Mixed News on Children’s Food Preferences

I recently encountered an interesting article on Medical News Today about research conducted by Kent State University scholars about children’s food preferences, “Strawberries, Watermelon, Grapes, Oh My! Study Finds Students Will Opt For Healthy Foods In The Lunch Line.” Despite the upbeat title, I find the news reported hopeful but mixed from the standpoint of healthy nutrition choices.

The fact that children rank fruits among their favorite foods is encouraging. This is balanced, though by the inclusion of preference for pizza and fast-food-style choices as also among their favorites. I’m also more ambivalent than the article’s author in seeing something like “string cheese” as a healthy food. At the same time, it is encouraging to hear that even as they offer lunch options of pizza and fast food style choices, more school districts are offering healthier versions of these items than in the past.

On a last note, while the researchers attribute preferences such as pizza, French fries, or chicken nuggets to cultural influence, I would tend to argue that preferences for things like fruits or for such fast food fare are all mediated by a combination of evolutionarily selected biological factors and cultural influences. A taste for certain food qualities, such as sweetness, the taste and texture of fats or proteins, saltiness, etc., seem to be a part of our evolutionary heritage, with this part of the reason that children (or adults) find fruits or chicken nuggets tasty. Patterns of consuming and acquiring a preference for specific food items are clearly also shaped by cultural context, though the precise influences shaping children’s desires for grapes or pizza differ.

The following is a selection from the article:

“Strawberries, grapes, and yogurt are just some of the healthier food items children prefer, researchers argue in a new study released this week. Kent State University researchers surveyed 1,818 students in grades 3 through 12, asking them what their favorite foods were. The study, included in the Winter 2007 issue of the Journal of Child Nutrition & Management, found that items such as strawberries, watermelon, white milk, and string cheese ranked among the "Top 20" foods, demonstrating that children will eat fruits, vegetables, and dairy products. “The researchers also found differences in taste between grade levels. Elementary school students were more likely to rank fruits much higher than older children, while "fast and familiar" foods such as chicken nuggets and hamburgers were less preferred by middle school and high school students.
“Although healthy items made the "Top 20" list, children still consider pizza, French fries, and chicken nuggets among their favorite foods. The researchers attribute this to the influence of culture on students. On average, approximately 30% of students consume fast food on any given day, making it more likely that students will eat these foods at school. To accommodate their tastes, school nutrition professionals offer these items, but use healthier ingredients such as whole grains, low-fat cheese, and lean meats and prepare the foods with healthier cooking techniques such as baking.
"School foodservice professionals and dietitians have been promoting the consumption of a wide variety of foods for a healthy diet," concluded researchers Natalie Caine-Bish, PhD, RD, LD and Barbara Scheule, PhD, RD. "Menu planners should consider the inclusion of these selections (favorite foods) in their menus as means to improve nutritional quality as well as satisfaction."

An Evolutionary Argument for Barbecue

In my post, “Technology and Freedom,” while discussing the relationship between technology and environment in shaping human action, I wrote:

“Human and hominid relations to the environment have always been mediated by technology, i.e. we use tools to provide for our basic needs from the physical environment, whether in the form of using a digging stick to uproot a wild tuber or plowing fields with massive tractors. Innovations in technology have also always had a transformative effect on what it is possible to do within a particular environment. The use of fire by Homo erectus was one of several technologies allowing that hominid species to expand into cooler areas previously unoccupied by hominids. Presuming Homo erectus groups used fire to cook plant and animal foods, this same technology would have made for a safer food supply (especially for groups that might have subsisted partly by scavenging carcasses) and enabled their bodies to extract more nutritional value from some plant foods.”

This was meant simply as an example of how technology can shape the range of possible uses of an environment, and hence the range of possible action within it for humans, or in this case hominids. After writing that paragraph, I began thinking more about the use of fire for cooking, and in particular about barbecue (the fact that it was approaching lunch time as I wrote that passage probably influenced my own train of thought). To my mind, there are few things more delicious than good barbecue. I don’t have in mind so much barbecue sauce, though a good sauce is nice, but well cooked smoky meat cooked over a fire with a thorough char around the edges (by charred I don’t mean burnt).

Barbecue seems to have near universal appeal. Nearly every culture I’m familiar with, whether directly or through reading ethnographies, seems to have a tradition of grilled, smoky meat, and of other grilled foods. (There are exceptions – so far as I’m aware, the Inuit don’t barbecue, probably related to simple lack of firewood – but the exceptions are few in number.) The details of grilling or barbecuing vary, of course, and there are wonderful arguments to be had about the relative merits of different styles of barbecue, but the basic appeal is there in each case.

Part of the basic appeal of barbecue is no doubt related to its simplicity – light a fire and cook meat in or over it. But beyond this I’d like to argue here that there’s good evolutionary reason to find barbecue appealing.

There are a number of basic tastes and/or food textures that have near universal appeal for humans, and probably other mammals as well, such as salty, fatty, or sweet tastes. This makes sense. Sugars and fats have high concentrations of calories. In a world of often scarce resources, natural selection would favor creatures who find these tastes appealing and even crave them. Fats are also essential to the body, as is salt, and so natural selection would again favor animals preferring these tastes. It’s only in the modern, developed world, where food is hyperabundant, that this is at all a problem for human health. For most of human history, a desire for salty, sweet, and fatty tastes would have helped drive humans to seek out sufficient quantities of these foods and to favor them whenever they were present.

What about the delectable smoky taste of good grilled meat and other food though? Depending on whether a sauce is used, and what kind, barbecue can be appealing in part because of the combination of fatty, salty, and sweet flavors involved, but there’s also a tremendous appeal to the smokiness of it, to the taste of having been cooked over fire. I argue that this appeal is also the result of natural selection. Here I’m engaging in speculation, but it’s reasoned speculation. Among the distinct advantages of using fire would have been to expand the range of foods that could be eaten and the nutritional value that could be gained from them, but also a general increase in the safety of food. Given this suite of advantages, individuals preferring the taste of fire-cooked food would have been favored by natural selection and would have left behind more of their barbecue-loving descendants.