I had a discussion with my mother-in-law about food the other day, and I realized that her philosophy on food and feeding your family is totally different than the food philosophy I grew up with in my family. My mother-in-law had eight children, and she did an excellent job of consistently providing healthy, balanced meals for her family to eat. One of her big things was making sure everyone had a filling, nutritious, hot breakfast to eat every school morning so that they would be in the best physical state to be able to learn and excel at school. As she was describing to me her process of planning and preparing meals for the month or the week, I realized that her main concern in planning meals for her family was nutrition. She took little to no thought about whether or not her family would like the foods she had decided to prepare.
That's totally different than the way food planning worked in my house growing up. When I try to plan food, I feel an enormous amount of pressure to make food that people will actually like to eat, myself included. Nutrition was a secondary concern in my family. The main concern was whether or not people liked the food that was prepared. My mother-in-law claimed she didn't really have any picky eaters in her family. I, on the other hand, come from a family of picky eaters. I'm sure many of you reading this would say that this is the fault of my parents and their parenting. And you could be right. I don't really know. All I know is that in my family it was considered inconsiderate and unkind to offer hungry people food they could not eat because they did not like it. You may as well not have made food at all for all the good it did them.
As a child, my mom was forced to sit at the table until she’d eaten whatever food was prepared, whether she liked it or not. This was such an unpleasant experience for her that she was fiercely determined never to do that to her children. Looking back, I'm pretty sure food was a big comfort thing for my mom, one of her coping mechanisms for dealing with other difficult or unpleasant things in her life. In my family, my dad was the one with the responsibility for making dinner. That's just the way things worked out in the division of responsibilities based on my parents’ individual strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. The reason I think food was a comfort thing for my mom is because if my dad made dinner and tweaked the recipe in a way that made it taste different or made something new that my mom didn't like, it wasn't just an inconvenience for her, it was a tragedy. How dare my dad ruin the meal that way.
I see a little bit of that food as a comfort thing in myself as well. On my mission, for example, I had a companion who would get so caught up in missionary work that she would sometimes forget to plan in time for us to eat lunch. I had to let her know that I could not function without eating all my meals, partly because I get really cranky if I don't eat regularly, but also because I was doing so many things that were hard for me as a missionary, I really needed to be able to rely on the comforting safety of good food at regular intervals to help me stay sane and cope with the hard things.
I'm not sure what the moral of the story is with all this. I'm not saying that one food philosophy is better or worse than the other--for now, I am just noticing the differences. I feel like that is the first step in making a deliberate choice about what your own philosophy will be--realizing that there are different ways to think about something and that you can choose how you think about it. Do I have any responsibility to take the food preferences of my family members into account when making food, or is the nutritiousness of the meal I offer the only important consideration? What do I want to teach my children about food and its purpose? How do I want to teach that? What is an appropriate way to react to encountering food you don't like? How should I best teach and model that for my children? These are all questions I must answer as I figure out what my own food philosophy will be.
