There's a story going viral right now about a mom who asked the other parents in her daughter's kindergarten group chat to stop packing Oreos. It wasn't an allergy thing. Her daughter had come home upset that another kid had them and she wasn't allowed to have them at home.
As you can imagine, the other moms pushed back. The mom escalated to emailing the teacher requesting an approved snack list. The school responded with something along the lines of: what goes in each child's lunchbox is up to their parents. There are now ten parts to this saga on Instagram and the internet has named it Oreogate.
Whether the texts are real or designed for virality is almost beside the point. Millions of people have weighed in. Most are laughing at the Oreo mom, and while I get it, I feel a bit badly for her.
She's trying to extend her household food rules into everyone else's lunchbox, which is a hard position to defend. But I found myself less interested in how wrong she was and more interested in what she was actually afraid of - can you imagine feeling like you have to control what other people are doing at home to manage what's happening in yours? Her daughter walked into a school room she couldn't control, and instead of sitting with that, she tried to get other people to do things differently.
Your cart was designed before you got there
Before I get to what I'm doing with my daughter, I want to back up to something older than any of us. In 1937, an Oklahoma grocer named Sylvan Goldman noticed that his shoppers stopped buying when their arms got full. So he introduced the first shopping cart at his Humpty Dumpty store, and when customers resisted, he hired well-dressed men and women to push them through the aisles until the behaviour looked normal.
Once the cart existed, you weren't limited to what you could carry (which, presumably is what you needed). The things you might have walked past when your arms were full - the extra box of cookies, second bag of chips, Oreos your kid grabbed on the way to lining up to pay - those landed in the cart too.
The environment in a grocery store is designed to impose decisions on us. What's at eye level, what comes in family-sized packages, what feels like a reasonable amount of food to bring home.
The Oreo mom isn't really reacting to Oreos. Underneath it, I think she's reacting to a landscape that puts them everywhere, and a wellness culture that turned "healthy" and "unhealthy" into moral categories ("I'm so good, I had a salad at lunch" or "I'm so bad, I ate 3 cookies"). And sometimes there's a version of parenting where you end up believing your job is to hold a line against all of it. So when another mom sends Oreos in a lunchbox, it might be the tipping point of what feels like a whole system pushing against her again.
Always food, sometimes food
As a naturopathic doctor, I care about what my daughter eats. I also know enough about the research on food moralization, and I've seen it in enough patients, to want to avoid giving her "good" and "bad" as categories, because it doesn't stay with the food.
It's easy to start learning the narrative of: I’m a good kid for eating the carrots and a bad kid for wanting the cookie, and that can follow her for a long time.
So at the suggestion of a friend whose entire clinical practice revolves around helping people untangle their relationship with food, I gave her "always food" and "sometimes food." Vegetables, rice, protein - always food. Oreos, chips, candy - sometimes food. This felt like it would remove morality.
For a while, it worked. She'd ask me if something was an always food or a sometimes food, and the fact that she was asking was already the win. She had a way to think about it, without judging herself for what she wanted.
Then school happened. And friends. And family members who weren't using the same language. She came home saying "healthy" and "unhealthy" again, and I could hear the binary settling back in. The louder, simpler version wins when you're six and everyone around you is speaking it.
My first reaction, if I'm being straight about it, was closer to the Oreo mom's than I would have liked. I had moments where I decided my mission was now to go to schools and try to separate food from morality - so I suppose that’s still a way of trying to control the narrative. Not that I'd text anyone's mother about their lunchbox choices (though there is a side of me that would send Oreos on purpose if someone tried to tell me that I couldn't pack them in my daughter's lunch).
When I decided I wanted "always food, sometimes food" so my daughter could think for herself and have a specific relationship with food - in a way, that's still me trying to shape the outcome. Just with a longer game and possibly better tools than banning Oreos from other people's lunches.
As a child, my mom chose what I ate, how much, and when, and that was the end of the discussion. No "good" or "bad," no "always" or "sometimes." Just her authority. I'm trying to give my daughter something I didn't have - a say in what she eats, and a way to think through it.
The Oreo mom and I probably want something similar for our kids. The question is whether we believe our kids can eventually hold the thinking for themselves.
Obviously, I don't know how this will turn out. My daughter's six. The good and bad framework is loud and a heck of a lot simpler than what I gave her. Maybe she'll come back to "always and sometimes" when she's ready to hold something more complicated. Maybe she won't and I'll want to find another way.
Either way, the work isn't in the lunchbox.
P.s. Speaking of Oreos, I recently found this double-flavoured, grape and peach one! Excited to try it out.
A Thought To Carry Forward:
What we carry into a room matters more than what's already in it, because the room was never ours to control.