GREEN MINDS: KNOWLEDGE-BASED STRATEGIES FOR THE ADOPTION OF A PLANT-BASED DIET IN 3-6 Y.O. CHILDREN

This dissertation deals with how to design new knowledge-based educational programs that can help young (3- to 6-year-old) children in overcoming food neophobia, which is a disposition to reject unfamiliar food even before tasting it (Dovey et al. 2008) and constitutes a major hindrance to the adoption of healthy and sustainable eating habits during the developmental phase in which food preferences first take shape. Recent studies have in fact found correlations between poorer performance in cognitive tasks tapping into conceptual food knowledge (e.g., food categorization and property inference) and higher scores on the Child Food Rejection Scale (Rioux et al., 2017) among preschool children (Lafraire et al., 2016; Rioux et al., 2018; Pickard et al., 2021; Foinant et al., 2022), thus suggesting that children’s food concepts play an important role in determining their food behavior. Anyways, the educational potential of this connection is still unaddressed in the literature. The General Introduction outlining the general topics of this work, some key terms, and the methodological approach I’ve attended throughout this research project is followed by three research papers, which constitute the bulk of the dissertation. The first one is a literature review, whose aim is that of clarifying the notion of “conceptual food knowledge” in the light of extant experimental research on young children’s food cognition. Conceptual food knowledge in this population can be unpacked into a more fine-grained typology encompassing three main subtypes of knowledge that most children proved capable of mastering by the sixth year of life: taxonomic knowledge, which hinges on set-inclusion relations among food categories, relations knowledge, which involves contextual thematic and script relationships between food items and events, and value-laden knowledge, which encompasses evaluative and ad-hoc food knowledge. This typology is the first one of this kind in the literature and highlights the richness of young children food knowledge. Specifically, the review suggests that conceptual flexibility and knowledge about conceptual relations are key factors to build a mature understanding of the food domain. The fact that young children can attend various types of conceptual food knowledge raises questions about how to conceive of the “knowledge gaps” displayed by neophobic children. In fact, poorer performance in experimental tasks could be due to different reasons, such as children lacking specific types of conceptual knowledge, or them not being flexible enough to access the right type of knowledge for the task at hand, or again the fact that information conveyed by their conceptual representations and by the experimenters’ differ in content. Part two thus takes a step back from early food neophobia and food education to address the broader issue of how to study conceptual differences in the food domain, which is a crucial to the understanding of behaviors and interactions that call for interindividual coordination (e.g., communication). By introducing the notion of conceptual mismatch, I propose an original approach which integrates philosophical insights on food conceptual pluralism and experimental research practice in cognitive science: I first define “conceptual mismatch” as the state that obtains between two conceptual representations that with respect to the concepts they embed or the relationships between such concepts, and then proceed to single out different types of conceptual mismatches that have been investigated in the food domain. Extensional mismatches occur when two conceptual representations refer to distinct categories, intensional mismatches encompass scenarios in which the modes of presentation of two different conceptual representations map onto the same category, and ontological mismatches capture differences involving the conceptual relations that structure two food ontologies. The last part of the dissertation takes stock on the results of the previous two to put forward recommendations about how to design new educational interventions that address the link between conceptual knowledge and (un)healthy eating dispositions. After pointing out the limitations of extant approaches to knowledge-based food education (KBFE), I single out three main recommendations to implement in improved KBFE programs, namely to propose analogies and comparisons to deliver varied conceptual food knowledge, to provide knowledge that undermines possible misleading biases, and to train conceptual flexibility and executive functions. On top of pushing forward research on KBFE among preschool children, this dissertation constitutes a valuable contribution to the study of food concepts more broadly. This is the first attempt at bringing together insights form both philosophical research and experimental cognitive science on the topic. As such, it bridges the gap between the different approaches to the study of concepts endorsed in the two domains, provides insights about how to improve the protocols employed in empirical investigations and paves the way for experimental methods in the philosophy of food. The notion of conceptual mismatch in particular constitutes a substantial contribution to the philosophical scholarship on food concepts (Borghini & Piras 2021, Borghini et al., 2021a, b), which in turn bears relevance to several other research topics (e.g., food ethics, communication, and policymaking).