Eat Your Veggies!

By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business

What, exactly, could it mean when parents report that, as Bryan relates in his piece, “Inconsistent taste was cited as the primary barrier to increasing children’s produce consumption”? Surely it is nonsensical to think this means that the broccoli we would like children to eat is inconsistent in its flavor or that fluctuations in the taste of spinach are what is holding kids back from demanding spinach salad.

One of the things to beware of in evaluating consumer research is that often the mental framework of the responder conditions the answers we get. So, when asked about the barriers to increasing produce consumption by their children, perhaps parents might report some recent experience, such as a memory that their child, who used to love oranges, was turned off by a dry one or that their child, who generally enjoys blueberries, rejected a recent purchase because the fruit was more tart.

One critique of this point is that the research, in fact, does not establish that children are any more influenced by this fluctuating quality than are adults. Another reasonable point is that it seems highly likely that parents have absolutely no idea that anything they or the produce industry can do would get their children to eat cauliflower or eggplant, and so they report on those items that seem plausible to them.

It is probably true that delivering a better taste experience would make children enjoy produce more. The same is true with regard to price and convenience. If we could get McDonald’s to throw a banana in each Happy Meal, both banana sales and banana consumption by children would probably rise. If we get schools to give out free snack fruit, both sales and consumption will probably rise. The same, by the way, is true of adults. If we get offices to give away free fruit as a snack every day, sales and consumption will probably increase.

Convenient package sizes certainly can help, especially with fresh-cuts. If parents can buy little packages of fruits and vegetables their children enjoy and include them in a school lunch, they are more likely to do so than if they have to buy large-size packages, divide the items, cut them and repackage the items into lunch-size portions.

Effective marketing, including fun cartoon character tie-ins, is doubtless appealing to children. Produce vendors should be looking at all these things, and the produce industry associations and commodity boards should be encouraging them.

But when it comes to health and nutrition and justifying these efforts in terms of reducing childhood obesity, the situation is much more difficult.

The truth is that fruit is delicious and loved by children and adults because it is sweet and filled with sugar. Yes, there are various nutrients in fruits and, certainly, all nutritionists would agree that it is better for children to eat fruit than cookies. However, if we are really interested in focusing on health and reducing childhood obesity, a big focus has to be on increasing vegetable consumption. And there are many problems here.

In the National Cancer Institute’s 5-A-Day for Better Health Program Evaluation Report, the following dilemma was identified: “…the potentially undesirable sensory qualities of some vegetables and fruit (e.g., bitterness, sourness, pungency, astringency) may act as significant barriers to the adoption of a diet that is high in vegetables and fruit, especially among children. The dilemma here is that the strong-tasting compounds as a group overlap extensively with the compounds that are potentially protective against cancer; therefore, removing strong-tasting compounds may reduce the protective effect.”

Put another way, all produce is not created equal when it comes to health effects, and the produce items that may be easiest to get people to increase consumption of, namely sweet-tasting fruits, are probably the least valuable health-wise. That is why the USDA’s latest food pyramid for kids urges the consumption of 1½ cups of fruit each day and 2½ cups of vegetables — 67 percent more vegetables than fruit.

And although marketing is important, it is very doubtful that putting SpongeBob on cauliflower will do much to increase consumption, and having Brussels sprouts in the school vending machines probably won’t make a big difference in eating habits.

Almost certainly the most proximate cause of childhood obesity can be found in the same causes of adult obesity. Changes in society have resulted in a lack of physically demanding work. Combine this with the growth of auto-centric suburban lifestyles and you have behavioral changes that account for a tremendous decline in the number of calories consumed by daily life. Urban planning and a radical redesign of our living environments to encourage physical activity may be the only real hope for substantial improvements in the physical condition of the populace.

This is not to say that the produce industry and the broader public health interests shouldn’t work to increase produce consumption. It is still in the interest of the trade and, on the margin, it will help a bit, which is a good thing. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves as an industry either: The issue is not simply poor marketing by produce companies.

If, as an industry, we really want to play a positive and significant role in reducing obesity, preventing cancer and, in general, contributing to the better health of the populace, there is much more work to do than is generally recognized.