S3E4: Unschooling and food

AUTOGENERATED TRANSCRIPT

S3E4 | Ladies Fixing the World

Cecilie Conrad: 00:01
This is the usual. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, and what else? Goodnight. Opening sentence of the ladies fixing the world because we have to fix the world from all over the world as the ladies are. Well, me in little Denmark, where I'm back in my home country. I'm Cecilia Conrad and I'm here with sandra.in the big USA over the other side of the water. And welcome Sandra. Love to be here. I also have with me Sue Elvis as usual, and she's down under in Australia. Hi Sue. Welcome. Hi Celia. Hi Sandra.

Sue Elvis: 00:44
I'm excited. You're the other side of,

Cecilie Conrad: 00:46
you're on the other side of lots of water. Lots of water. Yeah. And lots of planet. When I grew up, they taught me that Australia was as far as away, as away as you could get on the other side, but technically we'd have to angle it slightly off to get to Australia to dug that big hole. For the listeners, it will have been a week as this, I think is, uh, episode four of season three. But for us it's been a while. So we are all excited about talking again. Today we're talking about food, which we didn't want to, and then we wanted to, and then we didn't want to, and now we want to. So, and I think as usual, Sandra might have prepared something and I

Sandra Dodd: 01:32
wish I had, except for decades of discussion. Okay. So I have done low long preparation a lot of times on schoolers just. I freak out one way or the other about requiring, preventing limiting food. And so it's, it's, it, it's emotional for a lot of people and scary. And so I don't know what, I don't have an outline, I don't have a direction because I wasn't sure how you ensue would feel about it. So that's why I was afraid of it, because I'm very opinionated, mostly around not controlling kids, letting them learn about food the same way people learn about anything.

Sue Elvis: 02:14
Mm-hmm. I think food is a difficult topic because it can have repercussions throughout an adult life the way that you have been brought up with food. Uh, thinking of my own life here and how parents start wanting the best for their kids. Like, you need to eat all these healthy things and clear your plate and all that, but how it can lead to problems later. And yeah. I think we are gonna have a good discussion here, but I was interested, Sandra, oh, you said that you've got, uh, a lot of, um, years of discussions do, and you said also that food is one of those things that you find is, it's hard for everybody to talk to without getting emotional about or getting upset, having a strong opinion about why do you think that is Sandra?

Sandra Dodd: 03:13
Because, partly because of what you've said, that they've also grown up with food problems, food pressure or joy or fear or what? All the emotional things that go into relationships between parents and children when it comes to something that happens several times a day that you eat, that you're hungry and that you want some food. I think it, it can't help but affect the relationships and the physical health of trying to eat when you're upset, when you're afraid, when you, when there's, there are layers put on. Are you going to eat like a good kid? Are you going to eat like you love your mom? Are you going to eat like, you know, all this stuff? And it can make it hard to digest when, when you're not just eating food. So I've, I've tried to encourage people to just let it be about eating food. Don't make a kid eat what he doesn't wanna eat. Don't shame him for what he does want to eat. Let this thing develop gradually and for the parents not to feel so attached to it too. There. And there are layers and layers and I've, I've been helping unschoolers through several phases of food fad, food, fear, food, superstition. So I, in the course of an hour and a half or however long we talk, some of those will come up. I don't wanna dump the whole dump now.

Cecilie Conrad: 04:33
I was thinking, is it even possible to make some sort of spectrum? Like, like, uh, so there's the super strict Egypt greens. Some sort of regime. When we started talking about this, Sandra said, we can't talk about it because I'll kick your vegan ass. I like the way you express yourself. And, uh, maybe I got a little bit afraid maybe not. And that will unfold as well. My vegan story, I'm not even vegan anymore. But of course there are some regimes and they can come from some philosophy or religion or ideas about health or that can be as strict as the 1950s dinner table where you eat your greens and you, you say, please and thank you. And, and that's all you say to what I have also had discussions about with those who tread their first step, take their first steps. Into unschooling and they've seen some of the radical unschoolers more or less serve candy with chocolate milk on top, a cereal in the morning on TikTok or whatever displaying a radical freedom that the new people are afraid of. And, and you have these two ends of the spectrum of the extreme freedom. You can literally eat whatever you want on one end and on the other end, I am going to decide every molecule of what gets sin to your body. And I will make sure it gets there and in the right order. And you say please and thank you while, and smile. So you have this, is that a spectrum or do we have something? Is there a straight line between the two or is it, it's too complicated, right?

Sandra Dodd: 06:22
I don't think it's a line. I don't think it's a spectrum. I think s. Too many people, too many people are, are making rules about it. Like a rule that you can eat whatever you want to. Like, I don't, you said that they're serving candy with chocolate milk or whatever. I don't, that goes, that's, that's not any part of what I've been talking about.

Cecilie Conrad: 06:44
No, I know, I know. But I know that some of the people I talk with about unschooling when they ask me about food, this is one of the things they've seen out there. This, I don't wanna call it extreme, I'm just saying, well, I don't know if they saw it or they interpret it

Sandra Dodd: 07:01
that way. If a child is eating ice cream and it's morning, some people just think that's not right, because there's a rule somewhere in the back of their heads that ice cream is for hot parts of the day. Mm-hmm. You know, it's just, it's arbitrary, very arbitrary rules and thoughts and fears about food. And if, if a parent makes, gives a child a range of options. Because there's food in the house and doesn't say it's eight o'clock, sit down now and eat now. And they say, are you hungry yet? What do you want? There's no prediction that anybody could make that would be true about fears. Like if they go, oh my gosh, he ate ice cream three times this week. Honestly, my kids never ate ice cream for breakfast. I didn't, I wouldn't have minded, but they didn't. So, but the, but the fact that they had that option and didn't, is more important than if I'd said I'd never let them, or I served them ice cream because there, it's my choice, my control, my, my doing, my agency. And I, I really think it should be the child's agency. Very largely. Very largely. And, and, but I didn't have eight kids, which Sue did. And sometimes you can't, like maybe be that loosey goosey about having that many kids needing to eat before you go somewhere. Honestly about all my kids. Sometimes, sometimes I just took far.

Sue Elvis: 08:25
Sorry, Sandra, I keep interrupting you. I'm just thinking that, uh, you reminded me that for breakfast, for example, all my kids made their own breakfast at their own time. They just went to the cupboard and saw what was available and made their own. Which get reminds me of a good story. Well, I think it's a good story, uh, about kids letting kids do things and not, um, doing things for them. And I remember Leoni West Westberg, I think you might know hes Sandra. Do you know. Leoni, she's an Australian was a, was an Australian unschooling blogger a little bit ahead of me, but she was one of the people that I was in contact in my early blogging days, and she wrote this blog post about not giving kids help that they don't need. Letting kids get, um, do things. You know how we always, well, not we, but maybe we have at one time, um, ready to jump in and do things for kids instead of letting them do them for themselves. And I just reminded me of a story that when my youngest daughter was two years old, she would make her own toast. She would stand there, put a slight head of bread under the gorilla and cook her own toast, and she chose what she wanted for breakfast, cooked it herself, and then when sat down at the table and ate it. And I was thinking that a lot of parents wouldn't have let that, let her. Go anywhere near the gorilla, let alone choose what she wanted to have for her breakfast. And what you were saying, Sandra, about having lots of children, that was the consequence of you can't always be there doing things for every single child when you got lots of children, that you learn to let each child do what they are capable of. And you're not, I, I didn't have the time or the energy to stand there and do everything for all my children. They learn to be independent. And so that was a good consequence of having lots of children. And the older ones obviously would show the younger ones what to do. So as far as, um, food goes, that was only the toast. Cooking the toast in the morning. Uh, all my kids made their own breakfast chairs what they wanted. And I suppose my husband and I stock the pantry in the fridge. With, with, um, with food, and they just went there and chose what they wanted. But I don't remember them meeting ice cream, even though there was probably ice cream in the freezer. Mm-hmm.

Sandra Dodd: 10:58
I think, I think when I said it, I don't think it's a continuum and people make rules at what I was vision envisioning as a better world for that is to live by principles. The same principles that you use to learn and trust that kids can, can figure out on their own things, like even history and science, just by exploration and connecting the dots and gathering in what they're interested in and learning all about numbers and patterns. By playing with numbers and patterns. People can learn about food by eating food, making food, going to restaurants, eating at friends' houses. They start to learn the range of what's out there, what they like, what they don't like. Do you think though,

Sue Elvis: 11:42
that just like parents do, that kids can pick up bad messages about food? That we talk about food in such negative ways? Sometimes we get very, a lot of negative messages. A the internet about food, um, just like you were saying, Sandra Cecilia about that TikTok and the candy and the um, the chocolate milk that's a message someone's picked up about unschool schooling. And I can remember talking to a few women on my blog about how, oh, they didn't think they could unschool because they were afraid that their kids would start eating junk food and that was against what they wanted for their kids. So, but even other messages, if we go back a few episodes, I remember Cecilia, you were talking about, um, from the day our children are born, born, we start comparing and measuring and they've gotta be at this, uh, attained this goal at this age. And I can remember one of my children, I'm not sure which one it was one of the younger ones, and. You think I would be relaxed by the time I got to the younger ones. But I was worried she was putting on too much weight too fast because she was going over the the graph, the, she was in a higher percentile than she should have, should have been. Mm-hmm. And it was all to do with feeding. And I breastfed and I breastfed on demand, but that little, uh, message went through my head. Perhaps this is bad because she's putting on so much weight, she's getting, you know, that she wasn't a petite little girl. She was a bit rolly polly. And that message that you've gotta be careful what you give your babies to eat. And she only had breast milk. And it starts from day one. Well, it did for me, having to deliberately think about the messages I was giving my kids about food and. The choices that I, we were making, uh, trying to, again, that same sort of unschooling, educational beliefs that we slowly, um, knock on the head as we, uh, as we have more experience and how we ponder things and how we observe our kids as well as kids will learn. 'cause they're curious. I had to also let go of, I've gotta be in control of my children's eating. And it might seem like they're two separate things in control of their learning, in control of their eating, but very much the same as you're saying Sandra, there's principles that apply to both, but some people I'm sorry, go ahead. Some people No, no. I, I was just thinking about the, um, the, the, the mothers who told me that they. Were scared of unschooling, but in a way it wasn't just unschooling education, it was food. We won't let go, we won't let unschooling overflow into parenting because then my child might want to eat junk food all the time, and that's not good.

Sandra Dodd: 14:56
Well, what we found out by comparing notes all for all those years is that kids don't eat junk food all the time. And I have over 30 pages about eating food stuff, you know, food related things on my site. I just counted briefly before I came in here and I quit counting at 30 there probably more. But maybe part of the reason that food is so emotional, maybe especially for moms, is that they're so involved in the procurement and the preparation storage. Food safety, it's in them, they're cleaning up after it. They see how much each person didn't eat. 'cause they clean up the scraps and then they're deciding, do I have a compost pile, do I throw it away? You know, there it is. Just all of those thoughts about the same food, the same loaf of bread that comes into the house or that you cooked. You're there for all of it, for the, for the processing, the storage, the eating or not eating. And, and it, and it's probably biologically true that mothers are attached to that. The same way that birds, I guess some most species of birds, moms and dads both will feed them. But you know, that whole, that whole nurturing instinct sometimes gets sidetracked into something that is kind of like religion that Cecilia said. Where where there end up being foods that are devils and foods that are angels and foods that are saints and sins and. I don't care what people eat. What I cared about was that the parents weren't being irrational and controlling the effect on the other end wasn't my goal or thought it was, except that I had lots of stories of people who gave their kids choices and the kids chose vegetables or gave their kids, you know, what, what do you want me to buy you special from the store? Fully expecting that they're gonna say some sort of Twinkie or ding-dong sugar thing, and they say, uh, broccoli. See if they have broccoli. There's a story on my side about Holly wanting plums, and I went to three stores before I found her plums. And that wouldn't have been a story except we had picked Pam Ian up from the airport. Pam had three kids about the age of mine, and Holly was five at the time. And so Holly's just in the car, I'm talking to Pam, yada, yada, yada, yada. And Holly's in the back. So my mom. Do we have any plums at home? And I said, no. And Pam was interested in foreign grocery stores anyway, you know, to see what we had here that they don't have in California. And what it is, is a whole lot of salsa and green chili and red chili. But anyway, um, and tortillas, ma, all kinds of tortillas. Yes. But anyway, so, so we went in the store and they didn't have plums and Pam and I are still talking, and we went to another store. Finally, when we got plums, Holly sat in the back of the car and ate plums. But we took Holly in the store with us. She saw all kinds of stuff on the way to where plums weren't, she didn't change her mind. She just calmly not, you know, not in a crazy way, just, you know, that was the request. Can we get plums? Okay, we'll try. And we finally did. So that was, that was an example of somebody even having the kid come into the grocery store where you pass by the candy or you pass by the nuts or other kinds of fruits. And she could have changed her mind, but she, she didn't, I don't know. It's not a big deal. But that, but my side is full of people's stories like that. Of people who thought, okay, let's see if a kid will just eat sugar. And some, I know the names for this, but it doesn't matter. It was in another country and I knew 'em both. And it was like, so she bought her kid, the mom who was so afraid of sugar, bought her kid a box of sugar cubes like you put out for teeth and let him play with them or eat 'em or whatever he wanted to do with them. And he played with it some, and he ate some and then he stopped. It's not like he ever finished that box of sugar cubes. Hmm. So the, so that was, that was a way to inoculate that mom against the fright of, if you give him sugar, he will eat it all and immediately once some more, and then die. So there's, there's almost a magical sacrifice involved that parents get the idea that if they inspire a child to eat a certain way, or if they prevent a child from eating a certain way that they can guarantee health intelligence, good behavior, long life. And I've heard that stuff in detail. Like, oh, sugar makes kids hyper. That was proven to be false. And still parents are like, la, la, la. Don't matter, don't matter. And my kids had sugar. My kid is hyper, therefore he had sugar. And what the, what the scientists discovered, the people who were trying to figure out if it was true. And if so, why and how was the kids got excited because they were at a party or whatever it was. The kids got excited because after being prevented from having sugar for weeks or days or years, there's a sugar opportunity and they go woo-hoo cake, or whatever it is. And they get excited and they run around. That might have happened with or without the cake that they got excited and run around. But those events all usually have a cake, you know, it's usually a birthday or something or some sort of party. And so the parents wanting to be virtuous and loving and. Providing health, good behavior in long life, want to manage, micromanage emotionally, manage that child's access. We went to a birthday party one time. The cake is already out, candy's out visible, and then the mom made all the kids sit down and she gave them celery and carrot sticks. It was like, okay, that didn't improve anyone's health or virtue, but the mom felt good that she was trying to make her kids and everybody's kids eat some vegetables after which they would have cake as a reward. That's more dangerous than just giving them cake and saying, that's it. No, I'm sorry. If you want vegetables, go home and eat vegetables later. We only have cake because they, they elevated the cake to a prize that only winners get, and they also said, but carrots and celery are kind of yucky, but eat it anyway because it makes you virtuous. So that's the sort of religious overlay that I'm talking about is when some foods are considered to be satanic.

Sue Elvis: 21:18
Well, a few years ago in the media, in the bookshops locally I quit. Sugar was big. It was a, a brand. Sarah, Sarah, somebody Australian, and she had, I quit Sugar website. I quit sugar, sugar free products. I quit sugar recipe books. And I remember one day I was at the checkout, we're waiting in the line in a department store, and there was a display of all her books write bias. And I started talking with my teenagers about this book. And they're, they're talking amongst themselves, do you think we should give up sugar? And they turned to me and said, do you think we should give up sugar Mom? And I said, why don't we buy the book and then take it home and read it and and we will decide. So it was all in their hands. They took the book home, they read, read it, and they said, yes, mom, I think we should quit sugar. So we adapted other recipes. We had such an experimental time trying to get rid of the sugar in our diet. And Christmas came along and in the I Quit Sugar Book, there was all these Christmas substitute recipes for things like Christmas pudding and Christmas cake. And we decided we would make them all. So we, we didn't go to the supermarket and buy all the usual things with sugar in it. We made our own healthy alternatives. Christmas Day came and we sat the table and we all sat round and we ate the meal and it was horrible, absolutely awful. And everybody just looked at each other and said, what did we do here? We don't like this Christmas cake with Beach Rudy in it. And oh, I wish we had our, our normal Christmas dinner. So on Boxing Day, the very next day, we all went down to the supermarket and we bought the traditional sugar filled. Cakes, puddings and whatever. And we had a second Christmas dinner the next day and we all agreed that quitting sugar might have been a good idea and we did reduce that sugar, but some things are just not the same without the sugar. And if you are thinking of celebrations and things, who wants a beetroot cake on their birthday or Christmas? We all want that liquor of sugar. And if we are too strict about the whole thing, uh, it takes the fun out of the celebrations. And we took a lot about that and I just always have this memory now of that second Christmas dinner that we all really, really wanted and how much we all really, really enjoyed it. So yes, I guess what I'm saying is that. Sometimes there's a place for sugar or a place for the demon foods, and sometimes there's a place for discussing things amongst kids and letting them have, uh, an input into what they believe the family should be eating. And as the mother, it was their decision. And I just went out and bought what they said made well, the, I don't cook much, but they cooked all these recipes and I was expected to eat them. But I was glad about that second Christmas dinner

Sandra Dodd: 24:30
when I was just grown late teens, early twenties. It was late sixties, early seventies. And the big fad, New Mexico was kind of a hippie neighborhood. You know, a lot of hippies had moved to New Mexico and they were cooking with Carib and not chocolate, because chocolate was considered to be. Bad. Now chocolate's considered to be good, but that's a theme of my life is almost every food that I know has gone from, oh, don't eat that. Oh my gosh, I can't believe you have that in your house to, oh, that what you really ought to do is eat more lettuce. And and so car was the thing and chocolate was bad, and I've had cara brownies and cakes and cookies and taste like dirt, but people would pretend it didn't taste like dirt because there was virtue in that pretense. Exactly.

Sue Elvis: 25:18
Cecilia, I would be interested to know about when I was thinking when we quit sugar, then we didn't make it a we weren't so strict with ourselves that if we went to somebody's house and they served up cake, we didn't enjoy, just say, oh, and we can eat that 'cause we are not eating sugar. We just tucked in and enjoyed it. But what I would like to know, Cecilia, is you travel around so much and you stay with different families and obviously different families eat in different ways. How do your children, as they were growing up, how did your children adapt to the different diets and were you ever concerned that they, they would, would refuse the food? How did you deal with all that? Not being in somebody else's environment. Because the reason I wanted to know is a lot of people tell me that we should make sure our children aren't fussy eaters so that they don't embarrass us when we go visiting other people.

Cecilie Conrad: 26:16
So it's been a lot of years, not as many as it has for you, so you have more experience than me. But I've been a mom for 26 and a half years, and I've made probably most of the mistakes you can make around food, experimenting with different ways of navigating. I started out really poor. I had no money, and I was a single mom. So my first context for this whole thing was that, you know, I can't scrape it down the bin if we want to eat. The last week of the month. So I had to make food that my child wanted to eat and make sure, not make sure she ate it, but I wouldn't put more on the plate that she would, I could imagine she would actually eat. So this whole freedom thing had its very practical limitation that I couldn't afford buying all kinds of things. And I'm not going to tell the whole life story. I want to answer the question. I'm just trying to say that I, I, to me, there's, there's all of my luggage, all the things that I've been thinking and trying and, and, and all my ideas and things I had to work through to become free and, and also some ex some pushing myself into being more free than I actually was, which I think is worse than having just owning. You know, I can't have it. I'm not buying this. And I've been vegetarian and then not vegetarian and all kinds of things. I think I'm the most picky eater I know. So asking my kids to not be picky eaters is have never been a thing. I I I, I only eat what I want to eat and if I don't want to eat it, I'm just not eating it politely. So, but I'm not going to, and it's created a lot of problems for me personally in my life with growing up into families with different rules around food and different expectation, different culture around the dinner table. If there was a dinner table. Um, yeah. I've 80% maybe stuck to it in my own life that it, it doesn't pass my lips if I don't want to eat it. And of course, it made no sense to ask my kids to eat things they don't want to eat when I'm the most picky eater I know. So in that way, I've had to navigate that when we are living with other people. And for the past seven years we've been traveling and we've been living in many different contexts with many different people, in many different forms of community. And obviously I cook as well. I don't show up at someone's place and expect them to cook for me and my huge family. So when I cook, I make sure that there is something I know they like. It's always in the matrix. Um. For the past, I don't know, maybe 10 years. My three youngest children and myself and my husband have been vegetarian, um, most of the time vegan. So that puts some limitations that it's quite easy for other people to accept. You don't want to eat the meatball if you are vegetarian. It's easier than saying, I don't like meatballs. It's, it's less rude because it's a, it's a, it's a choice that you've made for maybe other reasons than your taste buds. And I don't find anyone frowning upon the vegetarian choice. I have never, I have never met it. I don't frown upon what other people eat. I think they should eat what they want to put in their mouth and we. Have all, all kinds of different reasons chosen to become vegetarian. It's not, it, it came from me the first time with my first child. I was vegetarian when I became a mom, so my child became vegetarian. It was natural, normal for me. But this time when we started one by one to become vegetarian, it, it did come from me to the extent that I was very sick after the cancer. I kept vomiting. I would, everything I would eat came back out. And, uh, this went on for years after I stopped the chemo. And at some point in my eating journey, I had to stop and think, okay, what do I do? I can't keep vomiting. My doctors gave up on me and said. We have very few survivors of this disease, and of them we have between 10 and 15% who, who are just sick the rest of their lives. They just keep vomiting. They keep having the confused brain. They have all the side effects as if they still got the chemo and we don't know what to do about it. And if people give us more funds for this disease, we will make sure that more people survive. We will not put it into these 10, 15% of the survivors. We will put it into the ones who die, which I had a lot of sympathy for. So there was nothing to do except figure it out myself. And so I did with restrictive dieting, what, what do you call it in English? You know, you, you go down to eating one or two things. And see if that stays inside the elimination and elimination. Yeah. And then you add more and more and more. And I, there's, this is a long story and it's not very interesting in the context of unschooling, but I definitely found out that I just cannot eat the meats. It makes me very sick. And, and that was how, and also milk and eggs. It started. How did it start? Well, all three got eliminated quite quickly. I just couldn't have it inside my body. Now it's 10, it's more, it's 14 years later and I can eat some cheeses if the milk is raw and you know, I can still not eat eggs. So, so that put me there and I had to stop thinking that whatever I think is right to eat is right for my whole family. I had just had to save myself at that point from vomiting, so I became vegan. For health reasons. And then the kids, like you said, Sue, like seeing a book in the supermarket. My kids were like, Hmm, I wonder how that would feel. And just played around with it. Eliminating stuff and, and choosing one by one. My husband had been a vegetarian for a long time in his young years and, and decided, why, what? Wait a minute. Why did I even start eating meat again? I don't want to eat meat. I don't wanna eat animals. I actually don't wanna be part of that whole industry. I think it's wrong. And then I, I think he was last, or second to last, I can't remember. So one by one they chose, of course they were affected by me. I'm not trying to say I didn't affect them. Of course I did. We lived together and I'm their mom. Of course, they're affected by my choices, but I didn't. Rant on the meat industry. I, I just became vegetarian myself and my kids, one by one decided to become vegetarian except for the oldest one, and I would still cook her the oldest one, what she wanted. Today, I have a harder time with it. I don't mind other people eating it, but I can not, personally, it's hard for me to actually cook meat. I can buy meat that is already cooked. I don't mind doing that. But doing the work is a little, I don't know, I can't do that anymore. So anyway, that's how everyone became vegetarian. Some became vegan. We were all vegan for a while. It became a little more of a religion and all the ethical things and self-righteousness did, did penetrate our minds for a while. And, and that has evaporated again, I feel like. And now we all just eat what we want to eat. Showing up in other people's houses. I'm a fairly good cook and I like cooking, so usually it becomes this fun community thing to cook with whoever we live with and learn from each other and, and compare notes and go on adventures and come up with ideas and make things. Sometimes it's with the kids in the house, sometimes it's with the adults. Sometimes we take turns. I don't, I don't, sometimes it's a problem socially to be vegetarian because people we visit, but that's more people we visit than people we community live with because they. Go very far to try to cook us something. And I feel that I didn't, I didn't ask you to put in that much effort just because I don't want to eat the meatball. You know? I can, I can just eat the broccoli on the side. You don't have to. So that can be sometimes socially challenging, but otherwise people are nice. People are easy. You just talk to them and, and I don't feel judged or, or I don't know. What, what wording did you put in your question? Like, um, that my people, my kids shouldn't, maybe I'm just rude. Maybe I'm just rude. Actually, I'm not asking them to eat things on the table just because they're on the table. I'm asking them to pick what they want and sometimes they don't want anything. And then I'll, I usually have my car with me and my car has a kitchen in it. And in the kitchen I have food that I know they like. So if we happen to sit at a dinner table and one of my kids is not eating because there's nothing that their body want that day, I'll just pop out and make something they like and that's quite rude. But then I try to talk myself out of it. And if people find that too rude, then maybe it's not the best people match anyway.

Sandra Dodd: 36:38
There is a social aspect of eating and there's some, some. Things that if that thing is happening, like a wedding cake, everyone is given a little piece of wedding cake and it's like a communal blessing for everybody to eat that wedding cake. But you're gonna be in trouble if that cake has eggs and milk, right?

Sue Elvis: 36:54
Mm-hmm.

Sandra Dodd: 36:54
So that's when I was a teen mm-hmm. 18 and 19. I was vegetarian for two years and it started because I thought if I was really hungry, I wouldn't be able to kill a cow to make a hamburger. Not the greatest first. I should have thought of a rabbit and a stew, maybe, you know, if I'm gonna be a little sensible about it. But I just thought, well, it's immoral if I'm, if I'm partaking a food that I can't personally obtain. And then, so I was vegetarian for two years, which wasn't a hardship for me. And I made a best friend then who we were friends for the rest of our lives. She died when she was 70 and she was still vegetarian and I wasn't, but. One of her justifications for being vegetarian was that vegetarians don't stink and meat eaters stink. Okay? And that's what Japanese said. The Japanese said, Americans stink because they drink milk and eat meat and you know that Japanese don't stink because they eat fish and rice. I will get back to that. So then I was 19 and I went to a little communal Thanksgiving thing of all just, you know, young people who were away from families and they were making a Turkey. 'cause that's what Americans do on Thanksgiving. And I was one of the more experienced cooks there, and I knew how to take care of the Turkey while it's baking for hours. And it started to smell good, you know? And so when the time came to cut the Turkey, I ate a little bit and it was great. So I ate some more. And then the next day I ate a hot dog because I thought, uh, you know, then, but part of the reason that I, that I. My own argument was just that a moral, a morals thing about accessibility and my lack of ability to kill an animal. Then I was taking anthropology classes and just starting to think there's never been a culture that said, sorry grandma. If you can't catch a chicken and kill it, you're not eating. There has never been a culture in which it wasn't the young strong men showing off for the other men who went and killed an antelope. That's how it is. There are hunters and there are people who have never been, hunters aren't gonna be hunters. The hunters would say, get away from us. You're scaring the animals away, or whatever. So the fact that now if, if, if someone eats meat that was raised by ranchers or farmers and butchered by a professional butcher and sold by professional grocers and they never had to take the feathers or skin off of anything, all of that, you know, that whole thing. It's not a sin, but it is a sin if you make a religion out of that. But if you look at it as cultural and his culture and history, it's not a sin. So for me it was some sort of, I was, I was creating some sort of religious guilt in my own self that really didn't have anything to do with diet. It had to do with virtue.

Sue Elvis: 39:52
Hmm.

Sandra Dodd: 39:53
And, and then I lived my life some more, but. It turns out nobody knew in the sixties and seventies, but it turns out that there are sweat glands and some of those sweat glands produce stink and some don't. And it's only been studied recently, and Koreans have zero stink. Japanese have very little stink. It's absolutely genetic, so their inner marriage is gonna be a problem. So if they have a baby that's not Japanese, that baby is likely, unless it's half Korean to smell worse than the other Japanese. And so their prejudice was based on something that they made up reasons for that it was the other people's diet or lack of taking baths just the way the Japanese did or whatever it was. Turns out it was wrong. So. There a lot of things that people have or make up explanations for. Justification score turned out not to be true and I don't like that for unschoolers. So all of my, all of my work with Unschoolers was to help the parents be more calm and rational, you know? Can you see this in such a way that it's just living, it's just playing, it's just eating. Eating is sustenance. Can you see food as what keeps someone alive or what entertains their taste buds for a moment or comforts them or helps them sleep or helps them wake up, you know, is coffee a sin or not? I don't personally like coffee. I have friends who have to drink coffee before they can communicate with other people. That's fine. I'll be one of them. Who wrote the books about sugar did better without sugar peachy. If she figured that out on her own by eliminating sugar from her own diet and felt great, that's wonderful. But why does she feel that that in that entitles her to make a bunch of money? Off of books and make somebody else's teenagers feel guilty because they ate sugar. You know? So at some level we're not talking about unschooling at all, but it's still the same control or control or, I don't know, if somebody writes a book to sell that's not control, but she's kind of putting her preference or her personal benefit out there as an ideal as I, I'm doing better with sugar and so everyone should eat like I'm eating, it seems like to me.

Sue Elvis: 42:16
And we can buy the book and read it and decide for ourselves what we want to do. But I have a a vegetarian story as well. Uh, and that's also to do with cookbooks and. My husband and I, oh, this was years and years and years ago when we had a baby and a toddler maybe, and we decided that we would become vegetarians because for health reasons, we'd read these, uh, books and we thought this would be an excellent way to lose weight. We must have had a bit of extra. So we became vegetarians, not for any, nothing e except for our own health. That was the reason. And we went to a party one night, just my husband and I. We must have got a babysitter. It, it was a rare event out and there was a barbeque in, in the garden of the party and there were barbecuing. Chicken. Chicken and what you said Sandra, about the Turkey smelling beautiful at Thanksgiving. Well, there this, um, beautiful smell of the, of the barbecuing chicken, sort of wafted our way and very virtuously. I said, we're vegetarian. For no other reason than health reasons, but we are vegetarian. We can't eat that. And then I noticed a little while later that my husband had gone and he had helped himself to the, the, the chicken off the barbecue and he was eating it. And I said, but you are vegetarian. And he looked at me a little bit guiltily and I thought to myself later, what I was doing was I decided we were going to be vegetarian. And I had imposed this diet restriction on at least myself and my husband. I, I, I'm not sure about the little ones. They were probably still breastfeeding and. For me, it was like, we are virtuous. We, we, we, we are restricting our diet. We can't eat that. And then was my husband sneaking away and eating the chicken And I thought, oh, this is ridiculous. If he wants to eat chicken, he can eat chicken. And we, as you went, Sandra, you went back and started eating hot dogs the next day. And I realized we were vegetarians for the wrong reasons and it wasn't good to impose my own thoughts and opinions on my husband. I guess it was good practice for later on when our kids came along and and posing my ideas on them. 'cause I've got a lot of, um, bad food stories. It took me a long time to learn. But also what what you were saying, Cecilia, about only being able, not being able to eat certain foods. And that made me think about how. Sometimes parents say, well, the kids need to eat what I cook because it's just considerate because I can't cook five different things, six different things, seven different things to suit people's tastes. Um, but then we, we, we always managed, I never imposed what we had. We always, uh, cooked somebody's favorite on particular days, and there was always more alternatives, even if there were only peanut butter sandwiches for anybody who just could not eat what was on the table. But I got an in a bigger insight into taste when one of my children, uh, became lactose intolerant. And because it was a health issue and I knew that she had a lot of stomach pains, it was obvious she could not eat any dairy. And I thought, well, what's the difference between taste? And health issues, shouldn't we be, take both into consideration when we're sitting around the table and we are eating? Is somebody's dislike for food, a valid reason for not forcing that food on them? We, we shouldn't do it just as we shouldn't force. The dairy on a lacto is intolerant child it. And if we are willing to modify the diet and to make sure that the lactose intolerant child has the foods that she needs, why can't we make sure that all those other children have the foods they need as qua? And, uh, thinking about that further. Uh, it's only in the last year I had a lot of problems eating well. We talking about elimination diets and I had a lot of problems and it came down to I could, I can't eat nuts and I can't eat gluten anymore. And everybody has been just so considerate towards me. When my kids are baking and they bring cakes home, they bring, and quite often they do this quite often they'll say to me, mom, I use gluten-free flour. And when we go out, they'll look at the menu and they'll say, well, we can't go there because mom won't have much choice the things to eat. This is a better place that we could all have something that suits our tastes and our needs. And everybody just has been so good about it and not making me feel bad because I can't eat a couple of food groups anymore. But how. When our children are growing up, we don't give them the same, the same consideration well some of us don't, that it's always so much more difficult. Maybe mothers are so overworked, overwhelmed, wanting to do the best. It all just seems too much to organize food for each. Make sure that everybody only eats what suits and what kids actually like the taste of. Maybe it just gets overwhelming and mothers just throw their hands up in the air and just say, you'll eat what I've provided. Um, because

Cecilie Conrad: 48:05
I think, I think there are lots of things affecting mothers, but I want to comment on the intolerances and, and, um, allergies versus taste buds. Because I found out only after having cancer and after being really, really sick, that my body is just not cut out for eating meats, especially the mammals. I just simply cannot digest them. And I actually never could. I was trying to be allowed to be vegetarian as a child. I would always, I have a sister who can, who thrives on eating mostly only meat. And we'd always have fun when we were little, especially at fine dinner tables with, you know, the white tablecloth and the expensive wines that we would swap plates without anyone seeing it. Because I would eat all the veggies and she would eat all the meat. And then we would both, both feel good at the end of the day that it is very easy for us to go out and share a dinner because we will eat each half of what's on that plate. But I was marked out of it and pushed out of it as a child. Because I could only argue with the, I don't want to kill the cow. I, I couldn't somehow get the message across that it made me feel sick. So it was a taste thing or a, an idea thing rather than an allergy or a intolerance when I was little. And it should take me so many years to get to a point where I realized, oh, actually I have a body that's just not compatible with eating that, that's the main reason I'm vegetarian. So I think when our kids are small, if they say, I don't want to eat strawberries, and, and you come running and say, but the strawberries are organic and the strawberries are healthy, and the strawberries are beautiful, and the strawberries, we grew them ourselves, or I paid a lot of money for 'em. Eat your strawberries and learn to eat strawberries. You should eat strawberries. Maybe that child's body just, just doesn't want strawberries in there. Maybe it's wrong for that child. And, and I think you are totally right that the taste buds should be as important a marker for us as parents, as an actual allergy. Not because it might be an allergy, not only because it might be an allergy, but just because it shouldn't, you shouldn't eat things you don't want to eat. It's, it's, it's like consent. You know? It, it's, it really is your body and it really is, the only way you can know what's right for you is to learn to trust the feedback you get. And I don't feel the feedback in my children's bodies as Sandra opened the story about sugar and, and that false accusation that sugar makes them hyper does it. Sugar makes me really tired. That's how it works on my body. And a few of my children have begun to say it. Now, if we have cake, we just wanna sleep and we have cake because cake is awesome. But not if we want to be agile and go dancing, because it just makes me really, really tired. If I have a good amount of sugar, a big pile of apple crumble on my plate, now I just wanna go to bed right after that. So in my personal experience, that's not how sugar works. And I think my kids should figure out for themselves how food items work on their body.

Sandra Dodd: 51:37
But, uh, that's what I wanted to say. We can stop. That's it. That if each person can see an array, an array of food, and choose what they want, they will gradually figure out what's good for them and what they don't like for one reason or another, what affects them. One way or another, they'll learn it the way they would've learned anything. It's much better for the relationship between the parent and the child than if the mother had said, this will make you feel like this. That will make you sick. It will make you sick. Absolutely. Will make you sick. I've never gotten sick from too much sugar my whole life. And I've, there have been some Easters and some Halloweens when there was a lot of sugar. I've never, either I stopped before I got sick or I don't get sick. So I've heard, I don't know how many hundreds of parents promise their kids, assure their kids threaten their kids, if you eat this, you will be sick. And if it's not true, the mom's wrong. Parents, kids don't like parents to be wrong. And, and too much of that causes problems about trust and faith. And I think trust and faith are more important than, than the details of diet. So thank you for saying what you said. And I will back down if you weren't through, go ahead.

Cecilie Conrad: 52:55
I don't know. I have a lot to say about this, but I'm not done thinking about it. So it becomes a little staccato style. I think this is the most important thing. You have to figure it out. You have to respect your own body. You have to figure out what's right for you to eat. But I also think that this principle, it exists in a context that's very complicated. It exists in a context of my food journey that I, I can, now that they are big, my children, I can share with them. I can say, I'm afraid of these things because this happened in my life, and I know that I'm affecting you and I hope you find your way and I'll help you and support you. All that it exists in a context of all the trends, like the sugar free book and the vegan movement, and. Whatever, all, all the things that happen in media and social media, TikTok, uh, YouTube, all the, all the things. It exists in a context of, of commercials. There's a lot of money in the food industry and in trying to affect us to eat special food specific foods and, and, um, we are not immune to that. We get influenced by all kinds of things and it's all very emotional. There's the context as I started out with my food journey as a mother was that I actually couldn't afford all kinds of things. I had to go for the rice and onions and, and carrots and cabbage because that's what is cheap. So there, and everyone has a context of finances. Everyone has a context of energy. When you said before Sue, was it Sue saying, uh, lots of parents say I can't cook five different meals for five different pallets. Which is obviously not true. Of course, you can. You just spend a lot of time doing it, and that means that other things you're not doing, you could also teach your kids to cook for themselves as a 2-year-old can make their own toast if you teach 'em to do it or allow for themselves, for them to find a way to do it. But all of these different layers of context still, I think they're still relevant to explore. In this podcast to figure out how do we navigate, and I wish I had a nice little list or a nice little info chart with the different elements so we could go through them one by one because in my mind it, it's actually quite chaotic. But I think these things, they influence the, the, the picture of what, what we eat, how we eat, what, how we shop for what we eat, how we feel, how we affect our children, how we try to avoid affecting our children. Are we forcing ourselves to let go when it doesn't feel right? Are we forcing our children to eat things when we're visiting other people because of social rules? How do we handle the wedding cake? It's a very, very good example of a situation where it's a problem to have a rule. When that rule is an allergy, it's slightly easier. People tend to understand it's better that I don't vomit at the wedding than not take the blessing. Um, but what if I'm vegan? I have a, one of my children is not technically allergic to milk, I think, I don't know, because she hasn't eaten it for a very long time. But she's chosen to stay completely vegan, and it's a choice. It's not so you don't have, it's just such an easy way to get out of eating something to say that you're allergic to it, right. And that you will vomit at the wedding if you eat it. So then people back off with their wedding cake and they accept, well, I have my little lunchbox with a cake for me, um, so that I can enjoy cake with you and celebrate your wedding. Like, just like, what about, what about alcohol? If you don't wanna drink alcohol and you have champagne to toast for the wedding, will there be an alcohol free champagne for you? Or do you bring it yourself and are you rude? If you bring it,

Sandra Dodd: 57:09
well, you just fake it and then pass it on to somebody else. Same with the cake. Sit with it. Smile. And when you see some little kid who's finished all the frosting off of hers, give her yours. Hmm. I I know there are ways to get away around it,

Cecilie Conrad: 57:20
like I did with my sister as a child. Just swap the plate when no one's watching. Yeah. Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 57:25
I absolutely understand why people who were alive in the 1920s and 1930s, or who lived through a famine or who, uh. Somehow refugee camps in a situation where food is really scarce, really rare. Or like my grandparents on my mom's side were very poor, really poor. They used to pick cotton and they didn't even have a house. Like they would move to another cotton place where it was time to pick and they would just live in some little in house that was for migrant workers. And they had eight kids, not all at once. They had seven alive at once for a while. And my mom would tell me just terrible stories of being made to eat food. And it would be just like biscuits and gravy, you know? Typical, typical, really poor Southern American stuff. Cornbread and beans would be a whole meal, or biscuits and gravy would be a whole meal. And that messed my mom up because she was told E, the only way to be a good human is to eat what we give you and all of it. And there is no other way to be. And. That shouldn't have affected me in the 1960s. So what happened was that became almost the definition of how you behave with your parents, how you behave as a human. And in the days, you know, when the United States was doing well in the fifties and sixties, people could afford a lot of food, and they were still being told, you will eat. When I tell you what I tell you, sitting the way I told you to hold your spoon the way I told you to, I, I mentioned this when we were talking about eating dinners together, that it became almost a torture an exercise in obedience and, and giving up your will to other people. It, it wasn't about food,

Sue Elvis: 59:11
it was

Sandra Dodd: 59:11
about something else. It was about some kind of training. And so I didn't want, I, because unschooling is stepping away from that assembly line of here's what you'll do and why, and when. I just was trying to rethink everything. It's like, okay, what is this? Squint at it at a distance. What is food about? And food is about staying alive in one way. And food is about social life in another way, and it's about enjoyment, ex exploration, learning. And so I tried to look at that like exploration and learning. That's good. Unschooling goals and principles. So I, so when people were saying, well, I'm, I'm fighting with my kids about this. I'm, my kids are really unhappy about that. I'm really unhappy about this. I would look at that and think, how can we take out the fighting and the unhappiness and the kids still get sustenance and exploration and learning. So that's why I was making the recommendations I was making about let them figure out for themselves what they want. And there was the assumption that there were at least two or three choices. You know, it doesn't have to be crackers and cheese. Maybe it could be bread and peanut butter. Crackers and Vegemite, I don't know, you know, whatever the, the little kid default cheap food that you can give them as an option. Hmm. Here it's white bread and peanut butter. If kids don't want, don't like what there is, so do you want peanut butter? It's sustenance and it's fine. And it's got a little bit sweet and a little bit salty. So I just didn't think that people should turn it into virtue or non virtue. That was, that was my stance and I have a large collection of evidence of people said, well, I don't think that's gonna work. Oh wait, it works. So same as all, most of the other unschooling stuff, it's about learning and peace for me. What

Sue Elvis: 01:00:57
about different standards for the parents and the children? I've heard stories about parents who restrict. Say sugar for children because they decide that their child has to have this healthy diet. And then when the child has gone to bed at night, the parent gets out the chocolate bars and has their treats once the child has gone to bed. I always, when had these stories, I think there's something really wrong with this secret eating of chocolate after your children have gone to bed. And the other story I I heard was, oh, this one's come up a couple of times. The people are chiming into what the answer to this problem is. But a child has gone to the refrigerator and stolen the chocolate. And what should I do? Because my child is a thief. He goes to the, the fridge and he steals the chocolate. And I was thinking, well, if the chocolate is freely available for every single member of the family, we wouldn't have somebody stealing the chocolate. But I, I, I've got a personal story for this. You know, sometimes you buy bags of, I didn't know, bags of chocolate in little pieces or Fred Frogs or whatever. And you have the bag in the fridge and 'cause it's chocolate and every time you open the fridge door there's bag, it's is in your face. And you think, oh, it'd be really lovely to have a piece of that chocolate. So you put your handy in and you grab a piece and you work off and you eat it. And as a parent you think nothing of it, it's. They're in your, your fridge and you have it. But then parents will complain that their kids go into the fridge and they put their hands in and they'll take, eat it. And then gradually the leveling, the bag goes down until it's empty. And you put your hand in, you think, oh, they're all gone. Um, and it's really great empathy, I think for, to think about things from our, as put ourselves in the shoes of our children. And I, I can easily do this because I go to the fridge and I think what pleasure there is in opening the fridge and seeing those Chuck, I, I don't wanna say to myself, oh, you, I'm gonna resist that. I think, oh, that would taste good. I'll have a piece. And so I can really understand why kids would do that. And I think that's. Something that we should just accept that if that bag of chocolates is in the fridge there, it's for everybody. And when it's all gone, it's all gone. A a sort of like a, a generous a generosity, but it's not my chocolate, it's our chocolate. We share it. And it's not one rule from parents and one rule for children. You can't have the sweet stuff, but I can after dark. And I think that we are setting ourselves up for problems if we try and be unfair and apply different principles for our kids than we, you know, have different rules for our kids than we have for ourselves. But yeah, maybe I totally

Cecilie Conrad: 01:04:06
agree. And it's one of the, one of the things, and this is a completely different topic, but I'm just putting it in here because it's, it is all about the fact that it's the same principles that play. I've very often seen how parents choose to talk to their children in a way they would never talk to anyone else. This mean and rude and demanding and entitled way Some parents talk to their children and one of my interventions is, you know, the way you phrase that, the way the tone of voice, the wording, the context, the ideas behind what you're saying. Would you talk to your wife like that? Would you ever dare talk to one of your friends like that, or one of your colleagues or a brother, only your children? You have this idea that you have the right to speak in this demanding and mean way, and in the same way, would you ever tell your wife to not eat the chocolates? What's the idea of a child stealing in their own home? It's their stuff. They live there just as much as we do. And I can leave all my sewing stuff all over the place making a mess of the living room if I want to sew. But if my children want to build Legos, then you come home and you tell them to put away their their toys because they're making a mess. Or you can build a garage and everything is a chaos. But if the child wants to, I don't know, build something out of clay and everything becomes a mess, then it's a bigger problem. Why don't they have the right to use the space of the home? Is it your home more than the kid's home? And it's the same thing. Is it your food more than it's the kid's food? Of course it's not. That said, of course you can have rules or principles right there. You can make a cake and you can tell everyone, I made this cake and I'm planning for us to share it at five o'clock when our friends come over. And I'd like the cake to be intact at that point. Can we, can we wait? And maybe you wait and if someone really cannot wait, then you have to maybe cut all the sides off so it still looks nice, decorate it again. I don't

Sue Elvis: 01:06:30
know. The kids learn to be considerate. I think that we, not we, but some people think that kids. If they can do whatever they want, they're not, they're going to be selfish, they're going to be self-focused. But kids learn to be considerate of the other members of the family if they're shown consideration. What you're saying there, Cecilia, about the way we talk to children away, some people are talk to children. When I had, um, maybe two, three little children, we had these friends who had two little girls and we would see them maybe once a month for Sunday afternoon maybe lunch, and then drinks outside on Sunday afternoon. And I noticed one day that the father was talking to his girls as if they were dogs, come here, do this, do that. And he looked, I was, I didn't say anything, but then he looked at me and said, well, they won't do what they're told unless I. I ordered them. And I thought about that later and I thought, is this really true? That if we are respectful towards our kids, they, we treat them with respect, we treat them as I said, we, we are considerate. That's the way our kids learn to be the other way around. I think kids will respond very well to respect and to be spoken to properly. I don't think we have to treat kids like dogs. I mean, even my dog, you know, I didn't really need to, uh, to yell at the dog. She's quite, uh, willing to, um, to listen. But yeah, the, that attitude,

Cecilie Conrad: 01:08:14
the whole, the whole idea, do what you're told is like eat what you're served and right. And as I said before, I'm the most picky eater I know, and I can guarantee you I'm not doing what I'm told I'm inclined. To not do it. If you tell me to do it, I'm quite stubborn with that. Don't tell me what to do. Do not tell me what to do. I'll refuse. You can use the reverse psychology on me. It will work. Tell me what to do. I'll do something else. I will not do what you're telling me to do. I can guarantee you. And I think so I have that very much in my own nature and I was lucky enough to have parents who have sort of the same, especially my mom, she was very rebellious of nature. She just couldn't stay within. I'm, I'm, I'm so much of a, my mom and I discussed if there was maybe an anarchist gene. And I'm not talking about political energy anarchy, just, just this. If someone is telling me what to do, I really have to stop and think about it for a long time.

Sandra Dodd: 01:09:24
If it well, that's healthy. It's better than the people who, somebody tells 'em what to do and they say, okay. And if you try to explain why, they're like, I, it doesn't matter. I'll do it. I'll do it there. Because that's what, that's what religions and cults often, um, get members by, is by people who want somebody to tell 'em what to do.

Sue Elvis: 01:09:42
But when, um,

Sandra Dodd: 01:09:43
there's the opposite personality trait

Sue Elvis: 01:09:46
when you're grown up being told what to do all the time. I can remember when I moved outta home and got my own life and I was thinking, nobody's gonna tell me what to do ever again. It was like I'd had had enough of that and I, nobody was ever going to tell me what to do. I was gonna make my own decisions. It actually went too far the other way because I didn't trust anybody. I always thought somebody might want be wanting to control what I want to do. And I was always very defensive. And it's not a good recipe for early marriage when, um, you are always. Thinking your husband is making, suspecting he might want to you, you don't bend and you don't go with the flow and you don't, you, you're not willing for the give and take because you always want to be in control all the time. Um, set the rules down and you're not gonna make me do this, and you're not gonna make me do that. So what I'm saying is that bringing up kids sometimes with a lot of control can backfire as adults that you can, in my case, become very defensive, very, I want to be in control and nobody's ever gonna tell me what to do ever again. So yeah, I dunno why I said that, but that's just what I was thinking of when you were saying about how nobody can tell you what to do. Maybe that's just in your personality, but for me, it came from the way I was brought up that I, it was a reaction. To that severe control as I was growing up, that you can actually push kids along a pathway like that. And it's good to be in have our own thoughts and our feelings and feeling control of our lives. But I also think that you can also, um, become too rigid to you don't trust anybody. The times when you do want to work as a team and you want to, you don't want that rigid control. You can't go through your life only making decisions that suit you. You've got to bend and go with the flow and listen to other people. And early on, and when I was a young person, I wasn't willing to do that.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:12:08
I think that do what you're told. That dad you told me about, who would say, who said they won't do what they're told if I don't command them? The premise of his reason for commanding is that he needs his children to do what they're told, and I would, I mean, we as Unschoolers would oppose that they shouldn't do what they're told. We shouldn't tell them this whole top down parenting idea that I'm telling them what to do. You wouldn't want your husband to do what he's told you want, don't want to be told what to do. Maybe you do to some extent and maybe. I mean, I always want to cooperate. I'm very much about community. I'm very much about working together with other people and, and making things flow. I just don't believe in rules. I don't believe rules will make that flow happen. I believe that principles philosophy, ideas and the willingness to work together will make things happen. So this podcast is not about my personality and therefore it's not very relevant whether I was born with an anarchy gene as my mom and I was joking about when she was alive. Or, or it's something has to do with something that happened. But I think speaking about food, the. Do what you're told is very much the same as eat what you're served and the whole principle of, just realize, as you said, you might eat the chocolate out of, of the fridge, giving yourself a dispensation from the rule that chocolate is only for after five o'clock or whatever the rule is for the children. You do that for yourself all the time, but that rule or, or dispensation rule doesn't apply for your kids and you will actually not eat the broccoli if you think it's been cooked too long and now it's gray and soggy and you don't want to eat it, then you're not eating it, but your kids have to eat it because you served it and they have to eat what you're served. So maybe for practical reasons, you could start to think the rules that apply to me, they should apply to my children as well. That's a good place to start. And then again, if we talk about food, a lot of adults have a lot of trauma around food and have a lot of makeup rules for themselves to try to navigate health issues and finance issues and ideas. Maybe moral ideas that you can't have sugar before five o'clock and you can't eat, drink alcohol on weekdays, and you can't. You make all these rules for yourself to try to navigate something that's actually really complex. And even though it's late in this podcast today, I hope we can, uh, stay awake for just the problem of the industry. I would like to hear what you ladies think about it. For me, that's definitely. Still approved. Not a problem. Uh, um, and, uh, issue of concern that there's so much agenda on the side of the moneymaking and there's so much for sale that's designed for me to eat more of it and buy more of it because someone's making a profit off it. And I have a big health, health agenda. I, I sit, I, I very much do. I, I've healed my own problems after the cancer by eating very healthy food. And it helped me a lot. And I don't wanna buy a lot of this processed stuff. I also have some sort of, I refuse to buy it because they're pushing all of this commercial, all of these ads, all of this. There's this agenda behind it that I don't like. So I don't know. I mean, we want to be free and not decide for our children. I think I still have an idea that these things are being marketed. It's not a problem for my children because they're so old now. I can, you know, we've talked about this a lot and it's not like I don't buy processed food. I do buy processed food sometimes, and if, if they want to try out something, they can pick whatever they want in the supermarket. And unless I can't afford it, I'll buy it and they can see if it's a thing. But I don't like buying processed stuff. I, I, I, I have this resistance and I think it has to do with telling me what to do. That the ads are telling me what to do and I know how much money is put in it from the other side. How many people, how many much focus groups. And I know that I'm not stronger, I'm not smarter than other people. I'm not better. I'll be affected by these things and so will my kids. And had I small children today, would I

Sandra Dodd: 01:17:20
feel safe? There's a problem with the language of. There, there's, it's not just one industry. And there, 10 years ago or so, there were a whole bunch of online cer certification for, sorry, we call it various things, but it would be like certified health advisor or certified. Some, some of these terms are, have legalities in one state or another. Like they couldn't say that they were dieticians because that has a parti In some states you have to have a degree and stuff, but dietary counselor, so the people would pay 1200, $1,500 for an online course, then they would get a piece of paper to tell other people what to eat. There was a huge wave of that about 10 years ago, and so people would come into the unschooling discussions and say, well, I'm a dietary counselor and so I know that you can't let your child eat this because the one little religion or course that they took was. Pro nuts, pro whatever, you know, this or that. And some of 'em had stuff to sell you powdered whatever to add to drinks. Mm. But very many of them would say, oh, avoid processed food, or avoid anything you can't pronounce. There's a guy in Australia who did posters of straw, strawberry banana, kiwi, all these fruits. And then he has all the ingredients listed. And it's a huge list of, you know, at a scientific level, at a chemical level, what's in a banana. And it looks godawful like, who, who would eat this? It's a banana that grew on a tree. Mm-hmm. And so the idea of processed food always makes me bristle up a little bit. It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait. In in a, in a cognitive therapy way, what is this word that you've just used? What and where did you get it? What's the baggage that goes with that processed spoon? Does that mean dried, salted, ground cooked? There are a lot of processes. People don't consider processed food. And then somewhere for each person, for whatever reasons, wherever they got that word, that term, it turns into processed food. Like I'll give you a spam and a can. It's pretty processed. But in World War ii, if they hadn't had that, a lot of soldiers wouldn't have had any food. And it ended up becoming very popular in Hawaii because there were some Japanese recipes that needed some kind of fish cake that they couldn't get easily. But SPAM worked. So spam has stayed in Hawaii as a staple, normal food that people never got a big prejudice against because there's so many recipes that needed something like that. So is spam and evil processed food maybe? Yes. No. Yes. No. There's a, there's a continuum for you. And

Cecilie Conrad: 01:19:59
so if I can answer the question so you can give me a little counseling here. And my personality does become an issue of the podcast. My problem is foods that I would go have trouble. So I'm trying to speak foods that are designed to taste so good that I will eat it, even though it makes me feel sick. That's the kind of food that I don't want to even buy it because I cannot control it. That's the kind of food that I'm afraid of. I have never heard

Sandra Dodd: 01:20:33
that definition. So you do have a very personal definition and And you're, that's what you're calling processed food?

Cecilie Conrad: 01:20:38
Well, no, I would call more things a processed, I'm trying to answer your question actually to become Didn't ask the question.

Sandra Dodd: 01:20:44
That's fine. That's my point. You

Cecilie Conrad: 01:20:46
kind of did though.

Sandra Dodd: 01:20:47
I like, I did. Okay. Where's the

Cecilie Conrad: 01:20:48
line? And I agree. What's processed food? A soy sauce of. Extremely high quality from Japan that's been, you know, five years on its way to become a delicate is a processed food. I totally get that. And what I'm talking about is candy and crisps and cup noodles and, and you know, food additives that are just there to make me eat more than I would want to. The, the, um, flavor enhancers and things that, but maybe I'm just very subjective here because some of these chemicals actually do make me so sick I will vomit. So for me, these are very toxic and maybe they're not toxic for everyone. I don't know. I do know that there's a lot of money put in behind designing foods so that we will buy them and there's not a lot of money put in behind my making us buy carrot. So some foods have more of a financial agenda behind them. People are making a lot of money off me buying things that I, I would argue they're not good for me. I can eat them for fun seeds, but I'm not eating them to feel good. Is that, is that some sort of definition of processed food, evil foods?

Sandra Dodd: 01:22:11
Maybe. I just think using that term or using the term junk food, people just say junk food and they have a, a picture in their head, but sometimes they're including chicken sandwiches. They're including fast food that you can drive through and get quickly as junk food. Mm-hmm. So that sort of crawls up in some people's definition. Junk food is whatever they don't want their kids to have. And so sometimes when somebody has come in really strongly about that, very vitriolic, several of the people in the, in the discussions that we had that were so strong for so long that I've saved on my site would say, don't call it junk food.

Sue Elvis: 01:22:47
Hmm.

Sandra Dodd: 01:22:47
Food that should be thrown away before anybody even eats it. And then finally, I, I, people would defend that so strongly because that, because they weren't as attached to the idea of unschooling and their children's happiness as they were to their prejudices and junk food was one of 'em. They would say, my child will never eat junk food. Never. I wouldn't have it in my house. And if anybody gave it to them, I would never speak to that person again. Like really strong prejudices, I would say. What if there's a child in a, in a camp, in, in, you know, a refugee camp? Or what if the parents have been deported and the kid is living with social services somewhere? Do you think that they should only have the kinds of food that you're wanting to give your kids? Do you think if you were in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and they were giving you spoiled fish soup, wouldn't a twine seem kind of good and wouldn't spam seem super sanitary? You know, so maybe it's relative, but to call to call things junk food and say My child will never have it, is, is not thoughtful. It's not, it's not realistic about sustenance. It's not, it's not considering food for what food is. And so each person has, has their idea of what's better or not at all. Not at all acceptable. You know, if you're Jewish and your kids never had ham, great. That's fine. Um, that makes sense. I come from a long, long, thousands of years of people who ate chickens and pigs. It's not gonna physically hurt me to eat pork or, or poultry. Sometimes people say, oh, well, if you're vegetarian and then you eat meat, you'll get sick. You'll get really sick. And they're basing that on stories from people from India who moved to, moved here and then ate beef for whatever went, ugh. Can't digest it. Well, they've been chosen from arranged marriage within, if they're Brahmans, they've been vegetarian for a thousand years, maybe two or 3000 years. All their greaty, great grandparents, all of them. And nobody chose to marry anybody outside of that cast. They were, they had arranged marriages, so nobody's eaten beef for, you know, ever, or chicken maybe ever, ever. They can't. The people who lived were the people who could survive on a vegetarian diet. Probably some of them got sick and, and couldn't handle it or whatever early on. And those didn't, those died out. So they self chose were people who could eat that. And so for people who have. Growing up in northwestern Europe, they can also drink milk. They can have generally have milk products, whereas there are places in the count, places in the world, a lot of Africa where nobody can, A lot of South America south Southern Europe, a lot of 'em, Spanish aren't great with milk. Very more likely to be lactose intolerant. So within your marriage you get it all mixed up. Some will, some won't, but people forget about genetic realities sometimes when they're talking about what will make somebody sick. And another thing is people will say, I, when you talked about parents eating chocolate or sugar after the kids go to bed, that's so as backwards because little kids need sweets. They need sugar. That's how their brain grows. Old people don't need it. So if old people have. Gradually adjusted their diet and they're like, oh, I don't, I don't even eat sugar anymore, so I'm not gonna let my kids or grandkids eat sugar. That doesn't make any sense. Anyone who's ever tasted breast milk even, or, or there's a, this is, this is maybe too gross and biological, but sometimes when, when, when a women are breastfeeding, they might get an infection or get over full and then, so that what they advise is express it in the shower. So you let some of the milk out, if you don't wash the shower right away, it dries like the, like the glaze on a donut. It's like frosting in there. Sugar is on the wall of your shower. It's shiny, it's hard. It has dried up into hard sugar. That's what breastfed babies are eating is sugar. And I've tasted commercial baby formula too, and it's not sweet. They're making a mistake. And so when little babies, little toddlers are not getting sweet, the sweet food that they need, that they would naturally get if they were exclusively breastfed. Then they crave that sugar. They want, if they can get sugar, they want it. And that's, that makes sense. So they know what they need, but the, this, the greater culture, maybe all cultures aren't, aren't good at letting kids know what they need. They tell them what they need, they tell them what they'll give them, they'll tell them what's allowed and there's no possibility of exploration or of choosing preferences, whether it's fruit or vegetables or sugar, that they take that away from children. And I don't think unschoolers should do it because it, it's a little bit like saying we unschool everything except reading or we unschool everything except math. So do you really have faith that people can learn even to learn what their body's like and need? Or not. So that's,

Sue Elvis: 01:27:46
and if they don't, if they, if they don't learn, then you've got problems for your life, continually fighting in your mind. The things that you think are good for you, the things that you, you think are bad for you. The times when you give in and then feel guilty about eating things that you've been told are bad for you. That continual ba, continual battle with the thought of food in your life. And I feel that that's something that would be good not to pass on to kids, but it's so easy to do it. That in today's society, you know, as Cecilia was saying, is ads for this and ads for that. And the biggest one I've got at the moment, it's not, I suppose it's food related, is every time I scroll through YouTube or something, I see all these women my age with, um, wonderful abs and, uh, in really in shape. And as if to say, Hey, you are not good enough the way you are. You need to watch these videos about how to get super fit, super fit in your sixties. There's no excuse. This is what you need to be like. And, you know, it just, it sits in the back of my mind and I think, am I lazy? Could I do more until I come to my senses and say, Hey, look, I haven't got time to do all those exercises every day. That's my life is not gonna revolve around my body. But that. That there's thoughts that can take hold of us and can control us when we don't want them to. And we have to stop them and say, Hey you are banish those thoughts because they're starting to affect what you do and your happiness. And I think that they do come from, originally from the way we are brought up, the things our parents have taught us, the things that society has taught us and even now the way social media, the internet is reinforcing all those things and to break free of it can be so difficult sometimes, even if we don't physically do anything to fit in with it, it can still have control of our heads sometimes, well, at least mine,

Sandra Dodd: 01:30:09
I think it's valuable for parents to see that their children can make choices that make sense and that gradually over months and years, they. Themselves develop what parents would consider it a balanced diet or whatever, all mm-hmm. If they never try it, they never get that benefit. It's like all the other aspects of unschooling. If you're unwilling to, if you don't have the philosophical basis to give it a shot, then you don't get the reward the, the benefit, the glory and happiness of seeing that it can work. So

Cecilie Conrad: 01:30:42
it's hard. I would very much admit to being afraid of cer certain food stuff and think that this is bad and that is bad. And the other thing is also bad, and this is unhealthy and unsafe and full of toxins and all kinds of ideas I have in my mind. But I will also say that whenever I let go, which I do, because I believe in letting go, and while my kids obviously walk through the supermarket with me and they grab the things that they want to try or want to have or whatever, and if I can afford it, if it's, and if, if I can fit it into the van because that's another problem, um, then we can have it. I've never ever had the problem that they will choose to go back to having cup noodles only or something that I believe to be bad and, and they try it out and then that takes up a cornerstone of their diet. They just try it out and it's never been a real problem. It's only been a real problem for myself that I can have the tendency to eat more of certain things than I feel I should. That makes me feel good. It's not like. I necessarily have a judgment that I'm a bad person if I eat a bag of candy. It's the fact that I, it'll make me feel sick and then I'm wondering why do I eat it even though it makes me feel sick. I can eat one or two, will not make me feel sick. I eat 25 and I feel sick, and why is it I don't stop at the two? But I personally have that problem way more than my kids do.

Sandra Dodd: 01:32:28
It could be because it was limited when you were younger, I don't know. But when, when people have something limited or forbidden, you know, from seeing people go off to university and live in dorms, that they go crazy. It's almost a list. You can almost tell somebody is staying up really late, drinking, not coming home on time. You can almost see the opposite. You know, that it's like a, a shadow of what was happening when they were at home. And so if, if. I see that people will eat a lot of cake or ice cream or candy if they got it as a reward when they were kids. Oh, you got good grades here, have a bag of candy. So then when they're older, they do something, they finish a project or whatever, and they give themselves a bag of candy. So that can be a, a delayed reaction to something that happened in childhood where you kind of define it as, I, I have that, I have that with cake. It's like, all right, we're done. I'm gonna make a cake. It's just, I don't eat the whole thing, but I could. And, but it doesn't make me sick. So I, I've just lucked out on that, I guess. So if I, if I get a bag of candy, I can eat the whole thing and I don't get sick. But that's good to know. It's good that I know, and I don't assume that that applies to other people. So it's another example of what does your body do with this substance?

Sue Elvis: 01:33:44
So I think that when you brought up to having to clear your plate. You don't learn what your body, how much your body needs. And I, I will clear my plate more often than not clear my plate regardless of whether I need that food because it's ingrained in me. And it's really hard sometimes. My, my children believe things on their plates, and it has been in the past, difficult not to say, oh, you haven't finished your dinner. What was wrong with it? And they'll say, I had enough. And then I, I've listened to my husband sometimes and he'll say, but I cooked that dinner for you. And it was almost like if you loved me, you would eat everything I I cooked because I spent a lot of time in the kitchen preparing that meal for you. And you go, you're sort of associating your love with the food and you're pressured into eating it because you don't wanna upset. If your parent who supposedly made that food for you out of love it's very, very hard. I think sometimes to change the, the patterns. We have to try really hard to break that, just like in, with education wise and everything, but whoops. Yeah, something that I've had to make a lot of changes over the way I speak about food, the way I deal with food, with my own kids. And then of course when going right back to the story I told about the, the baby who was putting on too much weight, and then you start to think, well, I, I'll say, I started to think they're putting on weight, they're eating too much, they're eating the wrong things. What do I do? That's a very emotional, very hard situation to deal with. Wanting to get in there, step in there and control the food, the type, the amount, because for some reason, so to think that our kids will be happier if there were this particular weight. Maybe that's because I think that I'll be happier if I remain small and I won't, every extra kilo that goes on that has gone on, it's weighs on my mind that I'm ashamed of that because I haven't got in control of my eating. Yeah. So it's a lot of, um, I think it could be a lot of mental, emotional. Trauma associated with food. And it's a lot in my head, especially when you go around and you live your everyday life and no one realizes and how much I have had to battle with all these things. Yeah. And how I haven't wanted to pass that onto my kids and how easy it is to do that sometimes.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:36:38
Isn't it the bottom line that I think a lot of parents, they make these rules for health reasons they think it's healthy, um mm-hmm. And then they forget to think about or they don't know to think about the health, mental health issue that they are creating by forcing the, the eating situation outta shape and, and creating all these different traumas and, and. Just wacky emotions around eating and how they will hurt the relationship and how the whole thing becomes sometimes even toxic. So if we could let go to some extent, and I think we will always have some sort of control being the adults we have, we have the final say, how much money can we spend in the supermarket? How often will we go? Especially when the kids are small. We have some, we have a lot of control. We set the scene to a great extent. And if we, if we go to the supermarket and the kid wants whatever shiny package of something and you don't wanna buy it, and you have the tantrum of the not buying the chocolate bar in the supermarket, well. First of all, maybe you should have just bought that chocolate bar and don't go three times a day. If you don't want your child to have a chocolate bar three times a day, um, you can just have that one chocolate bar. Then once a week you go or whatever, navigate it in a way that feels healthy and safe and all right, emotionally for, for you as a parent. And then if there's something you really don't want your kids to eat, then don't have it in the kitchen. But let, let freedom rule in that kitchen. Let the children cook that toast and put on it what they want to have in their body. The whole clear your plate. I've worked with that to the extent that you put on your plate what you want on your plate. When I was really poor, when my first child was little, I would maybe navigate how much went on that plate. So if you want rice and peas, okay, you don't have to finish the bag out on your plate because you're not going to eat that much, I think. But even that was actually better to just let the child finish the bag out on the plate and realize, okay, I couldn't actually eat that much. And then the next day it's only half of the bag going on the plate.

Sandra Dodd: 01:39:09
There's a phrase that they use here, and I don't know if they use it everywhere, but it was the full plate, the empty plate club, like to encourage kids to empty their plate. You'll be a member of the empty plate club or, and so my main food page is called center do.com/food small F, but it's called the Full Plate Club.

Sue Elvis: 01:39:30
Yeah. Yeah, I think that a lot of times the reason that parents, I'll include myself 'cause I've done it, want to impose control over food is for concern for the health of their children. They want the best, so the reasons are always good, but what happens is not for the best of their child. It's one of those terrible situations where we do things thinking that we are helping our kids and we want the best for them. Only later on realizing that what we did was we create, created a problem, and which I find is very sad that we don't understand well enough the consequences of that, that control. Uh, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:40:25
But how do we navigate that?

Sandra Dodd: 01:40:28
Gradually, individually, there's no other way.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:40:32
Try a little, read a little wait a while, remember what

Sue Elvis: 01:40:37
if wrong order you are like me, and have the have, um, gone through that sort of control and can see the problems to remember that and to try a different pathway. I think that's, uh, been, uh, the story of a lot of our own schooling is looking back and seeing the problems and what was helpful and what was not helpful for myself so that I can not for repeat the mistakes maybe. And hopefully have a better outcome. Though I think that hoping that things will be perfect is unrealistic. I think we'll never do that. That we have this idea that we are gonna be the perfect parents when we have our children, and then we find out that it's a lot more difficult than we thought. But we all strive not to make the same mistakes. I think

Sandra Dodd: 01:41:38
I, I think peace and learning, that was my guide guiding light. There was, if I got flustered or, you know, impatient and wanted to control, wanted to say no a lot, I would just think what, what adds to learning? What's more peaceful, what's more conducive to unschooling environment? And that, that answered a lot of questions as they came up.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:42:01
Yeah, but also honesty. I think for me, a lot of the nodes I put into food these days, they have to do with, I just don't wanna spend the time. One of them want something really complicated. I'm like, I'm not making that. I'll spend 45 minutes in the kitchen today, or I'll spend two hours in the kitchen today, but no more than that. And that complicated dessert you want, if you want that, you make it because I, I honestly have other things to do. I think there is always some sort of limitation. Sometimes it's where living in a place where, uh, they can't walk to a shop and I'm not driving today because I simply don't have the time for it. And that's just an honest, instead of coming up with some sort of judgmental, rule or you know, that's not good for you, or you shouldn't ask me that. Just say, you know, I'm not comfortable with that, or I don't have time for that, or I don't wanna do it. It's simply too complicated. I'll make something you like, and if you don't want any of the things that I'm willing to actually make, then maybe you could make it yourself. I'll put it on the shopping list for next week, but I'm not going out today. I was just out yesterday. I'm busy doing other things. We might be out of vanilla, but I'm not, I'm not starting the car for vanilla, so you're gonna have to eat something else. I think there's practicalities around these things, and if we can just be honest about practicalities, and it can very often come out in all kinds of different and judgemental ways, and it really shouldn't. If there's a limit, there's a limit. Sometimes it's even. I'm not comfortable buying that food. I think it's shit. I can't, I don't wanna pay money for it. I'm afraid of it. Can we get something else? Can we get something similar? Could we make it ourselves? I might be stupid, I might be ridiculous, but I can't do this. And then once you've said it, you just go and buy it because it's ridiculous. Although that's what happens to me. It's getting late in the states, I think. Are you okay, Sandra? Or

Sandra Dodd: 01:44:13
it's been, it's been a long time. I don't know if people can listen to this much stuff.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:44:16
I also think, have we been around it?

Sandra Dodd: 01:44:19
Oh, and talking about.

Sue Elvis: 01:44:21
Talking about time, it's our dinner time here in Australia, so I'm gonna have to go and cook our dinner. But I, I've just got one last story, like what you were saying about being honest Cecilia. And it gets easier as our kids get older because they don't need us so much. And I was telling you before we started recording how I had a really bad day yesterday and I got to dinner time and I just did not want to cook. So I just said to my daughter, I'm not cooking dinner today. I just can't do it. And you know what? She got in the kitchen and she cooked this beautiful curry with flatbreads and yogurt and everything, and it was magnificent. And I thought sometimes you just have to tell people. What you're capable of or what you're not capable of. And sometimes people will rally around if they know that they're needed and we'll, we'll go cook that dinner for, for themselves or for us or whatever. And so yeah, trying to be super mother and get it all done regardless. Sometimes it's not the, the right way to go.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:45:29
Well, let me tell a similar goodbye story then. Which is from, I can't remember, maybe when I had my third child, some, I had a baby that must have been my third child maybe. And we were eating some cakes out of the bag and the sofa very early morning. The baby was awake and had waking up everyone else, and I'd had maybe three hours of sleep and I was really tired and we were eating cake out of the bag for breakfast. And I did sit there and think it's so much better to have cake out of the bag for breakfast than not having siblings. I, I, I could have made it, maybe made a very, very healthy porridge with cabbage in it for breakfast and made my child eat. I would never, but sometimes you just don't have the energy to do these things, and it's so much better to just sit there and enjoy the cozy sour and be together and eat whatever you can just take out of the cupboard and eat. You probably have something when you think you have to cook. You probably don't have to cook. It's not like it's a religion that there has to be an elaborate dinner at the table every day at some specific time. It's something you do because you want to do it, and if you don't want to do it, then maybe don't do it.

Sue Elvis: 01:46:42
Well, you, you can, you can be creating special family, uh, memories. By doing something like eating cake for dinner and things that kids will talk about in years to come. You remember that wonderful evening or that wonderful morning when we had cake or ice cream for breakfast. And they're the things that bring joy to life, aren't they? When you, uh, do things differently and don't worry about having to do things the way that most of the world does it. Do you have a final story, Sandra? 'cause we both told a final food story.

Sandra Dodd: 01:47:18
No, I kept all those stories were final stories.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:47:22
It's also very late in New Mexico. You probably want to go to bed. Thank you for staying up so late, Sandra. I think it, this was an important conversation and I look forward to it. It was nice to

Sandra Dodd: 01:47:33
see you all again.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:47:34
Yeah, I was, can

Sue Elvis: 01:47:35
I say something about, to you, Sandra, you have just so full of interesting facts and information and, uh, thank you for sharing all that. I've learned so much just listening about food and about smells and Japanese and Korean yeah, all those little things that I never knew about.

Sandra Dodd: 01:47:54
I just think it's good when things are discovered and then, and then in your own life you used to believe this and, and acted on it, stayed vegetarian or whatever, and then you find out later it was something different. I think that, yeah, especially unschooling parents should be open to that and, and excited about that. So it also puts some humility into the idea that a mother can say, if you eat this, you will be sick. Because maybe not. Maybe that's not, maybe, maybe what somebody believes at the moment to be fact is not

Cecilie Conrad: 01:48:25
true. It's the basic, one of the basic unschooling principles question everything. Yeah. Why do you think you know it? Yeah, we could go on, but we shouldn't. Alright. Thank you. Good night. Thank you for today. Thank you. Fun. Good night. Good evening, and good morning to myself. All right. Good morning. Bye bye. Bye.

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