Toddlers’ food preferences are fickle but a new study reveals that they register social cues about food from adults. “By watching toddlers react to people’s food preferences, researchers found that the little ankle-biters seem to make generalizations about good eats and who will like them based on social identities. Toddlers expected people in the same social groups to like the same foods and appeared puzzled if that wasn’t the case,” Ars Technica writes.
Although infants may not be skilled at reasoning about perceptual or nutritional properties of foods, they may instead be skilled at thinking about the relationship between food choice and social identity, said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Infants…generalize food preferences across individuals who affiliate, or who speak a common language, but not across individuals who socially disengage or who speak different languages,” writes lead scientist Zoe Liberman, a psychologist at the University of Chicago. “Whereas food preferences are seen as embedded within social groups, disgust is interpreted as socially universal, which could help infants avoid potentially dangerous foods.”
Toddlers’ empirical perception of disgust led Liberman and contributing scientists from Cornell University and National Institutes of Health to speculate that “campaigns to improve kids’ diets may be better served by including aspects of eating rather than just nutritious information,” writes Ars Technica, as “social cues can play out in long-term health.”