I’ve planted a fruit tree for each of my children. For my firstborn, my 8 year old daughter, we planted a fig tree. It is her tree. She celebrates when the leaves grow back and the little figs begin to form, and she loves hanging decorations from its branches.
When she was a baby, I looked forward to the day she would taste a soft, ripe fig, warm from the sun and picked straight from her own tree. Finally, that day came. I picked a perfectly purple fig and handed it to her, eager to see what she thought.
She took a bite. “Bleh!” she spat it back out.
I ate the rest. It was delicious, and she wanted nothing more to do with figs that first summer. But she remained completely in love with her fig tree. It produced pounds of fruit that Mom and Dad happily enjoyed, and she loved picking figs for us. Whenever we invited her to eat one, though, she declined.
The next summer, she was excited when the first little figs began to form. When they finally ripened, she eagerly tried one again. She took a bite, swallowed, thought about it for a moment, and handed the rest to me. Still not a fan.
One winter, a large branch from a neighboring tree fell onto her fig tree and broke part of it. She was devastated. She worried about whether her tree would survive and fussed over the damage as we cleaned up the broken branches. Come spring, she watched proudly as it came roaring back, putting out new growth everywhere.
This summer we had a bumper crop, and once again she watched the little figs form and waited, still excited, for them to ripen. Except this time, she ate some. In fact, she ate exactly eight figs and even said “yum” twice.
Figs may never be her favorite fruit, but she still loves her fig tree and the figs it produces. Looking back, I find it interesting that she disliked the taste of the fig, but she never disliked the fig itself. She appreciated the tree, the process of growing it, and the abundance it provided long before she learned to enjoy the taste. I think that appreciation is part of what kept her willing to try again.
As a dietitian, I was 100% certain I would not have picky eaters. I followed baby-led weaning, introduced variety, waited until age one to introduce added sugar. I did all the things. Sauerkraut was one of their first foods!
Nevertheless, like clockwork, when my kids turned four they suddenly stopped liking things. Squash got left on the plate. Watermelon tasted funny. Grapes were too squishy. Broccoli was hit or miss. Sauerkraut, surprisingly, remained a favorite. My carefully laid plans to raise nonpicky eaters dissolved into the dirt.
What We Know About Food Acceptance
Many parents know this situation. Foods once happily eaten suddenly get rejected, leaving us wondering how a child can survive on what seems like nothing but beige foods.
Fortunately, research has given us some insight into how food acceptance develops. One of the most consistent findings is simple: exposure matters.
Some of the strongest research on repeated exposure comes from infants and toddlers, so we should not assume the findings apply identically to older children. Still, repeated exposure is a well-studied strategy for increasing acceptance of unfamiliar foods early in life. There is no one magic number of exposures for every child or food.
The usual advice is simple: keep offering it. But in real life, repeatedly offering a food a child will not eat comes with a practical problem. What happens to all that broccoli? Do we throw it away? Eat it ourselves? Push it toward our spouse? Do the dogs like broccoli?
Repeated tasting may not be the whole story. Research in very young children has found that even visual exposure to an unfamiliar vegetable can increase acceptance. Other research in children ages 2 to 12 has found improvements in fruit or vegetable intake from nutrition education and taste exposure, with more frequent interventions tending to report positive outcomes more often.
When going through the research to help my own children, I started wondering whether exposure had to mean putting the same uneaten vegetable on the dinner plate night after night. What if a child could encounter a food while planting it, watering it, watching it grow, harvesting it, touching it, smelling it, learning about it, and eventually tasting it?
I have seen my own kids become more willing to try certain foods in the garden. Both my girls like asparagus raw from the garden, but not cooked. They love tiny broccoli florets, which eventually led them to enjoy cooked broccoli. Ground cherries may look like a tomato and a tomatillo had a baby, but they are sweet and tropical, and unwrapping them is half the fun.
Growing food has allowed them to try things in ways they might not encounter at mealtime and experience how different the same food can taste depending on variety, freshness, and season.
What Changes When Kids Grow The Food?
Research on gardening-based interventions is still limited, but studies show promising results for increasing children's fruit and vegetable consumption. I cannot help but notice how many pieces gardening brings together.
A garden provides food education and repeated interaction with food. Children can see, touch, smell, harvest, prepare, and eventually taste what they grow. Most importantly, it allows children to develop a relationship with food long before that food appears on their plate.
Think about the encounters a child can have with a single tomato before taking a bite. They can plant the seed, watch it sprout, water it, smell the leaves, notice the flowers, watch the first green fruit appear, see it change color, pick it, carry it inside, and finally taste it.
That is a whole lot of interaction before dinner, and none of it has to end with a child eating the food. The garden offers opportunities for positive experiences with food without the pressure to eat it.
My daughter had exactly that kind of relationship with her fig tree. Even when she disliked the fruit, every season gave her another reason to interact with it, and another opportunity to decide whether she wanted to try again. She could dislike the taste of the fig without disliking the fig itself.
There is also the sheer weirdness of growing food, and if your kids are anything like mine, weirdness is wonderful.
Like the absolute lunacy of seeing a bushy green plant and learning that it is asparagus? Leave a spear unpicked and it can grow several feet tall, branch out, and produce little red berries.
You discover that carrots grow both below and above the soil, and you can taste both parts. You learn that plants might die if ignored, or somehow thrive anyway. How? It’s a mystery. Tomato leaves smell far more like tomatoes than tomatoes themselves. You learn when a fig is perfectly ripe. You present produce you have grown yourself to your family and feel proud.
These are not just lessons about nutrition. They are experiences.
Gardening gives children a chance to know food as something they can grow, care for, harvest, and share, not just something they are expected to eat. A child can carry a bag of figs into the house and proudly offer something they helped grow to someone they love. They are not just consumers at the end of a food system. They get to experience what it feels like to produce food for someone else.
Even when they do not enjoy the taste of something they have grown, they can watch someone else enjoy it. A child can think, “I do not like this,” without having to think, “I do not like this food, and I never want anything to do with it again.”
Eating It Isn’t The Only Measure Of Success
Yes, I am a dietitian. Yes, I care whether children eat vegetables. But I am convinced that we should stop treating consumption as the only outcome that matters.
Of course, eating fruits and vegetables matters. Research suggests that gardening can help children eat more of them, and that is worthwhile. But I believe the relationship kids build with food between the bites matters too.
They may eat it.
They may spit it out.
They may decide they love it.
They may decide they absolutely do not.
If the relationship remains positive, the experience is not a failure.
Gardening gives children room to experience food without making every encounter a test of whether they will eat it.
Children do not need to love every food right now. Tastes change. Preferences come and go. Maybe we just need to give kids enough positive experiences with food that they are willing to keep the door open.
Before we worry quite so much about whether our children will eat their vegetables, maybe we should give them the opportunity to know them.
