How To Food-Play

Food play is just that: playing with food. There are different ways to play with food, but I think it makes the most sense to think of it like playing with any other toy. The magic of food play is that you touch foods, because we have to be comfortable touching a food before we'll be comfortable putting in our mouth. Often we present picky eaters with new foods and want them to eat them or even just taste them. But the step before tasting is touching. If we can get kids touching new foods they'll learn about them--how they feel, how they smell, how they break apart. When we know about new foods and feel comfortable touching them, it feels safer to taste them because we know what to expect. So food-play is playing with food, but more importantly it's a way for kids to learn about and become more comfortable with new foods so they'll be more likely to try them.

Food-play is not snack time. Make this food-play time separate from a meal or snack when you want your child to eat a quantity of food for calories or nutrition. Kids might taste something or even have a little snack while playing with foods, but it is not the goal or purpose of food-play. Food-play time is a stress-free opportunity to explore and learn about the foods in the activity without any pressure to eat the food. This stress-free time will help to create positive interactions with foods and is valuable learning time to explore and learn about foods outside of meal-time expectations.

15-30 minutes is a great amount of time to explore and the addage ‘little and often,’ applies.