Kids like vegetables. They like them better than candy. OK, I didn't believe it either. But the results of a survey of California four- and five-year-old kids claims if peas and a Tootsie Pop had a fight, peas would knock 'em out of sight.
What bothers me about these kinds of studies is not only the size (there were just 100 kids involved) but the fact that interviews with kids are conducted the way they would be with adults. Chatting with four- and five-year-olds in English and Spanish over a period four days really tells us nothing about kids' eating habits. It tells us that a bunch of pre-schoolers, whose attitudes toward food are generally as fickle as they are toward their toys, gave some adults the answers they wanted to hear.
What would be more telling would be a process that tracked what kids actually ate when presented with options. Give them a plate of peas and a Tootsie Pop and see what they reach for first. Do they ignore the Tootsie Pop? Do they opt to eat it last? Or do they go glutton and find out just how many licks it takes to get to that chocolate goodness?
As an adult, my tastes are pretty well formed. I'm not going to decide tomorrow that I've given up on dark chocolate M&Ms for taste reasons (size of my butt reasons, maybe). My three-year-old will tell you tomorrow that the same cauliflower she devoured for dinner is "yucky." Last night, she announced that she wouldn't eat the ziti I'd made because, "I don't like sauce." It was the first I was hearing of it after almost three years of dishing out extra helpings of "red stuff" for her ravioli. By the same token, convincing her to eat just four green beans to satisfy the "green quotient" in a meal can take intense amounts of cajoling. But on an "all about me" poster she made for nursery school, listed right under "favorite food" are the words "green beans." Huh? Apparently that's what she told her teacher, and the unwitting teacher wrote it down.
Sure, she likes some vegetables. She even likes some she pretends to hate (and gobbles down while we're not looking). But give her peas or that Tootsie Pop, and I know where her loyalties lie.
Image: PBS Kids
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