The influence of socio-economic background on perceptions of vegetables among Scottish primary school children

Sensory profiling by children aged 6–7 and 10–11 years. Part 1: a descriptor approach

“…This question was of special interest since an earlier study of the meat-eating habits of children (Laing et al, 1999) had indicated changes in meat consumption occur with age, with substantial differences occurring at about 10-11 years. The absence of a gender effect for all of the meats with 6-7 year olds and three of the meats with the older group is in accord with reports by Baxter, Schroder, and Bower (1999) and Leon et al (1999) in studies of vegetables with 8-10 year olds and jams with 4-10 year olds, respectively. All of these results suggest gender may not influence liking of foods or food attributes prior to adolescence where changes have been documented (De Graaf & Zandstra, 1999;Enns, Van Italie, & Grinker, 1979;Laing & Clark, 1983).…”

The effect of preparation method and typicality of colour on children’s acceptance for vegetables

“…In our study ''flavour-masking'' could not occur as vegetables were prepared without other ingredients. Second, in two very similar studies with different vegetables, hard, crunchy vegetables were preferred over soft vegetables in one study (Baxter et al, 1998), but opposite results were found in the other study (Baxter et al, 1999). Results indicate that more insight is needed in the sensory factors affecting children's acceptance, and context of evaluation needs to be taken into account when generalising results.…”

“…However, their observation was based on interpretation of a PCA plot, and was not substantiated by PLS-R or mean sample data. Other studies in which firm and crunchy vegetables were preferred over softer, mushy ones (Baxter et al, 1999;Szczesniak, 1972) were not based on actual tasting of within-vegetable variations. With the vegetable types and preparation methods in this study, textural differences existed between samples, but their importance for consumer acceptance could not be confirmed.…”

“…For details of groups see Table 5. but they were less accepted because of their odour/flavour properties. Baxter et al (1999) suggested that the texture of the vegetables in a (mixed dish) such as in a stir-fry may be appealing to children, with the strong flavour of the meal concealing the flavour of the vegetables being another appealing factor. In our study ''flavour-masking'' could not occur as vegetables were prepared without other ingredients.…”

Sensory profiling by children aged 6–7 and 10–11 years. Part 2: a modality approach

“…The few examples include the training of children to optimise the formulation of powdered chocolate milk (Hough, Sanchez, Barbieri, & Martinez, 1997), limited profiling of orangeade (Zandstra & De Graaf, 1998), the use of the repertory grid method to generate descriptors for a range of vegetables (Baxter, Jack, & Schroder, 1998;Baxter, Schroder, & Bower, 1999;Hutchinson, Monteleone, & Oram, 2001) and most recently the study by Rose, Laing, Oram, and Hutchinson (in press) using a descriptor generation procedure with meats. Each of these studies, however, had limitations.…”