While my time working in food service was mostly limited to academic teaching restaurants and hospital cafeterias, I learned that some businesses monitor the food that customers leave on their plates and interpret the observations as feedback for what the patrons thought of their orders. The less food remaining, the more the customers enjoyed it, is the general theory. This summer, I thought about that each afternoon as we opened our daughter’s backpack to see what portions of her snacks and lunches returned home from camp unconsumed.
We packed her an array of snack options each day without any expectation that she would eat them all, but we wanted her to have choices so she could select something that sounded good to her. Sure enough, each day she ate at least one of the snacks, but lunches were a different story. Providing multiple snack options was easy because they were all shelf-stable items that required no preparation; if she did not feel like eating a particular snack one day, it could stay in her bag until a different day when she did. However, the lunch options she said she wanted were perishable and took time to prepare, so sending her off to camp each day with multiple lunch choices was impractical. Thus, when a lunch returned largely uneaten, that got our attention because it meant she did not have much of a meal.
If she just was not hungry at lunchtime, that would be fine, but our concern was the possibility that she was hungry but did not want the packed food. So we tried a bunch of lunch options, all of which she said she wanted, only to see them return home virtually or literally untouched. Eventually, I realized and accepted that she simply was not very hungry come lunchtime, and it became sort of humorous that she would request a specific lunch option only to not eat it.
As I chuckled at her uneaten food, I reminded myself of our luck and good fortune, and how being able to practice intuitive eating is a privilege. We did not mind if food came back uneaten and went down the garbage disposal, but what if that was the extent of the food that we could afford, and the choice was either to eat it or go hungry? Over the years, I have met people in our community who experience food insecurity, kids who either eat their free school-supplied breakfasts and lunches or have nothing all day, and families who accept what the food pantries have to offer or deal with barren kitchens.
Intuitive eating is embedded with privilege. Going through the matching process to choose one food over others requires having options available. Choosing when to eat necessitates having enough autonomy to be able to make such a decision. Ceasing to eat when comfortably full demands confidence that another opportunity to eat will arise again soon. Any of these privileges go out the window, and so does intuitive eating, at least to an extent.
However, subtle opportunities might still exist to utilize our intuition even in times when privilege is sparse. Buying dried legumes in bulk can be a thrifty way of obtaining protein, and with the prices of each bean being so similar to each other, we could choose the one that we most enjoy. A small array of cheap spices can impart somewhat different flavors on the same food for more variety in tastes. Free school meals include choices, such as chocolate or unflavored milk, and possibly different entree options. Foods that are shelf stable or at least function well as leftovers can be finished later, thus reducing the pressure to eat past the point of comfortable fullness.
The extent to which each of us practices intuitive eating is based at least in part on our circumstances. The laugh I got out of seeing our daughter’s uneaten lunches come home each day was a privileged reaction, and someone in different shoes might understandably have a very different reaction.