Play Picnics and Making Food Worlds

Abstract

Before our retirement from the university hospital, an excellently equipped old-style traditional place, we already tried to create a “food world” for children suffering from eating disorders within the hospital itself. But the best inpatient environment in the world cannot fake being a restaurant for children! Hygiene standards, aggressively smelling cleaning liquids, the presence of technical instruments, syringes, and infusions may reactivate traumatic or at least unpleasant memories in children and parents; this again evokes anxiety, produces stress, and kills one’s appetite. The frequency of our play picnics within the hospital was utmost 5x/week for a 3-week-lasting weaning course. Between 2013 and 2015, we travelled in Europe and conducted 20 Eating-Schools in various locations. In 2016, after introducing our own food world in an outpatient day clinic, which we call “Eating-School,” we employed a cook, and food became the dominant smell, a wooden floor, wallpaper depicting magical fruits, and an environment like in a fairy tale. Here we are able to conduct 18 play picnics/week, which had a convincingly positive impact on the overall outcome. Likewise, in our online counseling, we instruct parents to create more of a food world for their children at home: the smell of food, frequent cooking using herbs and spices of their culture, eating together, and inviting kids from the neighborhood to join offer the child the illusion of eating naturally long before it actually starts do so practically. The rules of play picnics are outlined, and red flags depicted when therapeutic intervention is urgently needed.