Apparently, there’s a scientific reason for why kids aged 1 to, well, middle-age turn their noses up at green veg.
According to a recent Economist article, it seems that the ancestral cousins of what we now know as broccoli came equipped with poisonous qualities in order to protect them from being eaten by animals.
Today, veg like broccoli, watercress and turnips still maintain a strain of this chemical repellent – it’s what gives them such a bitter taste (and why you need loads of garlic to convince the kids!).
The Economist goes into great detail on the science behind our love-hate affair with green veg – way too much detail for me to describe here (okay, so I didn’t understand half of it).
The central message was easy to comprehend though.
As the story put it:
"The upshot of all this is that the complaints fo children (and indeed of many adults) that green vegetables are horrid contains a lot of truth. There is no doubt that such vegetables are good for you. But they are not unequivocally good."
Just don’t tell the kids.
– Matthew
And might I add that salt can help too. Salt’s primary role in altering the taste of food is not by adding flavor as much as it by supressing bitterness. which is why it helps to add a jot to anything bitter. try it out for yourself and you’ll see that it makes the bitter factor drop.