Overcoming Nutritional Neophobia with Strategies to Introduce Strange Foods

Objective To determine the effect of parental intervention strategies on consumption of unfamiliar foods. Methods Fifty‐two college students were given three unfamiliar foods (kimchi, eggplant, and hijiki) prefaced with one of three strategies (truth—“you probably won't like this food”, oversell—“you'll love this food!”, and story—“Did you know that this food…”) in a Latin square design. They then filled out questionnaires reporting their consumption of the foods and rating their acceptance of the samples and their willingness to try each again. Results Subjects who had never eaten the foods before this study consumed less (p<0.0025), were less willing to eat that food again (p<0.0001), were less willing to order that food in a restaurant (p<0.0001), and were even less willing to consume a free sample of the food (p<0.0001) than subjects who had had previous exposure. Subjects with previous exposure rated the foods' taste and texture higher as well (taste, p<0.0001; texture, p<0.015). Subjects given eggplant prefaced with either the truth or oversell strategies consumed more of their sample than those given eggplant prefaced with the story strategy (p <0.0001). No significant differences between strategies were found in amount consumed for kimchi and hikiji. For both eggplant and hijiki, when prefaced with either the truth or oversell strategies, subjects rated themselves as more willing to eat those foods again than subjects prefaced with the story strategy (p<0.05). No significant differences between strategies were found in willingness to eat for subjects given kimchi. Conclusion Strategies for introducing unfamiliar foods have an impact on the amount of food consumed. Overall, strategies that included information about the taste—regardless of the positive or negative slant—were more effective than a strategy that merely gave interesting facts about the foods.