“Unless we have at least one meal together as a family—the day does not feel right.”
—AMISH MOTHER
All this insistence on family and intentionally making family the center of life has some broad-reaching implications for how Amish children see the world and their place in it. But the importance of family for the Amish has other, more tangible benefits as well, at least in the everyday lives of mothers with small children.
I realized this one evening when I was having dinner with my friend Leah’s family. We were having a nice conversation, but suddenly I realized that there was something missing from our conversation. We were surrounded by her young children, but never once did I hear her tell her children to eat their food. She makes very healthy meals, and is knowledgeable about health and nutrition. The whole-grain bread, for instance, had been made from non-GMO wheat that she orders from a company out west. Yet, in spite of her concern about nutrition, and in spite of the fact that she was unabashedly setting out wheat bread, not the processed white bread that is all most of the children I know will touch, I have never heard her say to one of her children, “Eat that, it’s good for you!”
Unfortunately, when my boys were small, I made this comment a lot. As a young mother, I was obsessed with getting the right amount of calories and nutrition into their little bodies, and as I look back, I think I pretty much drove everyone nuts with it.
My eldest son still shudders when he talks about the pasta with spinach mixed into the noodles that I sent to school in his lunch. The other kids made fun of his “green spaghetti,” so of course he went hungry rather than eat it in front of them. For a while I secretly blended cooked zucchini into spaghetti sauce, until one of the boys caught me at it and tattled to his brothers. Then there was the homemade whole wheat bread I labored over that was so heavy and dense even I couldn’t force myself to eat it. I’m the only woman I know who has made her own tofu from scratch. My sons hated it, and still do.
I thought I had really stumbled onto something when, instead of what I thought was unhealthy white-flour commercial saltines, I tried to entice my kids into eating homemade tomato soup by putting out a bowl of popcorn to sprinkle into it. I thought my youngest was especially fond of that dish until he confessed that his older brother was secretly rewarding him for each spoonful by handing him a baseball card under the table. It worked well until he realized that they were his own baseball cards, which his brother had filched from his stash.
When I worked as a teacher’s aide, I saw a few other mothers who were even more focused on nutrition than I was. One was so determined that her children never taste refined sugar that she sent a modified, whole-grain, healthier version of cupcakes to school every time there was a birthday party, so her daughter would have something healthy to eat. I felt vaguely inferior to her until I discovered her child was tossing her mother’s “good” cupcakes into the trash and eating the fancy, sugar-filled birthday cupcakes that all the other children were enjoying.
Therefore, I was extremely impressed when, with no fanfare or discussion, Leah’s children happily ate the food she passed around the table—vegetables, whole grains, and all. As I sat there, I realized that I had never heard an Amish child complain about not liking the food that had been set before them. I’m sure it happens. I’m just saying I’ve never heard it.
At a larger event, I had seen more than a dozen small Amish children file through a potluck food line without once complaining about the food choices. I also didn’t see parents hovering over them worriedly asking if their child wanted a piece of this, a spoonful of that. The parents seemed to take it for granted that their children would accept the food placed in front of them, and the children seemed to take it for granted, too.
I asked Leah about this later, and at first she seemed puzzled by the idea that a child might refuse to eat the good food they were given. But when I pressed her about it, she offered as a possible explanation the fact that the Amish place a deliberate emphasis on sharing meals as a family.
Leah’s husband gets up early for work, while it is still dark. One morning while I was staying with them, I was stumbling to the bathroom with a flashlight in my hand, passed the kitchen, and caught a glimpse of Leah sitting at the kitchen table, keeping her husband company as he ate his breakfast.
They were talking softly together beneath the glow of a gaslight. Leah had not fixed a labor-intensive breakfast. She had not been rushing around frying bacon or scrambling eggs. Instead, her husband was spooning up a large bowl of the homemade granola she had baked the day before, and she was enjoying some time with him before he left.
This was their time together and I did not interrupt.
At six o’clock, after her husband had gone, I saw her getting the children up.
I noted that the children ate together and each had a few indoor and outdoor chores to finish before Leah began their schoolwork. Though she had the option of sending them to the Amish school down the road, she had chosen instead to homeschool all her children.
“Why?” I asked.
“I just enjoy having the time with them,” she answered.
The children did their schoolwork under their mother’s oversight while I got some work done on my battery-operated laptop.
Lunch was a simple affair with her, me, and the younger children together at the table.
“Is there anything you don’t like to eat?” I asked the eight-year-old.
“I don’t like wild rice very much,” she answered.
“So—if you came to my house, and I served wild rice, what would you do?”
She looked at her mother for help on how to deal with the question.
“She would probably whisper something about it to me,” Leah said. “And I would ask her to eat a little of it anyway.”
“And would you?” I asked the child.
She nodded.
“Even though you don’t like it, you would eat it anyway?”
“I would try very hard to eat some of it,” she said.
This began a discussion among the four children about food preferences. I found out that they had stronger opinions about food than I had suspected. They all mentioned things they didn’t necessarily enjoy, but all agreed that their preferences would not keep them from eating that particular food item if it were placed in front of them.
Later that evening, when we gathered around the supper table, Leah was visibly worried because an older son’s work kept him too late to sit down and eat with the rest of us.
“It’s so important for a family to eat together,” she told me. “As the children get older, schedules change and we aren’t able to have every meal together, but we try to make sure to have at least one each day when everyone is present. If we don’t . . . things just do not feel right to me.”
As the dishes were passed around, I noticed that individual children took more of some food than others, but they all ate some of each dish. There wasn’t a lot of discussion about the food, but there was a lively discussion about the goat auction we planned to go to the next day.
Leah’s meals are always wholesome and tasty, but they aren’t elaborate. The phrase comfort food came to mind as I sat at the table with them, but I don’t think the comfort necessarily comes from the food alone. The comfort comes from the company. This was a family who liked each other and enjoyed having a guest as well.
Like everyone else, I have favorite dishes. When I think about those dishes, much of my enjoyment comes from the social associations with them that I remember. The first curry dish I ever tasted was at the home of a family who had done mission work in Africa. As I sat at that table hearing interesting stories about their time in that country, I decided that I liked curry very much indeed.
I disliked potato soup as a child, until my mother became very ill and was unable to care for me for several days. I remember my aunt showing up with a pot of potato soup, plopping me down on her lap, and spooning it down me without asking whether or not I liked it—while she scolded my mother for not calling her sooner.
I remember being relieved that someone was finally taking care of me and being surprised that potato soup could taste so good. My aunt’s recipe was exactly like my mother’s, but the relief and gratitude I felt about her showing up made it a favorite comfort food from that point on. I actually crave it when I’m unwell, even today.
If I think back, nearly all my favorite foods have a story attached involving other people whom I loved or were kind to me.
Eating real food with our children, on a daily basis, without turning a meal into a battlefield, isn’t a magical answer to childhood pickiness, but I think it is a factor, especially if the food does not become the focus of the conversation.
“It also helps if the parents train themselves not to be picky eaters in front of their children,” Mary once pointed out. “John is not fond of tomatoes, but he eats them in front of the children anyway.”
Another factor that leads Amish children to eat what’s put in front of them is that the Amish tend to raise a great deal of their own food, usually with children tagging along and helping. I’ve noticed that if children are involved in the preparation of food, they are much more likely to try new things. Doing even just a small part of the harvesting of fruits and vegetables will tempt them to be more adventurous about trying new foods.
My eight-year-old grandson was opposed to tasting any kind of fruit except apples until he was visiting one day and helped me pick pears. The activity of picking ripe pears straight off the tree in my backyard was intriguing enough that he finally ventured a taste. Before long, he was sitting beside me in the grass, munching the fresh fruit like a veteran fruit eater. In fact, he loved pears so much that they became one of his favorite foods and for quite a while, he had to have a pear for breakfast every morning.
Amish children have this sort of experience almost daily throughout the various seasons. Even in the late winter, they help their mother plant seeds in containers on window sills, and in early spring they make a trip to a nursery for seedlings. Preparing the soil, planting, weeding, checking the first carrot, rejoicing over the first tomato, being amazed at the abundance of a few zucchini plants, or being allowed to have their own allotted garden space to grow watermelons, as Paul Stutzman told me he did as a child—all this has an effect on their appetites and food preferences.
Not everyone has enough earth to plant a large garden, but something as simple as helping a child plant a container of cherry tomatoes on a patio can pique their interest. It is hard not to want to taste what one has nurtured and helped to harvest.
I write about this as though I know how to garden, but the truth is, I’m an abysmal gardener. I always have such good intentions, but I forget to water, or I accidentally use the wrong fertilizer, or I get an infestation of worms that eat up the cabbage plants. The spirit is willing, but the skill is lacking, and the enthusiasm I had in spring wanes drastically about mid-July.
But even my imperfect attempts brought about enough of a harvest to be interesting to my sons when they were children. There might have been only two tomatoes, but we revered those two tomatoes that year. One summer I attempted watermelons. Only one watermelon survived, and we ran outside each morning to see how much it had grown. Excitement ran high when we finally sliced into it.
A parent doesn’t have to be a master gardener to give children at least some of the experience of harvesting food. Pick-your-own fruit orchards offer activities most children enjoy. It is a rare child who doesn’t want to sample the ripe blueberries he picked all by himself. One of our favorite things to do when we lived in Michigan was to drive north and pick ripe sweet cherries. The picking involved actually climbing into low-hanging trees, a perfect opportunity for an active child to work off some energy. Visits to a cherry orchard and the fun of eating sweet black cherries in the backseat of our car made cherries one of my sons’ favorite foods.
Another thing my sons enjoyed when we lived in the city was making a trip to the farmers’ market each Saturday. Purchasing produce straight from the farmer who grew it and had just pulled it from the earth was a form of harvest in itself as well as an adventure.
I believe that the further children get away from the earth and the process of planting, watering, and harvesting, the less interested they will be in eating real food. They will naturally default back to the highly processed junk food that they see in commercials.
Of course, all these issues are so much less prevalent in Amish families, and not just because they grow much of their own food but because of the lack of television in their lives. As I’ve spoken to other mothers and grandmothers, I’ve become more and more convinced that my theory—though it’s a highly unscientific theory based on my own personal experience—has merit.
I was in first grade before our family bought a television. I remember seldom thinking about food up to that point except to enjoy it whenever mealtime came around. We rarely snacked unless the apples on the tree in the backyard were ripe, or sometimes I would wander out into the tomato patch with a salt shaker in hand and surfeit myself with sun-warmed garden tomatoes if I was hungry and dinner wasn’t ready.
I remember the very first time I realized that I was actually craving something specific. I was watching my first Kraft food commercial. The buttery voice-over of the narrator and the vision of that creamy Kraft mayonnaise being spooned into a bowl was heady stuff to a six-year-old. Commercial mayonnaise was not something my mother ever bought, but I saw it on television and I wanted some.
There were also the sugary-cereal commercials that suddenly appeared in our home, where breakfast usually involved foods like oatmeal with honey, fresh-caught fish, fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, or homemade bread covered with wild blackberry jam.
Once we got a television, I suddenly wanted a breakfast that matched the jingle in a commercial (“Snap, crackle, pop . . . Rice Krispies!”), especially if there was the promise of a toy inside the box. Things changed in our home when the television appeared, and that was no accident. It was a well-planned campaign by food companies to make a profit, and it worked.
According to the Nielsen Corporation, food products and fast-food restaurants are ranked number one in the type of TV advertisements marketed during kids’ programming, and Nielsen also estimates that American children watch approximately 20,000 thirty-second commercials per year.
Food companies pay billions of dollars for a few minutes of commercial airtime during children’s programming, and there is a good reason for this: commercials have a profound effect. Well-funded, well-researched ads tell children what they should eat and where they should eat it. Research has proven that television commercials have a much greater effect on children’s food choices than do their parents’ preferences or suggestions.
In other words, there are extremely well orchestrated reasons that our children beg for unhealthy food or refuse to eat anything but Chicken McNuggets, but these reasons have little to do with a growing child’s need for good nutrition. And, as any parent realizes when they have had to pull their child off the ceiling after a birthday party involving too much sugar, bad nutrition can cause bad behavior.
The Amish are not forbidden to eat junk food, but in the homes I’ve visited, junk food is rare. The Amish are not forbidden to stop at fast-food restaurants, but eating at them is not a way of life. It isn’t exactly “fast food” if one has to hitch up a horse and buggy to get there. I’ve also never seen anything on the table to drink except water or milk. There was lemonade once for a special family dinner, but that is rare. The children seem well satisfied with these two simple beverages.
I think another factor is that Amish children have physical chores to accomplish each day, and with no video games and television to keep them on the couch, they tend to be much more physically active. I think the enthusiasm Amish children show for real food might sometimes have a lot to do with the simple fact that they actually have an appetite when they come to the table.
Having an appetite is no small thing when it comes to pickiness. I saw this played out at our church one weekend. Our youth director observed a thirty-six-hour “lock-in” during which the teenagers voluntarily ate nothing except some water and juice. The goal was to raise awareness of world hunger. The pocket money they saved by not eating out would go to a local homeless shelter.
They were to break their fast with chicken-and-rice soup, which I was asked to supply. I didn’t have a recipe for such a large group, so it was a little bit of this and a lot of that, and a little more broth and some vegetables, and finally I had a huge pot of soup—but as I looked at the hodgepodge of chicken, broth, rice, broccoli, carrots, and peas, I realized I’d made a huge mistake.
It tasted great, but it looked—even to me—like slop, and I knew no self-respecting teenager in our church would eat it. I knew these kids. I’d cooked for these kids before. I’d seen them turn their noses up at much better-looking foods than this pot of soup.
But time was short, the soup was all I had, and I discovered that after thirty-six hours without solid food, there were no picky eaters in the teen group. Not one. They lined up with their bowls in their hands, and I have never fed such a grateful group of people. There was not one complaint. Every teen came back, humbly asking for seconds. And—I thought this was hilarious—a few days afterward I started getting requests from various mothers for my “wonderful” soup recipe because their teenager kept raving about how delicious it was.
Am I recommending starving a child? Absolutely not! But I will say that I seldom see Amish children snack between meals. I haven’t even seen them ask permission to have a snack, except once, when I brought a box of fancy chocolate to Leah’s house as a gift and the littlest child asked for a piece. The elder sister graciously accepted the gift and put it on a high shelf for “later.” The thing that surprised me was that the youngest child did not fuss or throw a tantrum, but calmly accepted the older sister’s pronouncement. Snacking was not something they were used to, so it wasn’t an issue.
Maybe the difficulties so many parents face in getting their children to eat at meals could be helped by intentionally making snacks inaccessible, and by encouraging their children to work up their appetites doing things outdoors like taking a long walk or playing. Allowing a child to work up a real appetite and then simply sitting down as a family to eat certainly works for the Amish.
No one wants to fight with their children. It’s so much easier to give in, and believe me, I understand how and why it happens. But I also believe that sometimes it is worth making some changes. It isn’t wise or kind to allow children to grow up on junk simply because it’s easier to cave in to them than to encourage habits that lead to healthy eating.
However, there is one notable exception to this—even in Amish families.
“What about grandparents?” I asked Mary. “I’ll bet Amish grandparents don’t give children junk food either. Right?”
“Oh, you would be wrong about that.” She laughs. “John’s mother says she enjoys giving our children lots of candy when they are at her house and then sending them home mad. She also makes sure there are always potato chips or cookies available for them at her house.”
“And you are okay with this?” I asked.
“Of course I am.” Mary seemed surprised I would ask. “She is their grandmother.”
In other words, there are some ways in which there is absolutely no difference at all between our two cultures.