He will provide the brothers their allotted amount of food without any pride or delay, lest they be led astray. For he must remember what the Scripture says that person deserves who leads one of the little ones astray [Matthew 18:6]. (Rule of St. Benedict 31.16)
The chef serves. When you take charge of the food, you assume the role of a servant, and in this you imitate Christ. If you resent this role and complain about it, you teach your children to despise and resent service to others. You set them against Christ, who came not only to serve but to feed us.
God designed us to eat daily, and what we eat, we taste. The sense of taste offers the first of comforts to the newborn and the last of consolations to the dying. You can be blind, deaf and immobile, yet still taste, and feel refreshed.
So the formation of taste is important. Lots of things are edible, but not all digestible things are healthy. If you teach your children that healthy food tastes disgusting and that unhealthy food tastes delicious, you form in them a self-destructive habit of thought. You set inclination against principle.
This is folly. The sinful aspect of a guilty pleasure never deterred any but the most devout and self-controlled among us.
Far, far better for a happy life is to align inclination with principle, so that the healthy food is also delicious. Then the unhealthy loses its power of appeal.
Disgust is a visceral reaction, orders of magnitude more powerful than any reasoned argument. If something disgusts you, not only will you not want it: when someone tries to push it on you in the name of pleasure, your revulsion only increases. The person who tries to tempt you with a disgusting thing becomes repulsive herself.
This is how the formation of taste plays into the formation of morals.
Children are mimetic. They will mimic your actual behavior. If you tell them that sodas are unhealthy and off limits, but then they observe you guzzling sodas every chance you get, they will conclude that sodas are desirable but forbidden.
But if you reject sweet drinks yourself when you could have them, your children will notice what you choose instead and reach for that.
The problem is that you’re up against powerful forces in this world, all dedicated to making unhealthy foods alluring. The only possible way to train children in good taste is to provide them with good food regularly, as a matter of course, as the norm. Make a case for healthy food by ensuring that what you serve is also tasty.
But don’t ban sweets or anything else as evil. Beware the trap of the forbidden fruit that human beings will crave exactly because it’s mysterious and off limits. Let children taste everything, so that no food or drink inspires awe. Let them become connoisseurs, and invite them to judge for themselves. One day you’ll find that your children’s standards are higher than your own. You will have set them on the right path, and they will outstrip you.
An ordinary Christian household is neither ascetic nor gluttonous. There’s a time to fast, and there’s a time to feast. If you get this balance right, you will have calibrated the dynamic between inclination and principle that will influence all of your children’s decisions throughout life.
