Woke this morning to this article on the main news - my first reaction was frustration and disbelief that this was actually an issue.
I think what particularly got me was the teacher interviewed who was Pakeha (white New Zealander), saying while she wasn’t Maori, she thought the use of food was obscene in this age of conservation.
After yelling at her to explain whether she was similarily appauled at the use of potato starch in making disposable plates (instead of plastic), I wondered whether I am overacting and need to be more accommodating? Although I can’t imagine a childhood without playdough, potato stamps and macaroni art. What’s the view?
Not to sound ambivalent or anything, but I DO sometimes feel guilty for throwing away food. But I blame my Mother for that one. If I didn’t finish everything on my plate as a kid her trite response was “do you know how many children are starving in (insert third world country here)?”
I guess it depends on what’s being conserved. With all respect to the Maori, I for one find it offensive that they are systemically destroying the thermal features at Rotorua so that they can boil corn in the hot water and sell it for a buck. Although I don’t begrudge them a way to make a living.
An old argument: If we’re really worried about food conservation then the US should stop paying farmers not to grow it.
This media beat-up comes around on a regular basis. Playcentre hasn’t allowed the use of food in play for over a decade and they’re still going strong. I’m against the use of food in play when there are realistic alternatives. When I was a Playcentre member, we did have playdough but it was made with flour that otherwise was going to be dumped because it wasn’t food grade. I’m blanking on what the replacement for potato stamps was but there was one ;). Actually the more I think about it, the more I think there was an exception made for playdough if non-food grade flour wasn’t available.
I don’t think it’s right to use food for play in a world where people are starving. At the childcare centre my mum adminsters here in Q, there are children who have literally starved and who have lived their whole lives in refugee camps before they came to Australia. It feels wrong to me to use food as a plaything with those children.
The issue mostly is that the people who feel strongly about respecting food, have also put the energy into finding alternative solutions. If you go to your local kindergarten or playcentre, the kids have stuff to play with and are not deprived so where is the problem really?
Yeah I have and they’re delightful. However if I were going to do that kind of thing with my kids, the expectation would be that the food is eventually eaten.
If we could not play with our food, these fine ingenious artists would be out of a job. Thousands, nay hundreds, would never have heard their delightful brand of music if everyone thought that food was simply for eating.
I can’t say it’s immoral, since we aren’t really lacking food on this planet. It’s mostly a distribution issue. IOW, we aren’t depriving anybody when we waste food. There would be enough food to feed everybody and waste some if we were really willing to make sure everybody is fed. Wasting isn’t the issue.
However, I personnally dislike both playing with food and throwing it away. Education issue. I’ve been brought up in a place where food that wasn’t eaten by humans was fed to dogs, pigs, chickens, etc…and essentially never thrown away. For instance, we would keep all our stale bread and bring it to my great aunt who grounded it and fed it to her chickens (part of the stale bread was used to make a kind of dessert, too).
It might seem weird, but when I throw food away and it uneases me, I’m not thinking mostly about children currently starving in some third world country, but rather to my ancestors who would never have done so.
I don’t think it’s any more immoral than the huge amounts of excess surrounding us. I do worry about the distribution of resources on this Earth, but the problem is more about what systems and governments are doing than if I chuck some potatoes at someone.
But wasteing food in front of people that do know starvation is in kind of bad taste, wasting things in general is somewhat troubling, and making kids do something that goes against their culture and religion is almost never not a good plan. If the Maori have special beliefs about food, schools in these areas ought to respect that. We’d never incorporate crosses in to a game, or eat communion wafers and cheese for snack time. Finding non-food activities isn’t all that hard, and won’t harm kids or lessen what they are learning in school.
The article made me think a lot about education and using food for things like kiddies’ playtime. I noted that it seems since we’ve become even more of a multi-cultural society, with immigrants from nations in the Horn of Africa who have known hunger, that this has arisen.
I remember years and years ago British books detailing how to make impression stamps from cut potatoes. I don’t think those, or the maccaroni collages, will seriously be missed. There are so many other things for kids to play and learn with these days – this is just a change in our times, and a moving on. I agree with the moves.
No food was harmed in the creation of this thread. All portrayals of food in this thread are strictly fictional and in no way represent any real foods or situations. All food was lovingly prepared in a creamy butter-garlic sau…, uh, back to your regularly scheduled thread.
