How to Talk to Your Kids About Racism in the Food System

Some ideas for getting the conversation started.

Photo by TUAN ANH TRAN on Unsplash

I was at a local food systems gathering a couple months ago, and mentioned to a new acquaintance, a white woman, that I sometimes talk to my eight-year-old son about racism in the food system. "You talk to your KID about WHAT?" She wasn't being shaming or mean about it; she was just really surprised.

It made me wonder what other parents involved in local food systems talked about with their kids, so get another perspective, I reached out to Devon Turner, the former executive director of Grow Dat Youth Farm, a youth leadership program and urban farm located in City Park in New Orleans. Devon, who is Black, is originally from Plaquemines Parish, a coastal region southeast of New Orleans, and she has two sons—ages eight and nine. I am half-Thai and half-white, and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, an area outside Los Angeles with a large and diverse Asian population, and now live in the less diverse, decidedly less Asian city of Denver.

After talking to Devon about her experiences with her sons, and reflecting on my own experiences, I have a few takeaways.

First you have to normalize talking about race and racism with your kid.

There are many resources out there for how to start talking to your kids about race and racism, if you need them. I started talking to my older son about race and a bit about racism when he was in preschool, with more frequent and in-depth conversations as he has gotten older. If you need a quick starting point, I thought this recent post from

A Cup of Ambition

gave an approachable overview, with links to further resources:

Talking to kids about racism

These conversations are not a curriculum to get through, but part of an ongoing, ever-evolving back-and-forth between you and your children. Food is just one part of it, but because food touches so many aspects of our lives, it is also a great entry point for everyday conversations about racism.

Both Devon and I approach these conversations not as lectures, but invitations for our kids to share what they have observed about the world ("Have you noticed…?' or "Did you see…?") and explore the explanations they have started to form for themselves ("Why do you think that is?"). As Devon puts it, "Then I generously fill in the in-between context and the historical context." Over time, my kid has started to sometimes fill in the blanks himself, or connect the things we talk about to what he learns in school or reads about in books.

You can start with food.

Food is a joyful connection to culture, and communicates some of the history of the communities that eat a particular cuisine. It's a great starting point for talking about race, culture, and the whiteness of mainstream food culture in Western countries.

For BIPOC parents and kids, these conversations build a foundation of pride and celebration around their culture's food. For me, this means not only talking about Thai food, but also getting my kid pumped about the blended Asian American culture that I grew up in, shopping at the Sanrio store while sipping Taiwanese bubble tea and waiting for a table at the place with the best chả giò.

I sometimes contrast my husband's white, New England childhood food preferences and norms in order to talk about some of the imbalances in the American food system. When you only want to eat boneless, skinless chicken breasts, what does that mean for the rest of the chicken? Why might some cultures eat every part of a chicken, including its feet? Is that gross, or is the more gross thing to kill an animal for just one part of its body? I am sensitive to how whiteness shows up in squeamishness to the sights, smells, and textures of food from Asian cultures, so I talk openly to my kid about what we lose when we eat the "Americanized" version of a food, and why it's actually kind of awesome to love a fruit that smells vaguely of sewage (IYKYK).

For Devon, eating traditional New Year's foods on January 1st opened the door to talking about soul food with her kids. "Why do we eat black eyed peas?" she asked her sons, who then complained about eating them. Her half-joking reply: "You need to eat it, because you are not bringing bad luck onto my house. Eat the black-eyed peas!" That led to a conversation about the cultural meaning behind the foods they were eating, soul food more generally, and the idea of living off the land, a concept that they directly experience in more rural parts of Louisiana, where people catch shrimp and crawfish, or hunt rabbit and other wild game.

For white parents and their kids, I'm not suggesting that the path to antiracism starts and ends with eating out at restaurants catering to BIPOC communities—but it can thoughtfully (and deliciously) include it. Even modeling the experience of immersing yourself in an environment where you don't know the cultural norms, and approaching it with a spirit of humility and learning (rather than the white, American norm of "I don't need to know the right way—I'll just loudly do it MY way!") can be a powerful lesson for kids.

Use their interests to spark conversation.

No six-year-old is going to ask you out of the blue to explain Black land loss, but there are many every day opportunities to talk about inequities and historical injustices in the food system, with concrete examples that children can understand.

Devon and her sons regularly drive down to Plaquemines Parish, where her parents still live, and her kids love looking at the pastures full of cows and the occasional alligator through the car windows. But recently they've been watching one stretch of land transform from green, cow-dotted pasture to empty fenced-in land to the walled site of a liquified natural gas terminal, and they've been talking about the transformation, starting with the animals and the loss of their habitat. "Because that's their heart," says Devon. 

From there, they talked about animals' connection to people within ecosystems, and she posed the question: "Why do you think they chose that area to build a terminal in? What do you know about that?" Louisiana has a long history of environmental racism built on the legacy of slavery, and Devon has started explaining it to her sons—starting with the disappearance of the animals they care so much about.

Talk about race and racism with other adults when your kid is around.

My kid loves listening in on adult conversations and asking clarifying questions. Probably 90 percent of the time, I'll explain what we're talking about in an age-appropriate way, 5 percent of the time I tell him I'll explain in more detail when he is older, and 5 percent of the time I tell him, "Don't worry about it right now" because I'm too lazy at that moment to get into the long history and nuances of, say, J. Lo and Ben Affleck's relationship history.

In writing this piece, I've realized that a lot of conversations we've had around food and racism have started with him overhearing me talk to another adult (usually his dad) about it, then saying, "What? What did you just say? What happened?"

I spent a while last year expressing outrage about a local "Thai" pop-up restaurant run by a young white guy who as far as I could tell had spent a couple weeks in Thailand on vacation, and was promoting his menu as Thai, though it featured a lot of Spam, kimchi, and other Asian-ish but decidedly non-Thai ingredients. It also had a theme based on the red-light district in Bangkok, which…no. The place was getting a lot of press in Denver food media, which further infuriated me.

When my son asked what I was mad about, I talked about cultural appropriation, the frequent collapsing of distinct cultural traditions into "Asian" and how that sometimes also happens to Asian people ("they all look the same"), the exoticization of Asian women, and the barriers that BIPOC entrepreneurs have in accessing capital, which can keep them from opening restaurants or other food businesses where they can make the food of their heart and culture. It wasn't a lecture, but a back-and-forth, with me explaining a new concept or telling a story from my life, and checking in with him for questions. He had a lot of questions and thoughts.

Devon has a standing Saturday date with her mom and some of her sisters, where they spend the day together and typically eat a meal at a Black-owned restaurant together. A few times, her sons have tagged along, and on one of those days, the conversation turned to which businesses they like to support, and which they'd rather not give their money to. Devon's kids were very curious about the collective agreement about not supporting certain establishments, and asked, "Why are y'all not going there?" They were answered honestly: "Because people don't get paid right" or "Because they're discriminating."

Rouse's, a chain of local supermarkets, joined that list after its co-owner was seen at the January 6th pro-Trump rally prior to the attack on the Capitol, and Devon's older son, who was learning about the branches of government in school at the time, was especially disturbed by his actions. As a family, they all agreed they would no longer shop at Rouse's. Then came a road trip where one of her sons suddenly had to go to the bathroom and the only place they could find with a clean bathroom was…a Rouse's.

"I can hold it!" her son said.

"I appreciate your commitment, and I'm not going to some raggedy bathroom," Devon said. "We need to go here."

So they made a beeline to the bathrooms in the back of the store, which happened to be near the bakery. Sweets are Devon’s number-one weakness. She stopped and admired a cake in the display case. "Oh, doesn't that look good?"

Her son was appalled. "You cannot buy that."

She told him, "One, check your tone. But two, I got you—and thank you." She didn’t buy anything.

And maybe that is the best reason to talk about racism and other injustices in the food system with our kids. Because they are listening and learning, and they will hold us accountable to the values we share with them. I think we're all better off for it.

I am headed out of town with my family this week, so next Wednesday’s post will be a guest essay from another Substack writer—it’s a good one, so stay tuned!