What would we need to do differently as we are interacting with kids and they’re eating lunch? What can we personally do differently and how can we raise our children to help them to continue to connect with their food voice when they’re interacting with other people who make other food decisions that are fine for them, but just not the same that they’re making for themselves? 

Julie: So I have a bit of a rant. I have five things in particular that I want to share with you. And I hope it helps. I hope it helps you to set the school year off in a way. And whether you’re a parent, a caregiver, a teacher, or somehow connected to schools, I hope it helps you to further connect to your own food voice. So we are gonna get to this rant, but a quick message about um the Find Your Food Voice Book and then a word from our sponsor. 

Julie: In case you missed the announcement, the Find Your Food Voice book is coming. I am so excited and thank you so much for all the kind words and encouragement. I, I know you’re really excited too and I’m super excited that you get to be a part of the process with me. One of the ways that you can be a part of the process is you can submit a letter to be included in the book. That’s right. We are accepting letters to food to include in the podcast and also possibly in the book. And we’re gonna pick, I believe it’s 10 letters, to include with every chapter and kind of go through different parts of finding your food voice. And if you’d like to submit a letter for the podcast, we need those too. Uh But also the book, you can do that by clicking on the link in the show notes or you can just send it over to info@juliedillonrd.com. The other way that you can be a part of the process is you can join me live as I’m writing the book. So you can join for free on TikTok. I will be doing a lot of lives on there. And if you want to be a part of it where we are meeting live and I am writing and you also using that time is kind of a healing self-care time. We are calling this nesting time, it is a part of the Find Your Food Voice book. And I will explain more um in the near future. But nesting time is basically giving you a chance for respite where you can um connect to the tools that you need to help you connect with your food voice. And that may be journaling, meditation, it could be making a grocery list, it can be resting, it can be singing, crafting coloring, it could be eating your lunch. I mean, it could be any of those things. So while I am writing, I invite you to use that space too where we can like help the energy, connect us and help to enhance that healing time. Um Like I said, you can do that over on TikTok, but you also can do that in the Circle community that I’ve created for those of you who wanna be a part of this and being a part of the community, it’s just $5 a month and there I will be hosting again, those that kind of co-working space, but every 25 minutes, I will take a break and then we can just chat about what you’re up to. Um um I can fill you in on what I’m writing about that day. Um There’s also gonna be other kind of um updates and things within the community where you can see my word count, you can see kind of like what I’m working on that week and again, just be a part of the process while I’m writing it. So the Find Your Food Voice book is um slated to come out in January of 2025. I know that seems like so far away, but it really is gonna be here before we know it. Um I have until May 1st to write this book. So write it with me. Let’s do this together. You can get to all the details on this process at julieduffydillon.com/book. Again, it’s julieduffydillon.com/book. All right, let’s get to the episode. But first a very quick word from our sponsor. 

Julie: Welcome back. So let’s get to it ways to find your food voice at school, my dream utopia. So I have five items that are necessary for this utopia. And number one, and I will say these are not in any particular order but are the order in which they were downloaded into my brain. And so number one is probably the most important. Number one, no one is scolded for what is in their lunch. There are people every day, kids who are scolded and shamed for what is in their lunch box, for what they choose when they go down the cafeteria line. And you would be surprised how many times people are told that what they pack for their lunch or what they picked in the the cafeteria is not a good choice or that they pick something that was just horrible and they’re being bad. I think it’s really important to just remind you, listener, that when you hear what you’re doing is bad and you’re a child versus when you say to a, as you’re an adult and you say what you’re eating is bad. They’re equally just really shitty in my book. But an adult brain has a lot more maturity and complexity than a child’s brain. And when I would be sitting with kids that were my clients and they would talk about being told that what they are eating is bad. Like when they picked french fries out of the cafeteria and put it on their tray and they were sitting down at their table and their teacher comes by and is like, that is so bad to get french fries when they hear that they don’t think of like, oh, I only need to eat french fries in moderation. No, they think when I hit somebody that is bad and I did something wrong. That’s immoral. So when they hear eating french fries is bad, it’s gonna land the same way. And as adults again, it’s not great for us either because it’s french fries are not immoral. Like this is a food choice and even more when you’re a child and you don’t have any of the um the ability to make choices, like on where it comes from and, and the issues that may come up for you but I think it’s really important to remember that a kid is really starting to experience food uh by themselves when they’re at school. And when they’re told that their food choice is bad by a teacher or a parent or another child, it is something that is super um basically, it’s this big wedge that’s put in their brain that helps to disconnect from their own food voice. In particular, big offenses that I saw were kids being mocked or scolded or told they were bad for having processed food in their lunch. Sometimes it was behind their backs and sometimes it was right to their face. And I even heard about school systems giving children demerits when they had things like Doritos or other packaged kind of chips in their lunch. And you know, this is so problematic on so many levels. But like think about a child who’s bringing their lunch to school most of the time. I know there’s sometimes that the kids are packing it themselves, which is just another conversation that’s equally important here to why you shouldn’t scold them. But for many kids, especially when they’re very young, they are bringing a lunch that their parents provided and when they get in trouble for eating a food that their parents who love them very much and worked hard to get that food. When you are scolding them, it’s really getting in the way of their relationship with their parents and their parents’ relationship with the child, it makes it very messy and complicated. And again, this is something that I would see in real time working with younger children and how they felt like they were so responsible, um, and how they were then responsible to, to, um, teach their parents to do something different. But yet also feeling really, like, stuck in a rock and a hard place or whatever the saying is because they knew their parents loved them and they knew that telling their parents to not pack that food was something that would be shaming for the parents. And really, and again, stuck in a really weird spot. 

Julie: It’s totally a common practice for health care providers to tell kids to tell their parents to pack something different. And I have a really big problem with it. There’s also this part of shaming kids because of what they bring into their lunchbox. You know, kids with allergies and have limited choices, kids with sensory issues or on um ADHD medication or other medications that dulls the appetite. Kids who are having a hard time eating enough oftentimes foods that have some more sweetness or savoriness or just fun are intentionally packed. And as a dietician, I would encourage parents to pack these foods to help make appetite just a more pleasurable thing when a person doesn’t have a lot of appetite. So again, scolding a kid for what’s in their lunch is super problematic for kids who may be struggling with all these different things. But even more, the thing that I think is the, the worst of all is when a kid is experiencing food insecurity and the choices that are in the lunchbox are all of the choices that they can have – foods that are self stable for a very long time are really important. They’re important to our food supply and especially important for folks who may not have consistent food coming into the household. So they need stuff that’s gonna last a long time and shaming kids scolding them for what’s in their lunch, I think is um blaming a kid for their food insecurity instead of really blaming the system and working towards fixing the system. Um, I think it’s really important for even for those of us who have enough um, food security to not shame people for shelf stable food and um, also teach your children to not like,  it’s one of those things that I just tell my kids, no one appreciates hearing your opinion on their food choices, and I think we should tell all the kids this. Nobody should be teasing because of what’s in the lunchbox, teachers, administrators, coaches, parents, other kids like let’s, we can talk about food as like an enjoyable thing or I, I enjoy this or I enjoy that,  I don’t enjoy this, but judging a kid’s food choices has so many issues to it. I mean, these are just the first four that I thought of. And one of the things that I hope you can, um, communicate to your kids is that it’s really important to not judge another person’s lunchbox choices or what they have on their tray. Sometimes we say things like, don’t yuck their yum and, um, kids, they remember that. 

Julie: So I wanna go also to the flip side of this besides don’t scold people for what’s in their lunch, I think we should also not reward people for what is in their lunch. I know you’ve heard it. “Oh my gosh, you’re being so good today”,  “I feel so bad because you’re being so good”, or “you pack such healthy food”, or “Oh wow, you always have these like foods that’s from scratch”. Like no one should be rewarded for what’s in their lunch either. And I think it goes with like what I was talking about before with scolding people, rewarding people because they have more access to food that they have more resources and so more time to prepare food from scratch and they may not have a condition that prevents kind of uh I know senses don’t bother them and they enjoy lots of different types of foods that is just a difference. And rewarding people, not only is it just like an asshole move, but it also is something that has I’ve seen to become problematic over time when I work with clients with eating disorders and people would tell me as adults that they had this core memory of being um congratulated because of what was in their lunchbox. And people were just like, oh, you eat so healthy, you’re so good. And that became a part of their identity. So much of child development includes forming one’s own identity. And there’s so many things that a person can incorporate into their identity but being a healthy eater, you don’t want that to be their identity because that means as an adult, if their body changes, because if we live, if we continue to stay alive, our body is going to change because that’s just how bodies are, then that will impact their ability to eat enough food. Um they can’t, oftentimes you will really struggle with moving away from that identity as a healthy eater. Again, you don’t want that to be someone’s core identity or one of the main ways that they identify themselves. We really want people to connect with their voice to connect with the things that they enjoy and not be rewarded because of what they decide to eat. 

Julie: All right, let’s move on to number three. In my dream utopia where people are just practicing connecting to their food voice, kids can eat their lunch in any order they choose. This of course, is something with my own children, I saw happening in um the younger grades, especially, preschool through probably third grade. Some folks saying, hey, you have to eat the healthy things first. If your parents packed a food, food, fruit or a vegetable, you have to eat that first, the dessert is last. Um doing that is something that will be teaching a kid to one to not trust their body, to be ashamed of wanting something that is super yummy. And that eating fruits and vegetables is this chore, you have to do. It is something that has, it seems like such a small thing, but it is something that really has impacted people’s access to their food voice. So if a parent packs a food, um just letting them eat it in whatever order that they want and not teaching disordered eating behavior, IE, you have to eat the vegetables first in order to get these other foods. 

Julie: So number four, let’s move to the next one kind of goes with number three. But in this food utopia, kids can finish whatever they want, if anything, in their lunch. Now, as I say this, there may be some exceptions like if someone needs to take a medication with their lunch, um or their blood sugar is low or something. Of course, those need to happen and they happen every day. But I, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about if a kid just eats, maybe just the dessert and decides they don’t want to eat the carrots, something like that. Kids get to decide what they want to eat from their lunch if anything. Now what if they go hungry? What if they don’t eat anything in that lunch and they’re hungry later? Something that’s really cool about that experience is that it’s experience, like people need experience in their bodies. They need experience with their food voice to understand when I have this level of hunger and I eat this amount, it feels really great. Or if I am not quite hungry at lunchtime, so I don’t eat anything, I’m starving an hour later, but then I can’t eat until I get home. And so it’s gonna be better for me to eat when I’m at lunch. Kids need this experience. One of my favorite examples is Halloween. Um It’s a time of year where many people send me emails, “Like what should I do about Halloween candy?” And I think it’s really important for like the Halloween experience to let your kids eat what, what they want from the stash. I know in my house like the first three days or so after Halloween, they just kind of ate what they wanted. And then after about three days, it kind of got put into a general, like anybody can eat pile including me. Whatever, I snuck out the, I snuck out all the Reese cups before they even noticed. But, um, that’s beside the point letting kids have experiences where they get a tummy ache from eating more of something like on Halloween is a really great experience for them to have. They need that experience. It’s a part of being human and I think it’s important to experience it when you’re young and um instead of experiencing it when you’re 30 for the first time because when people are getting that autonomy finally as adults, um it feels different because there’s a lot of a shame that ends up coming up from that. So in this food utopia, kids can finish whatever they want for their lunch, they can pick whatever they want and no one’s gonna make them eat anything from that and, and again, they can eat it any order they want. 

Julie: All right, let’s get to number five. So this is pure utopia at its finest. For number five, the teachers, I’m thinking about you. Because I’ve worked with a lot of teachers. Teachers, nurses, lawyers, people that are like busy and I know a lot of different folks are busy. Um But for some reason, those are the ones that pop up my head, as I’m thinking through this. But everyone deserves enough time to eat and teachers you deserve enough time to eat as well. I hear so many of you having to eat your lunch throughout the day between classes, um or during your planning period or you’re supposed to eat lunch while you’re on lunch duty and you have like 20 minutes to do lunch duty, keeping the kids safe basically during lunch and eat your own lunch. It’s just not ok. Because I know for many of you, you’re starving by the time you leave school and this is leaving you to experience things with food that just feel not the way you want. And it really gets in the way of you taking care of yourself and taking care of the kids that you’re teaching and you deserve more. Do I have a solution? I don’t have a solution but I just wanted to name that you, you also deserve enough time to eat. I wish there was a way and there probably is, I’m just not the person who’s gonna be able to think of all that, but you do deserve enough time to eat and at the same time not scolded but um, about what you pack for your lunch or not rewarded for what you pack in your lunch. And I also think that you should be given a chance to eat your lunch in any order you want and finish whatever you want and given enough time to do all of that. 

Julie: All right. So that is my rant, my school lunch tradition of Find Your Food Voice, and you may be a parent, a caregiver or a teacher. I hope this helps you to just start the year off in a way that helps you and your family take care of yourselves and find your own food voice. 

Julie: So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this, find your Food Voice podcast episode and I will be back next week with a new episode and I just want to send a reminder again to send us your letters to food. I am out of letters and I need more letters from you so you can send it over to our email inbox info@juliedillonrd.com and there’s a place you can submit it on our website. I would love to have your letter to food as a part of the show. And remember we are also selecting letters for the Find Your Food voice book so you can submit that in both places. And I would love, love, love to read your dear food letter. And speaking of the Finding Your Food Voice book, you can check out my progress along the way, you can get to all the details on helping to support that process and again, just stay up to date on what is going on with that at julieduffydillon.com/book. So until next week, take care. 

Julie: Thank you for listening. I am Julie Duffy Dylan and this is the Find Your Food Voice podcast. Ready to join the Anti Diet Movement and take the Food Voice pledge? Go to julieduffydillon.com and sign your name to the growing list of people saying no to diets and yes to their own food voice. The Find Your Food Voice podcast is produced by me, Julie Duffy Dylan and my team of kick ass folks. I couldn’t make the show without Yel Cruz, assistant producer and resident book and Coleen Bremner, customer service coordinator and professional hype master. Audio editing is from Toby Lyles at 24 sound music is fly free by Hartley. Are you looking for episode transcripts? Get them at julieduffydillon.com where you can also submit letters for the podcast, give us feedback and sign the food voice pledge. We need your voice to end diet culture. We literally can’t do this without you. Subscribe to the Find Your Food Voice podcast to get weekly inspiration and education on how we can defeat diet culture and reclaim our own food voice. I look forward to seeing you here next week for another episode of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. Take care.