Eating Week 2024: Sharing meals and sitting at the table together as means to strengthen bonds and building trust with children.
The Aliança pela Infância - Alliance for Childhood Brazil - launches Eating Week 2024, inspired by our annual theme “Join the Circle.” Eating Week 2024 will take place from August 12th to 18th, and, as always, everyone is invited to participate by organizing activities at home, in schools, squares, parks, or even sharing content on social media.
Every year, Eating Week happens under the ABCD Calendar, a platform dedicated to inspiring and offering experiences that mobilize adults' loving attention to children's everyday acts, such as learning, playing, eating, and sleeping, which in Portuguese stand for ABCD.
Throughout this year, we have invited people to join us in this circle, recognizing the importance of being united in promoting fair, equitable, welcoming, and accessible environments for the development of our children, where they can express themselves freely. This circle, to which everyone is invited, represents union, affection, and love, organizing and setting the rhythm essential for a full, dignified, and wonder-filled childhood.
The act of eating carries aspects of affection, bonding, and union. A dining table is a common space to share everyday life and celebrate achievements. People gather, talk, taste, and share food; conversations about the day, plans for tomorrow, opinions about seasonings, and congratulations on birthdays or important moments strengthen bonds of affection and trust with the child, contributing to the development of emotional and social skills.
We are beings whose sociability revolves around the act of eating. We invite people to share meals such as lunches, barbecues, snacks, and afternoon tea. Eating is a reason for bonding, for meetings and reunions, where food is always part of the moment.
It all starts with breastfeeding, which plays a fundamental role not only in nourishing the baby but also in creating deep emotional bonds between mother and child. This intimate moment is full of emotional and psychological meanings that strengthen an emotional relationship for life. Physical proximity and skin-to-skin contact meet the baby's nutritional needs and provide a safe, comforting environment where the child feels loved and cared for. This act of breastfeeding, which promotes healthy child development, goes beyond organic nutrition, as it nourishes the soul with security and affection.
During shared meals, children also nurture their own process of building identity and personality. Whether by participating in conversations and exchanges that take place at the table, observing gestures and attitudes, or in their relationship with food, mediated by those who prepare and share the table with them. Eating is part of play as a child's language, through which children investigate the world around them, discover the diversity of flavors, and live sensory experiences. Affective and gustatory memories are remarkable and add to the layers of discovery and self-knowledge of childhood.
Patience, time, respect, and communion are dimensions of affection. Taste is an individual property built in social relationships mediated by culture that develops during family meals, at school, and other collective contexts. It is essential to encourage a diverse diet and sensory exploration of different flavors and textures, always respecting the child's relationship with food and their own body, as they discover how specific foods taste to them, how their bodies react to them, and which flavors and textures they like or dislike.
Good nutrition is also urgent. Encouraging the habit of eating healthy foods, especially in times of packaged, processed, and ultra-processed foods, is essential for children to reach their full development potential. This is also an act of care and affection that profoundly impacts the health and well-being of children. In an increasingly fast-paced world, involving them in choosing and preparing food brings more awareness of finite resources and the value of land and affection.
We can also approach this topic in light of the problem of food insecurity faced in Brazil today, where hunger continues to affect especially our children. According to IBGE's Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PnadC), released in 2024, more than a third (37.4%) of children up to 4 years old lived in homes with some degree of food insecurity in 2023. For minors from 5 to 17 years old, 36.6% lived in food-insecure homes. How can we talk about sharing moments of affection when there is a lack of food? Relationships weaken without nourishment for the body and soul.
Eating well, in good company, and with affection transforms eating from a purely biological act to a social, cultural, affective, and integrative experience. The shared meal, full of food grown, produced, distributed, and prepared with care, strengthens ties in the present and inspires hope for the future. This act of eating ensures children the opportunity to live a full, dignified childhood and continue dreaming together.
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