Lettuce Alone
My late Father-in-Law loved a good joke.
One of his favorite one liners was asking my Mother-in-Law if we were having honeymoon salad for dinner. What’s that you ask? Lettuce alone!
Cue the knee slap. Ba Dum Bum.
I couldn’t help thinking about his salad joke when a mom at our neighborhood pool gathered her three children to see that neighbor Molly was eating a salad BY HER OWN WILL.
“Do you see what a great job she’s doing eating vegetables all by herself without her mom forcing her to eat them? She’s being such a good role model and setting such a good example for all the other kids!”
Her kids stared at her blankly and jumped back in the pool while Molly sat uncomfortably in her poolside chair munching away.
I’m sure they were all thinking, lettuce alone.
Putting certain foods on pedestals and demonizing other foods is exactly what diet culture teaches and perpetuates through countless diet rules and regulations.
Little Molly might want salad one day and the chicken fingers and fries fries the next day. Guess what? Both options have the same moral equivalence. We’re not conditioned to think this way, so we need to re-wire our brains to believe that all food is equal. Any choice we make at any given moment on any given day won’t hurt us or save us. The salad, the burger, the wrap, the smoothie, and the fries are all “good” choices.
Praising kids for eating certain foods at home or in public puts way too much pressure on kids to behave in a performative way around food and it can jeopardize their relationship with their intuition and/or lead to dieting which is a major predictor of disordered eating.
If you see Molly or anyone else doing something “good” around food, resist the temptation to say anything. Instead, check in with yourself and decide if that item might be just what you crave or if something else would hit the spot. Instead of judging, ask yourself what you want and need instead.
Either way, the kids and I want to make sure you remember to lettuce along when it comes to our food choices.
