It's all in the marketing...

I love this. A group of 186 four-year-olds (an opinionated focus group, to be sure) was given cooked carrots one day--presented as carrots. The next day they were give the same style of cooked carrots--presented as X-Ray Vision Carrots. They ate twice as many carrots the second day, and continued to eat twice as many on subsequent occasions, regardless of the name. This approach also worked with adults, who ate more Succulent Italian Seafood Filet than Seafood Filet (both sound suspiciously vague, to me).

I guess this should come as no surprise, considering the amount of text enticing youngsters on boxes of cereal, fruit snacks, etc etc. Marketing works.

In which case, I encourage a wholesale effort to come up with exciting, tempting, intriguing names for everything that is met with a grimace at the table: Dynamite Super Cauliflower; Sparkle Princess Spinach (would that work for a girl? all my marketing ploys would involve cars and superheroes, maybe a dinosaur or two); Kung Fu Warrior Tofu!

Unfortunately, the pickiest eater these days is the baby, and he is still unswayed by attempts to glamorize greens. Altho he did eat broccoli willingly last week...there's hope!