Early Conceptual Knowledge About Food

Recent research suggests that preschool (three- to six-years-old) children’s food cognition involves much more than the nutritional information usually conveyed by traditional food education programs. This review aims at collecting the empirical evidence documenting the richness of preschoolers’ conceptual knowledge about food. After introducing the relevance of the topic in the context of the research in early food rejection dispositions (Sect. 1), we draw from empirical contributions to propose the first classification of food knowledge in the field, which includes taxonomic (2.1.), relational (2.2.), and value-laden food knowledge (2.3.). Finally, in Sect. 3, we highlight some theoretical shortcomings of extant literature, suggesting that the account of food knowledge we propose could be employed to develop more effective educational strategies that mitigate early food rejection behaviors (e.g., food neophobia).

Early conceptual knowledge about food.