Get Your Kids to Eat Their Veggies: Creative Labelling

Here's a thought. If you say to your kids "eat your broccoli" they will turn up their noses. If you say "eat your dinosaur tree" they'll have their forks at the ready.

According to The New York Times, Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, says that describing food in an appealing manner will encourage people to try new foods and they are more likely to enjoy the dish they are eating. Using words such as "tender" and "succulent" lead people to believe that their meal is just that. He calls this "confirmation bias"

"If you say something is juicy, people almost unconsciously turn up their -juicy sensors' when they taste the food,'' he writes. "Once these taste sensors are activated, people become preprogrammed to think a dish tastes good.''At the Cornell lab, Dr. Wansink tested his theory by serving identical meals with different names. One day they would serve "red beans and rice" and another day serve "Traditional Cajun Red Beans with Rice". People rated the foods with the jazzy names as better tasting than their plainly named counterparts.

When testing his ideas on children he found that naming peas "power peas" doubled the number of kids who ate them. If only I'd known this 15 years ago.

So tonight when you are getting dinner ready, forget about the cookbook. Arm yourself with a thesaurus instead.

Difficulty level: Easy