unschooling food on a budget

[Lynda]

How do you try to ensure it works out fair for all of you if you have limited resources? For example, if you have a big bag of sweets and one person wants to eat lots of them right away, but others want to save them for later in the week. Do you divide them up so each person has their share of the sweets to eat when they want? How do you balance the need to eat perishables before they go off with letting everyone eat what they want? At the moment my kids want to know how many each other have had to decide how many to have themselves, which I think is fair to make sure someone doesn't leave one of the others without, but it also seems to work the other way - that if M has had 3, K will think she has to have 3, even if she would have been happy with 2 if she hadn't know what M had.

I can see how the principle would work if there's a plentiful supply of food, but I'm trying now to understand how it translates to our circumstances. I hope my rambling has made sense!

[Katherine]

Obviously I'm not Meredith but here's what I got from that word disconnected.

If a child can have anything he wants to eat from what's available in the house, that's autonomy to a degree. But not as much as he could have when making food choices more on his own.

When a child is actually involved in choosing the foods to buy and actually involved in putting the items in the buggy, then that's more food autonomy to add to what a child already has. Planning and implementing a plan is much bigger than choosing from the supplies that are available in front of a person.

Karl is definitely in the picky eater phase and has been in full swing these last few months. He has gotten adventurous about trying other foods to determine if they're good by his estimation just by dent of making food requests when I'm making out a grocery list to shop by. He is totally getting a kick out of making food decisions lately.

I also got Karl onto Neopets today. It's the same thing as having more options in food choice to have more options in games he can play. He has been asking for a live pet lately and hasn't settled on what pet is to be his very own that he's going to choose for himself, and Neopets is sort of like a little "store" where he can vicariously get some ideas about what he wants in a live pet.

Buying groceries is another way to connect with food and also, through this activity, it's a way for a child to make other connections with people and ideas too.

It's a way to make food his own thing.

[Schuyler]

"problem is that this isn't the cheapest way or the easiest."

I was thinking about this yesterday when Linnaea and I went out to walk Pickle. I don't know where you live in the UK, but in Norfolk the bramble is fruiting, blackberries are everywhere, so our elderberries. I picked some blackberries and Linnaea came home and had them on ice cream And at the Pick your own up the road they have rasberries and down the road there is a little set of fishing ponds that we've been going to over the past week. Not that we eat the fish, Simon and Linnaea are releasing them into the pond next to our house. The farmer next door said that they will end up back down at the fishing ponds as the ditches run there. Oh, we did have samphere the other day, a sea vegetable, from Blakeney, a coastal village. It was really good. And while we bought it, we did notice it growing on the beaches in Wells, so we could have foraged it for free.

There is a great book called Food for Free which lists a lot of the edible plants around the UK and when they are available. Simon and Linnaea really enjoy foraging for food. We used to go to a place in Durham county called Hawthorne Dene, in the spring ramsons were everywhere. I still have a little tub of their seeds that Simon and Linnaea saved to season the food that they wanted to taste of ramsons. I just did a search for Food for Free on-line and found this cool site: http://duo.irational.org/food_for_free/ it lists some of the free foragable food around Bristol. Simon really wants to eat American crawfish, the invader species, but we have never gone looking for a good place to fish for them. His cousin mentioned catching them near Milton Keynes with just a string and a bit of meat, so maybe we'll give it a go.

Just thinking of cheap ways to enjoy food more.

Schuyler

[Meredith]

"When a child is actually involved in choosing the foods to buy and actually involved in putting the items in the buggy, then that's more food autonomy to add to what a child already has"

Yup, that's what I meant!
Especially since Lukas (most kids, but especially Lukas) is such a "physical" guy, there's a big difference, too, between making a list and actually looking and touching and Being There in the store, surrounded by Choices. All those choices are tangible things in the store, not ideas of what to eat. He can connect on a really concrete level with his own decision making process - do I want This or That?

[Lynda]

==Buying groceries is another way to connect with food and also, through this activity, it's a way for a child to make other connections with people and ideas too.==

I can recommend keeping hens as a great way to connect with food & be excited about it. We have 3 different breeds, so the eggs are different & they know which egg has come from their hen.

[Tammy]

I find that now my kids are much better at sharing the food goodies then they were when we restricted them. It had to be fair , right down to the amount of counted marshmallows in the cocoa. Unschooling food was the hardest part of this whole ongoing process for me. I wanted complete control to make sure no "junk" would ruin my kids ( if I knew how to insert and eyes rolling smiley , i would here :)

I TOTALLY blew it at first. I just went out and bought everything I could imagine we would eat and everything they wanted and let them go hog wild ( I had no real understanding of how to go about gradual unannounced change :) )they ate everything I brought home right away. With in a couple of days it was almost all gone. With the constant " He ate them all " or "I wanted that one and he took it" So that continued while I read and learned more about what I was doing wrong and ( the little ) I was doing right .

But finally we found a balance . I have learned to let go and they have learned to leave food for each other . I finally just told them they were free to have what they wanted , but they had to remember the others in the house. Be mindful of each other. They would hate to be left out ,so they needed to have a way that no one was , and ask them how did THEY think it should be done?

Well their solution was to split everything equally , down to putting initials on yoo-hoos ( not joking...of course this is to be expected from all the years of restriction I put on them and "junk") .So that's what I did , took out the sharpie and labeled it all.. Then I found ,not long into it, I would hear one asking the other "can I have your last ice cream if you don't want it?" and the other said "sure"....I knew we were getting closer to what we needed. Then still later they started putting food and snacks away with no initials /names on them...I just kept my mouth shut and watched and learned. Then came the point where they just kind of knew that they needed to be mindful of either leaving one or asking if anyone wanted it before they ate more than "their share" and now it's just kind of natural that they don't eat it all without at least thinking of the others in the house. It took awile , almost a year , but they eventually understood that there was no rush to eat it all.

I would just ask your kids how they want it done. If they want equal shares at first , let them . They will eventually see that they don't always have to have the exact amount as the other just because the numbers say so. It did take a bit for mine to realize they don't NEED to eat it just to get their "share" but they did eventually realise it.

[Joyce Fetteroll]

** Lukas will insist on eating out of the big tub with a spoon. When i explain to him that it's not sanitory **

I meant to reply to this. Unsanitary is overstated in this society. You trade way less spit eating from a communal tub of ice cream than kissing someone but parents aren't warning kids that kissing is unsanitary. (Well, some undoubtedly are, but not with the same universal acknowledgment that they're right! ;-) Viruses that are swallowed get digested. (Some bacteria can survive the stomach, like botulism bacteria, but you're not picking those up from someone's spit. Ever heard of someone getting botulism from kissing ;-)

The way cold and flu viruses are transmitted is through touch. Some is airborne but that's not nearly as effective as touch. You shake hands or touch something someone with a cold touched then touch your nose. (You don't even have to pick it ;-) The membranes are very thin and the virus can get through easily.

I'm remembering one cold my husband suggested Kat not drink from his glass so she used a straw. It's much more likely she'd pick up the cold virus from holding the glass than by drinking from it!

Kids should be aware that some people find sharing food repulsive though. (Probably because they think it's unsanitary!) It's useful for kids to know that not everyone will want to turn their food into community pot luck. But that's not a reason to insist that a tub of ice cream can't be eaten from because someday, someone might not like it to share their coleslaw at a restaurant.

[Merlin]

There's a difference between sharing food & eating from food that will be stored until eaten some time days or weeks later. I've no problem with my kids sharing from my bowl of ice cream, but none of us eat directly from the tub unless we're intending finishing it.

[Joyce Fetteroll]

** There's a difference between sharing food & eating from food that will be stored until eaten some time days or weeks later. **

What *is* the difference, though? Kids know "There's a difference," is just as lame an explanation as "Because I said so." ;-)

The point is to think about issues clearly. If you find it gross, that's a reason (though a good one to examine if it's causing strife in the family.) The original statement was that it was unsanitary which isn't true.

There is a good reason for not eating pudding from the storage bowl, though! The saliva you transfer back to the bowl on your spoon will break some of the pudding down and it will get watery. (Ewwww! ;-) Seems to me there was something else, too. Maybe Jello. Or maybe it was also something milk based.

Now no one's going to come visit me and eat anything from my refrigerator! Except pudding. You'll know that's safe.

My point isn't to argue that people should be eating from refrigerator containers. My point is clarity of thinking rather than passing on "common knowledge" unthinkingly.

[Schuyler]

Actually if it is frozen food, refreezing will hold any bacteria that aren't killed in stasis: http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/questions/FAQ_freezing.html#8.

Schuyler

[Lynda]

My take is that we don't always know which food will be frozen or put in the fridge. Ice cream is obvious, but things like the korma I'm cooking now might be frozen if there's a load left, or if its a smaller amount it'll go in the fridge for someone's lunch over the next couple of days. So to make it easier for everyone we use serving spoons. Plus it has the added advantage of not getting bits of chilli from DH's food in the pot with everyone else's (DH likes things firey hot) I've experienced the effect on an innocent looking knob of butter - those cartoons with steam coming out of their ears & then they drink gallons of water? Our kids almost split their sides at the real life version.

[Sandra Dodd]

I don't think anyone was recommending eating out of the ice cream tub. Rather they were recommending finding a way the kid can eat out of something fun, and recommending that the parents be honest about what and why, and not just make "because it's not okay" kinds of 'rules.'

If a kid has his own leftovers he's eaten out of, put his name on it maybe. Or give him wooden popsicle sticks or a pile of spoons to eat out of a public tub--maybe measuring spoons. Toothpicks. And put each one back to wash, or in the trash, or in the firewood/kindling when he's done (after each bite).

There are creative, fun, nurturing things to do that don't involve rules or threats of biological danger.

[Pamela Sorooshian]

When we eat out, we all write our names on our "doggie-bags." I don't mind this at all - If I save half my food to eat later, I like to know that it'll be there when I go to get it out of the fridge. However, we frequently end up sharing what we brought home - we'll often ask, "Hey, are you going to want your leftovers from last night?" The answer might be, "Heck yes - I'm looking forward to eating that." But it is pretty likely to be, "You can have it."

In economics, there is a lot of discussion about property rights. The basic idea is that without clear understanding of who has the property rights, people can't negotiate trades - and they can't really "share" either. This can be taken too far - in a family we come to care as much about each other's well-being as we do our own. But, still, I have found, over the years, that when kids are having trouble sharing, it can really help to make it clear who has ownership. Little kids, for example, have a hard time with realizing something is still theirs even when another child has physical possession of the thing.

Anyway - that's another topic, but it relates to food in that most of the food in a kitchen pantry or fridge is not the property of anyone in particular. Individuals can feel insecure about getting what they want, even when it looks like plenty to the others. We used to have some fantastic fruit trees and, for a while, I never got any of the fruit - my husband and daughters like fruit way less ripe than I do and they'd eat it all before it got ripe enough for me. When I realized what was happening, I mentioned it and then we'd set aside some fruit identified as "mom's ripe fruit." That worked just fine. Before I'd realized why I was never getting any fruit, I was getting annoyed at the others for "eating too much" or "more than their fair share." It started to feel like I was being mistreated and I was feeling resentful. And "I" was an adult woman, not a little kid.

For little kids, it can be a huge disappointment to go to the fridge and discover that ALL the peaches are gone. And they can feel like they didn't get a fair share and the others who ate the peaches did a mean thing "to" them. That can set up a chain of reactions like the feelings I had about the fruit - often ending up with the kid being very demanding and seeming very selfish. Lots of times what also happened was that the child was disappointed and the parent tried to talk them out of it. A better approach is to say, "You really wanted more of those peaches, so let's get some special for you next time." Then get some peaches specifically for that child, as soon as possible. It is nice to have so much abundance that everyone can have all they want, but when that is clearly not happening, it sometimes helps to divvy stuff up and make it clear what belongs to each person. Given that clarity, lots of trading and lots of generosity can take place.

I'm also thinking about Halloween. When my kids were little, they'd get home from trick-or-treating and each would dump her own bag on the carpet in front of her. They'd each sort their own candy into some kind of categories. Then they'd spend a long time negotiating trades. Later, they'd have so much that they'd be super generous - but the trading was part of the Halloween fun. When they got older, they started just dumping all their candy from trick-or-treating into one big bowl and it sat out and everyone ate what they wanted when they wanted. The last couple of years that Rosie went trick-or-treating, she walked around, in costume, with a group of friends, but she didn't collect any candy. She said she'd rather buy the kind of candy she really likes, instead of collecting a bunch that she doesn't really like that much.

-pam