Strawberries and Cream: The Relationship Between Food Rejection and Thematic Knowledge of Food in Young Children

Abstract

Establishing healthy dietary habits in childhood is crucial in preventing long-term repercussions, as a lack of dietary variety in childhood leads to enduring impacts on both physical and cognitive health. Poor conceptual knowledge about food has recently been shown to be a driving factor of food rejection. The majority of studies that have investigated the development of food knowledge along with food rejection have mainly focused on one subtype of conceptual knowledge about food, namely taxonomic categories (e.g., vegetables or meat). However, taxonomic categorization is not the only way to understand the food domain. We also heavily rely on other conceptual structures, namely thematic associations, in which objects are grouped because they share spatial-temporal properties or exhibit a complementary relationship (e.g., soft-boiled egg and soldiers). We rely on such thematic associations between food items, which may not fall into the same taxon, to determine the acceptability of food combinations. However, the development of children's ability to master these relations has not been systematically investigated, nor alongside the phenomenon of food rejection. The present research aims to fill this gap by investigating (i) the development of conceptual food knowledge (both taxonomic and thematic) and (ii) the putative relationship between children's food rejection (as measured by the Child Food Rejection Scale) and both thematic and taxonomic food knowledge. A proportional (A:B::C:?) analogy task, with a choice between taxonomic (i.e., bread and pasta) and thematic (i.e., bread and butter) food associates, was conducted on children between 3 and 7-years-old (n = 85). The children were systematically presented with either a thematic or taxonomic food base pair (A:B) and then asked to extend the example type of relation to select the respective thematic or taxonomic match to the target (C:?). Our results revealed, for the first time, that increased levels of food rejection were significantly predictive of poorer food identification and decreased thematic understanding. These findings entitle us to hypothesize that knowledge-based food education programs to foster dietary variety in young children, should not only aim to improve taxonomic understanding of food, but also thematic relations.

Tears for pears: Influence of children’s neophobia on categorization performance and strategy in the food domain

“…In line with previous studies (14,(54)(55)(56)63) neophobic children in the present research performed poorly in the categorization tasks compared to their neophilic counterparts. Children's decision criterion scores Beta as a function of their food neophobia scores and item state.…”

“…In line with previous evidence [e.g., refs. (14,54)], neophobic children in Experiment 1 performed more poorly on the categorization task than their neophilic counterparts. Our main result was that high levels of food neophobia predicted a safer categorization strategy.…”

“…Recent studies have evidenced that the intensity of food neophobia was negatively related to children’s performance in food categorization and induction tasks [e.g., ref. ( 14 )]. Although much research has examined children’s ability to discriminate categories of items in the food domain, less is known about their categorization strategies.…”

“…At the cognitive level, recent studies uncovered a negative relationship between children’s food neophobia and category-based abilities [e.g., categorization and induction ( 14 , 54 , 55 )]. For instance, in a forced-choice task, Rioux et al ( 54 ) tested 2- to-6-year-old children’s abilities to discriminate between two taxonomic categories, vegetables and fruits.…”

“…Neophilic children tended to generalize blank properties (e.g., “contains zuline”) according to taxonomic category membership (e.g., from a green zucchini to an orange carrot) as adults generally do, whilst neophobic children tended to generalize the properties according to perceptual similarity [e.g., from a green zucchini to a green banana ( 55 )]. Interestingly, the negative relationship between food neophobia and categorization abilities is not restricted to taxonomic knowledge but extends to thematic knowledge [e.g., the ability to associate a burger patty with a burger bun ( 14 )]. This evidence shows a strong negative association between children’s food neophobia and their categorization performance.…”