Supportive School Food Environments

Food and Weight Neutral Classrooms:

Food neutrality is about acceptance, appreciation, understanding, being curious and seeing the value in differences – all traits we encourage our children to embrace.

Children are not born thinking one food is better than the other or that they need to stop eating a certain food or that they need to change their body to “be better”. This is all taught by society and is damaging to their development of a healthy relationship with food. The focus on obesity and diabetes prevention in schools is causing harm (ex. eating disorders).

Food Neutrality in the classroom is: 

• A place where all food is morally equal.

• Removing judgement of food from classroom lessons.
  
  

In your classroom, you can start making changes to how you talk about food right away. It’s not easy to change this language as most of us were raised and taught about food this way. Changes you can make are: 

• Presenting all foods as good foods; 

• Avoiding sorting or splitting foods into two groups: healthy vs. unhealthy, every day vs. sometimes foods, good vs bad, treat vs. healthy etc.; 

• Approaching food by exploring with the senses and being curious about food;

• Allowing students to eat their preferred foods first;

• Never attaching shame or judgement to foods, the kids, or their adults who make their food choices.

Read the full Dietitians 4 Teachers blog post about Food Neutral Classrooms here.