Merging Play and Food: How to Get Kids to Eat Vegetables

Many parents have children who eat both raw and cooked vegetables with ease. As a Registered Dietitian, I'd like to say I am one of them. But my child has been on the slow train to Veggietown and it has required a lot of time and patience just to get to the outskirts of town.

To work on getting my son to eat more vegetables, I decided to let him play with them. I don't mean a free-for-all with them, though I'm sure he'd love to drop-kick a head of lettuce like a soccer ball across the yard. I'm referring to playing with vegetables in the same way that I would let him sit at a table with a puzzle, coloring book, or Play-doh. You know, with civility.

Pizza toppings in a muffin pan.

One way I let my son play with vegetables is by presenting a muffin pan filled with a variety of them, particularly the ones that go good on pizza. Pepperoni, ham, pineapple, those get a muffin cup, too.

Then, I present a cookie sheet with a marinara-covered unbaked pizza crust on it and tell him to have fun making art. I encourage him to make faces, patterns, flowers, rainbows - anything he wants, but to use at least one of everything in the muffin pan.

If needed, he can wipe the slate clean and start over. I'll dump some more marinara on, and he can make something else. There's no time limit or end goal. If he wants to bake it and eat it, great. If not, that's ok.

Teacher Melissa Carden's cat pizza

Why do all this?

Touching the vegetables and playing with them in an imaginative way normalizes them. It's a desensitization process. In the world of psychology, it's called behavior pairing: combine something not fun with something fun to reach a goal.

People wanting to get in shape often use behavior pairing. To reach a weight loss goal, it's helpful to combine something not fun (such as walking) with something fun (such as listening to a podcast or talking with a friend).

For a child that doesn't find vegetables "fun," playing with them and being creative with them makes them fun.

A student in Melissa Carden's class with her decorated pizza.

Try it out with your kids and let me know how it goes.

One warning though - don't try this strategy around older generations in your family. Anyone born prior to 1970 is probably not going to like this idea. The generation that belonged to the "Clean Your Plate Club" and coined the phrase, "Don't play with your food," will probably find it very inappropriate to see a child playing making art with food. It will probably be considered wasteful given that some of the food will end up on the floor, discarded, or God forbid, not even eaten. But we modern parents who live in the age of sensory bins, water beads, and slime can handle it.