Understanding Preferences

Like you, your children will have their own natural preferences – some prefer sweet flavours, while others enjoy bitter, some prefer crunchy, others soft, cooked foods. The very first step to supporting your child when it comes to eating vegetables is to understand what veg they naturally prefer.

“Eurgh, it’s disgusting!”

Understanding your child’s personal preferences can be your greatest tool in getting them to eat more veg.

Think of cheese, wine, or even chocolate. You probably have a favourite type, brand, taste or texture. Vegetables are just the same – they vary widely in textures and flavours, and very few of us like them all. It’s not necessary for someone to love all veggies – many have a very healthy diet eating only a small range of veg.

We all have personal tastes, preferences and favourites when it comes to food. It can be a lifesaver to have tools that help you discover your family’s tastes so that you can give yourself the best chances at victory when it comes to getting kids to try new veg.

KIM SMITH mSC.

To get some practical tips on this, we turned to our friend Kim Smith at TastEd, who teaches children how to explore veg & fruit through their senses. Here are simple ways for you to understand your children’s preferences and make the most of them:

more than just taste

Exploring veg with all their senses can naturally bring out descriptive language that tells you what they like and dislike.

Next time your child engages with a vegetable, try to gently encourage using their senses (emphasising that they don’t need to try and they don’t need to like it to remove any pressure), and see if they can use descriptive language that can help you understand their preferences and find other veggies they may like that are similar in texture (or sound, temperature, colour, flavour, etc) to make the next step an easier one. Use the chart below to keep track of this information and lead you to the best veg to try next.

Taste

Might be sweet, sour, bitter, savoury, salty, spicy, or words that compare to other things like grassy, watery or hot/cold.

sight

Could be described with words such as bright, red (or yellow or green, etc), dark, bumpy or striped.

Smell

Might bring out words like strong, sweet, grassy, or mild. Often associated with memories – does it bring anything back to them?

SOUND

Can be loud or quiet or even musical. Is it crunchy, soft, hard? Does it sound louder when you pop on some headphones?

Touch

Might lead to hard, soft, lumpy, hot, cold or slimy. Is it smooth or rough? Does it have bumps? If you pop it in a clean sock and try just feeling without seeing, does it remind you of anything else?

Texture, touch and taste

If your children regularly turn down veg offered to them, it can be easy to assume that they always will. But when you start to dig into why a child doesn’t like a veg beyond “it’s gross” you may find them using descriptions like “it’s too soft” “it’s chunky” “it feels weird” or “it’s loud”.

Surprisingly, it is not always taste that is the biggest issue when it comes to veg, it might be the texture, or even whether a veg is a certain colour, or if it is served hot or cold!

Understanding how to assess your child’s taste and, more importantly, texture preferences can be crucial to breaking through the cycle of offering and rejecting!

Describe, don’t react

Get your children using descriptive language to be more specific about why they dislike a particular veg. Instead of using words like “disgusting” or “gross”, can they describe it using words like crunchy/soft, sweet/sour, bright or other descriptive words to get to the bottom of their preferences?

Kim Smith

Kim Smith recently graduated from a Masters in food policy and has over 25 years experience working across the U.K. food industry. Covering a diverse range of roles, she has been a product developer for supermarkets, food service and food manufacturers as well as running farmers markets, food events, judged food awards and most recently taught food education in primary schools. A lifelong lover of food, she is the mother to 2 boys, and now works to improve primary school food education. She does this through her role as Co-Chair and Trustee at TastEd, a leading sensory food education charity, developing a curriculum based primary food education programme and continuing her academic research.

www.tasteeducation.com

BITTER TASTES

One of our experts, scientist Professor Giles Yeo, explains why bitterness can be a common sticking point for children.

If your child is one of many “supertasters” (meaning they carry a variation of the gene that detects bitterness), they may find bitter foods like cabbage and leafy greens particularly difficult to enjoy.

All children have a tendency to prefer sweetness over bitterness, it’s true, but when you are exploring veg through the senses, listen carefully to the descriptions they give, and if there is a big focus on bitterness being a problem, perhaps try offering sweeter-tasting veg more often.

And remember, re-offering is important, so don’t give up completely! Listen to the language your child uses and try different ways of offering more bitter foods, introducing them slowly, in tiny amounts, over time.

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF VEG

Check out our vegepedia. When to buy in-season. How to store them to keep for longer. How to engage children with each veg, and simple ideas of how to prepare and cook them for maximum taste and minimum waste. Select a veg…

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