For many parents and teachers, getting a preschooler to eat a green vegetable can feel like its own science experiment. A new study suggests that treating food like science may actually be part of the answer.
Researchers from North Carolina State University and East Carolina University found that a food-based learning program helped preschoolers improve science knowledge and vocabulary skills. The program also gave children a low-pressure way to explore foods they might otherwise avoid, such as fruits and vegetables.
The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, focused on More PEAS Please!, a classroom program designed for Head Start children. Instead of treating food only as something children are expected to eat, the program uses food as a teaching tool for science, language and hands-on exploration.
Food-based learning can include activities that help children observe, touch, smell, describe, grow or prepare foods. In one classroom unit, children learned about seeds by looking at different kinds of seeds, watching how they germinate, testing how they grow with and without sun or water, then making a “seed salsa” with tomatoes and corn.
“We want to encourage kids to get excited about science and be curious about the world around them. We saw food as a way to get kids excited about learning, because you can also use food as a way to teach so many different concepts, like science, mathematics and language,” said Virginia Stage, associate professor of agricultural and human sciences at NC State and lead author of the study.
The study compared more than 125 preschoolers who received the food-based learning intervention with almost 150 who did not. Children in the intervention group increased their understanding of science concepts four times more than children in the comparison group, according to NC State. Their vocabulary increased by almost 20% by the end of the school year, compared with 6% in the comparison group.
That does not mean the program turned picky eaters into vegetable lovers overnight. The study was mainly about learning outcomes, teacher experiences and children’s exposure to food in the classroom. It was not a long-term test of whether children changed their diets at home.
Still, the food exposure piece matters. Nutrition educators often emphasize that children may need many calm, repeated experiences with a food before they are willing to taste it. More PEAS Please! builds those experiences into activities that are not centered on pressure, praise or forcing a bite.
Jocelyn Dixon, assistant director and research project coordinator for the Feeding & Eating Education Lab at NC State, said the program tries to change how adults define progress with young children and food.
“We try to reframe what success looks like in this field of working with healthy foods in the preschool space,” Dixon said. “Because we often trap ourselves into thinking that success means that a child ends up eating some broccoli or spinach. But if the last time you did an activity, the child only touched the spinach with a fork, and today the child is open to touching it and tearing it with their fingers — that’s a huge win.”
That idea may feel familiar to anyone who has watched a child reject a food simply because it looked, smelled or felt unfamiliar. In the classroom, the goal is not necessarily to get a child to clean a plate. It may be to help the child notice what a spinach leaf feels like, describe the color of a pepper or understand that a tomato grows from a seed.
The program also focused on teachers. Intervention teachers attended an all-day workshop early in the school year and received additional resources, including online training videos and classroom support. Teachers reported that the program helped them communicate science and nutrition through food, according to the research team.
That is important because preschool classrooms already have many learning goals competing for time. A food-based approach may give teachers a way to combine nutrition exposure with science, vocabulary and kindergarten readiness rather than treating food education as one more separate task.
The study has limits. It was conducted in Head Start classrooms in three North Carolina counties, so the findings may not apply to every preschool setting. The program also involved trained teachers, structured activities and support materials, which means the results may not be the same if food activities are added casually without training or planning.
The study was supported by a National Institute of General Medical Sciences Science Education Partnership Award.