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 first step in helping your child enjoy veg, fruit, beans or pulses is understanding what they naturally prefer… flavours, textures, colours and all.

“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, fruits & beans are just the same – they vary widely in textures and flavours, and very few of us like them all.

Kids don’t need to like everything, but discovering their natural preferences gives you a huge advantage. Discovering your family’s tastes can give you the best chance at victory!

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.

Try to gently encourage your child to use 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 and fruit that are similar in texture (or sound, temperature, colour, flavour, etc). 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 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, it can be easy to assume they always will. But when you dig into why a child doesn’t like a veg beyond “it’s gross” you may find descriptions like “it’s too soft” “it’s chunky” “it feels weird” or “it’s loud”.

Surprisingly, it’s not always taste that puts children off veg, fruit, beans or pulses, often it’s texture, colour, temperature or even sound.

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

Engaging through senses

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?

Describing foods in this way builds confidence and reduces fear. It shifts attention from “good/bad” to simple curiosity.

Use our veg selector!

Need some describing words to get you started? We’ve offered some suggestions for a selection of veg to start you off. Pick a veg, begin with the selector, and then see where your imagination takes you!

Try the Veg Selector

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.

Most children tend to prefer sweetness over bitterness, but when you are exploring veg through the senses, listen carefully to their descriptions, and if there is a focus on bitterness as a problem, perhaps try offering sweeter-tasting veg, fruit & beans more often.

And remember, re-offering is important, so don’t give up! 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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