KidsFoodJourney Week 1: Tiny Tastes, Familiar Foods and the Big Tasting Feast
Week 1
P2 - 4 (Year 1 - 3) Home Lesson Plan
Tiny Tastes, Familiar Foods and the Big Tasting Feast
Before starting these activities please read this introduction to KidsFoodJourney.
During the first workshop we work to introduce our core concepts to the children. These are:
1. Familiar Foods
2. Tiny Tastes
3. A new food language
4. Zero pressure, 100% curiosity
5. Play
1. Familiar Foods. We try and replace the automatic ‘I don’t like it’ with ‘I don’t know it’, as this is usually what children really mean when they say they don’t like a food. In most cases our reaction to a food, whether we dislike or like it, is purely a case of exposure and familiarity. The more often we try something, the more likely we are to like it. It’s that simple! This works in practice over and over again but is highly counter-intuitive to both children and adults, so we have developed a few different games to reinforce the idea. This is the main concept that we try and teach. We set the children the challenge not to say ‘yuk!’ or ‘I don’t like it’ when trying new foods, but instead find ways to describe the food or use ‘I don’t like it yet’.
2. ‘Tiny Tastes’. Developed by University College London, this technique is the basis for a programme called Tiny Tastes, designed to help parents struggling with a child’s limited diet and food likes. I have followed this pattern with adults, children, babies and toddlers and promise you it works if you stick with it. It’s all about zero pressure combined with repeated exposure to a food. Start with a pea-sized quantity of it – an unintimidatingly small amount. The child can taste or even just lick the new food. Next time ask them to eat that tiny tiny amount – if they won’t, then stick to a lick. After that start increasing the size gradually. The repeated exposure combined with a quantity too small to trigger the fear reflex (a fear of new foods is called neophobia, and is common in children to varying degrees) helps us overcome most initial dislikes. In KFJ we don’t even require the child to lick the new food, but we do encourage them to at least smell and feel it.
The idea behind Tiny Tastes – that our reaction to foods we dislike can, and usually will, change with repeated exposure – is highly counter-intuitive for most people. This might include yourself! It’s hard to teach children this will work if we don’t believe it ourselves, so I encourage you to put it to the test personally. Think back to the foods you used not to like and now love. Play the game alongside your children, and/or by yourself. Pick a food you don’t like, something cheap and easy to taste every day. Some people I’ve taught have picked peanut butter, others blue cheese, or Marmite, or olives. Eat a small amount of that food every day for two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, has your preference for it changed? It very likely has. I’ve had people in classes end up loving a food they once loathed. Once you see for yourself that Tiny Tastes really works, you will feel much more confident persevering with it alongside your children.
3. A new food language. Here we try and teach children how to describe foods in creative ways. This takes the focus off simple ‘like / don’t like’ and encourages curiosity about food and where it comes from. Why don’t you like it? What does it taste like and what about that don’t you like? Is it: crunchy, smooth, fuzzy, crunchy, mushy, bitter, sweet, sour, salty, savoury, fishy, earthy, fresh, zesty, hard, crackly….what colour is it, what does it remind you of? This idea is based on the Sapere school of sensory food education, and is the basis of the inspirational TastEd school taste education classes in England.
4. Zero pressure, 100% curiosity. We never pressure a child to eat anything; we never fuss if they don’t want to. We encourage, we praise courage and enthusiasm in trying and engaging with new and familiar foods. The aim is to inspire children to want to try new things and keep seeking new foods through curiosity, excitement and play. Pressure and fuss is proven to have the opposite effect on children’s preferences for food: it puts them off where you mean to encourage.
5. Play. The whole course is designed around meeting food through play, taking the pressure off feeling compelled to eat anything and focussing on food-based games, activities and stories. We want children to make positive food memories. The aim is that children don’t have to like or be interested in food to enjoy KFJ, the activities are fun in their own right and engage with food in a new way that sparks their curiosity.
Week 1 Lesson Introduction
We introduce the concept of ‘familiar foods’.
We teach the ‘rules of the game’: can you manage never to say: ‘yuk’ and ‘I don’t like that’, and instead say: ‘I don’t like that yet’?
Familiar Foods
To reinforce the idea of familiar foods we hand around and discuss pictures of school lunches and popular snacks and meals in other countries, and / or work through slideshows of these.
Find pictures of school lunches around the world here.
Find pictures of popular snacks around the world here.
Find pictures of familiar foods around the world here.
Things to talk about with the photos:
Talk about the phrase: ‘an acquired taste’. We have the cultural concept of familiar foods and repeated trying in our language, but we often use this phrase to mean something challenging and unpleasant, rather than a food we’ll learn to love.
“I’ve never eaten that, I’m not sure I’d like it the first time I tried it but if I’d eaten it all my life it would be a normal snack for me too.”
Would you prefer your lunch or this lunch?
Has anyone eaten any of these foods, or something similar?
What food do you eat that other children might not have tried? Many Scottish children eat haggis and black pudding without a second thought, but their English counterparts might not be so keen.
Find the familiar in the unfamiliar: daal is like lentil soup; Korean soondae isn’t a million miles from haggis and black pudding.
Which of these foods would you like to try? Would you like to learn to cook any of them? Why? Why not?
Talk about kimchi: spicy fermented cabbage, kimchi is a national institution in Korea, eaten at almost every meal. The fact that such a strongly flavoured dish is universally popular proves that it is familiarity and repeated tasting that informs our preferences. Kimchi is delicious, but it’s not a food that most children would take to on first try.
Tiny Tastes
Next we introduce the weekly Tiny Tastes experiment. The aim is to prove to the class that repeatedly tasting a food makes us more likely to like it.
I choose a food that I believe most children will find challenging but not disgusting on first try, and then at the start of each weekly session we eat some together. Foods I have chosen for this include raw broccoli and dark 100% rye pumpernickel bread.
This is presented to the children as an experiment: ‘scientific research tells us that this works: let’s test it out on ourselves.’ After week 1, when the children are familiar with the concept, we ensure this part of the workshop is zero pressure by simply placing plates of the food on the tables ready for the children to crack into as they come in and sit down. Most children voluntarily try the food without being asked, and by the end of a four- to six-week course almost every child will put their hand up when asked if they like it.
The Main Game (Snacktivity…): Fruit and Veg Tasting
We always kick off the course with a big, noisy tasting of lots of different raw fruit and veg: the children love it. Choose some that they can chop themselves, alongside others you can prepare.
Remember: present the fruit and vegetables as interesting, new and beautiful. Explore what it looks like, for example slice a beetroot across the equator to show them the rings – if you can find yellow or rainbow beetroot they will be captivated by the pattern made by the bright rings. Cut an apple the same way to show them the magical star in its core. One of my best finds was dragon-fruit: I challenge any child not to be impressed by one of those. Never tell children they won’t like something, or present a food with a grimace: I have seen children get stuck into raw cabbage, Brussels sprouts, beetroot, celeriac, grapefruit…all sorts of flavours their parents would be amazed to see their kids clamouring for seconds of!
Go for a range of fruit and vegetables: I find six to eight different kinds work well. Pick a couple that they will be familiar with to build their confidence, and then lots of wild cards. I often buy pomegranates because they’re beautiful, and the drama of cutting them open and whacking the seeds out with a spoon is engaging (how to prepare a pomegranate – I half-fill the bowl with water so the seeds sink and the pith floats to the top to be easily removed). I also like to use cauliflower, beetroot (careful of clothes), grapefruit (funny sour faces), celeriac (this can be grated and tried raw), passionfruit, lychees and different coloured tomatoes and beans.
We’re lucky to have the Community Carrot, this amazing greengrocers that stocks a varied range of fruit and veg and will source ingredients for me if I ask. Independent greengrocers often have a more interesting range than supermarkets, but you can play this game with any range you can find.
Start with the raw fruit or veg. Show them what it looks like whole and ask if they know what it is. Then prepare it or ask them to cut it up. Beetroot, carrots, celeriac etc can be grated and eaten raw. Courgettes can be ribboned with a peeler.
What does it remind them of? What does it look and taste like? Make a list of ‘tasting notes’ as you go to help them build their vocabulary of description words.
At the end of the fruit and veg, I like to do one final tasting: seaweed crisps. Seaweed is featured in many of the pictures of familiar foods around the world, and (where we live at least) most children haven’t tried it so it’s fun to introduce. Seaweed crisps aren’t hard to find now, even in supermarkets, or you can make your own with dried sushi nori sheets, even more commonly sold in supermarkets. Brush them with oil and crisp in the oven at 180C for a couple of minutes – careful, they burn fast. These are very divisive, but there are always a few children who LOVE them!
As proof of the familiar foods concept, in my experience it just takes a class to have one child who eats seaweed at home for the whole class to be more likely to eat and enjoy it. In some classes almost every child go nuts for it – I rarely have any left.
A story to finish
We are so lucky at KFJ to have a professional storyteller among our staff. Chris ends every session with an energetic, sometimes musical, always hilarious story about food. Here he is telling the story of the three wishes and the sausage.
We have found the children don’t grow out of loving this – if anything the older ones are even more engaged. We tell a story at the end of KFJ sessions from ages 4 – 11, and they all love them. You don’t have to be a professional to tell the story, just make sure it’s ‘on message’, and not one that teaches children that sweets and cakes are great fun while broccoli is a chore! Be careful also about stories that focus on weight, or sort foods into black and white ‘healthy/unhealthy’ categories. We never talk about weight in KFJ, and avoid telling children that certain foods are better or worse than others. We’re trying to widen their tasting horizons and place a range of food on a more level playing field for children to learn to genuinely enjoy eating a varied diet.
Kit List
Tiny Tastes food
6 – 8 different fruits and vegetables to try
Chopping board, grater, peeler
Seaweed crisps