Eliminating Fear Through Study

Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.

Karl Augustus Menninger

A school in New Jersey has found an excellent way to get kids to eat their vegetables: simply by learning about them.

The Method

You can find the full article here, http://goo.gl/Ay2MzZ, but the basic story is that each month the school focuses on a fruit or vegetable, and the children learn all about it. This education isn’t limited to what nutrients the food might have, but rather all of the subjects in school make note of the food. This ranges from learning where it was first grown for history, and where it is now most produced for geography. Throughout the month the children are also given the chance to try the fruit or vegetable in different recipes.

The Effect

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much feedback as to the program’s effectiveness quite yet, but I think it’ll work. I believe this purely because of one thing. It removes fear.

Food can be scary for a picky eater. We’re always wondering whether something is going to taste horrible because so many other things do. Eventually, so many things have turn our stomachs that we don’t even want to eat things of a certain color or texture, just because everything else like it turned out badly.

But learning about the food in an environment like this can take the edge off of that fear. Rather than hearing “squash, the yucky stuff that my mom tries to get me to eat at Thanksgiving”, you hear “squash was first grown in Mexico and Central America but is now grown all over the world.”

Once something is familiar, it’s not as scary or intimidating. After a month of interacting with the fruit or vegetable, attitudes can change completely.

My Challenge

So while your child’s school is most likely not participating in this program, there are a number of different things you can do. You can of course try something similar to this, where you teach your children all about asparagus or cauliflower, but it doesn’t even need to be that involved. A simple, frequent interaction with different foods can be enough.

What is probably most important, however, is that the experiences be positive. It’s going to be hard to get your child to eat corn if his only memory of corn is when Uncle Albert told him that it was spider-eggs on the cob. Something even as simple as “introducing” your child to the food can be good. Show them the food before it’s cut or cooked and they then have a reference for it, rather than just “the yellow bits in there”.

So if you want to get rid of the fear, get rid of the unknown and show your kids what the food actually is.