Child Involvement in Choosing a Recipe, Purchasing Ingredients, and Cooking at School Increases Willingness to Try New Foods and Reduces Food Neophobia

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the effect of involving children in their feeding process (choosing a recipe, purchasing the ingredients, and cooking) on their lunch food choice in a school environment.

Design: Quasi-experimental.

Setting: Two schools in Bilbao, Spain.

Participants: A total of 202 children (aged 8-9 years) participated in the study (43% girls), with 99 in the nutrition education (NE) group and 103 in the hands-on (HO) group.

Intervention: Three 1-hour workshops (1 workshop/wk), different for each group: HO, cooking-related activities, and NE, healthy habits promotion through nutrition education activities.

Main outcome measures: Food neophobia, diet quality, cooking self-efficacy and attitudes toward cooking, and food intake and selection of the experimental lunches.

Analysis: Chi-square test of independence, ANCOVA, and t tests were performed.

Results: Students from the HO group selected and ate more spinach/broccoli (P < 0.001 and P = 0.02, respectively) for the first lunch; and selected more spinach/broccoli (P = 0.04) for the second lunch. After the intervention, improvements were observed for spinach liking and neophobia for the HO group and cooking self-efficacy and KidMed score for both groups.

Conclusions and implications: Both interventions succeeded in improving children's diet quality, but only the HO group reduced food neophobia levels. Therefore, involving children in choosing a recipe, purchasing ingredients, and cooking may promote changing eating behaviors toward healthy habits such as increasing vegetable consumption.

Keywords: children food neophobia; cooking; ingredients purchasing; recipe choice; vegetable intake.