Discuss: How to get children to eat more vegetables

Our challenge for today was “how to get children to eat more vegetables” – an age old question that we hoped to generate new solutions for.

Using Edward de Bono’s book, “Creativity Workout,” we applied the Thinker Tool: Random Words, and selected ‘sailor’ as our random word. 

This initiated the story of Captain James Cook’s theory on the prevention of scurvy. A terrible scourge afflicting sailors on long voyages, Cook discovered that feeding his men cabbage held scurvy at bay. They weren’t fond of it, so the only way he could get them to swallow was by leading through example and eating it himself, in front of them.

Obviously Cook wasn’t aware that Vitamin C that was the cure but he did recognise that consuming certain foods (or the lack thereof) had a direct impact on the disease’s management.

This tale spawned a series of thought trails…

First it led us to ask: Why don’t children like vegetables? We established the following list:
taste, colour, texture, association, timing, appearance

This spun off a series of solutions to these issues. 

1. Hide the vegetables:
- grated into minced meat meals ie: meat pies, sausage rolls, bolognese etc
- finely grated into rolled meat wraps where the taste and flavours drown out the stow-away 

2. Disguise the vegetables:
- Serve them in unusual ways ie: desserts (pumpkin pie), chips (any root vegetable makes a good chip)

3. Change their appearance:
- Present the vegetables in fun ways i.e. a funny face
- Make them into dips ie beetroot dip
- Juice them

4.  Serve them at unusual times
- include them in a breakfast cereal ie make a type of Cheerios/Fruit Loops whose base ingredient is vegetable
- offer them at snack times or when the kids are distracted instead of forcing them down as part of the main meal

5. Change their form
- create powder forms for drink bases to add to shakes etc
- serve as daily dose capsules ‘vitamins’
- hide the powder in jelly/jubes so they are like confectionery 

Secondly it demonstrated that a way of changing behaviour can be to lead by example. We recgonised that how the parents and family eats and their relationship with vegetables will impact on the child’s response. This led to a conversation about peer pressure and how ‘school dinners’ in the UK were chosen based on what one’s friends were eating. Of course this was influenced by what was available so in those cases it would be a matter of replacing the junk foods with healthy options.

Thirdly if one type of vegetable isn’t available, substituting with another can deliver the same benefits i.e. don’t get too hung up on a vegetable, because any vegetable will do for a start.

This spawned another idea of creating a service which would create meals based on preferences (likes and dislikes of vegetables) for the busy or unhealthy eater who needed some inspiration to gradually change their eating patterns over time. It could be created in conjunction with a supermarket chain, which would produce a list of meals for the week based on budget and taste requirements, then home deliver the appropriate ingredients. 

After an hour we could have kept going for another hour… but the rules of Thinking Club are clear, so we stopped and got on with some real work.

How about you? Can you use another Thinker Tool to generate further ways to get kids to eat more veges, or have you alreday some tried and true methods you use at home? Let us know by adding your comments.

Get your thinking caps on,
Thinking Club