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The catch-22 of introducing children to new foods is that they may need many positive exposures (some say c. 10-14) before a food is liked. But if they hate the food, how can the exposure possibly be positive? It’s like asking an adult to eat slugs 14 times...
I spent a long time researching different ways around this problem for my book First Bite. One of the best I came across was Tiny Tastes, a clever system devised by psychologist Lucy Cooke. If the piece of food is as small as a pea or even a grain of rice, it’s much easier to try
Another way round it is social modelling. When we see others eating new foods and surviving, it becomes less scary, esp if we love those people. This is how chilli-eating is passed on in Mexico, at the table, from parent to child and brother to sister.
But yet another way which excited me was to allow children to explore food using all five senses plus natural curiosity rather than fixating on making them eat a certain amount of food. I came across a method called Sapere used at preschools in Finland and Sweden...
I’ve since been part of a group bringing Sapere to the U.K. as TastEd ( @tastedfeed). It’s been so exciting to see that the Finnish techniques I read about all those years ago actually work. One of the reasons it works so well is positive peer pressure from the other children...
But the great magic of it is in making the experience of trying new foods a kind of game, separate from the pressure of dinner time. Children feel onions buried in the bottom of socks, they sniff lemons and they try to describe exactly what the inside of a tomato looks like.
The other big thing is removing all pressure to try (which I know isn’t necessarily so easy at mealtimes). But by telling the children they don’t have to try or -crucially-like, they suddenly feel free to explore, which is how the positive exposure happens.
All of this is obviously much harder to do for those on low incomes who really can’t afford for food to be wasted. Which is why I wish that @tastedfeed could be made available in schools to every child in the U.K., just as it is in Finland.
Anyway, if you are interested in hearing more, these are some of the questions I’ll be discussing with brilliant cookery teacher and food policy researcher @McGowanKim on Tuesday at 8pm (after pancakes!). Plus q and a. Search for ‘happier meals Bee Wilson’ on YouTube.
