What’s in your Dabba? Children’s Evaluations of Ethnic Lunchbox Foods

• In Event: What's in a group? New Directions for Children's Essentialist Perceptions

Abstract

Background: School lunchboxes can be indicators of group membership and categorization in terms of children’s social class, ethnicity, and ingroup-outgroup food preferences. Indeed, qualitative and observational research has indicated that children negatively judge those who bring nonnormative food to school (Karrebæk, 2012; Ludvigsen & Scott, 2009). To our knowledge, no study has experimentally investigated children’s evaluations of different ethnic lunchbox foods. The current ongoing study explores whether children hold a stereotype that people from other cultures eat specific foods (e.g., do they think East Asian children are more likely to eat a Chinese food lunchbox?) and children’s evaluations of diverse foods. These questions examine whether children hold pre-existing conceptualizations of the relation between racial/ethnic categories and food choice, as well as potential downstream consequences of essentialist reasoning in the food domain (in terms of children’s evaluations).

Methods: To date, we have run 40 children (24 5-to- 8-year olds, 16 9-to-12-year olds, 52.5% female, 80% White). This study is ongoing; our target sample size is 85. The study employs a video-chat format. Children are first shown an array of faces of children from different ethnicities and a lunchbox, and then asked to choose the child most likely to bring that food to school. Next, children evaluate American, Latinx, Indian and Chinese lunchboxes in terms of how tasty, smelly, and messy they think the food is, whether they think cool kids eat the food at school, and if they think it is okay to bring it to school. For each question, children first rate the food on a three point scale (for example, “do you think this tastes good, in the middle, or bad?” ) and then can qualify their response (for example, if “good,” “is it very good or a little bit good?”). Parents also complete a questionnaire on the factors they consider while packing their child’s lunchboxes such as cost, convenience, health, and child preferences.

Results: For the face-matching task, we observed both consensus and variability. We saw especially high rates of stereotyped matching for the American food (62.5% chose the White face), the Chinese food (57.5% chose the East Asian face), and the Indian food (50% chose the South Asian face; note that for each food there were 5 potential options (see Table 1). There was individual variability in how many foods were consistently matched to the expected faces (see Figure 1). For example, 6 children matched all four foods to faces based on our a priori expectations. One-sample t-tests reveal that each lunchbox is rated positively (averaging across questions, compared to chance); American: t(39)=13.5, p<.001 (M=3.06, SD=0.50); Indian: t(39)= 3.35, p <.05 (M=2.35, SD=0.66 ); Chinese: t(39)=3.76, p <0.05 (M= 2.40, SD=0.67); Mexican: t(39)= 4.17, p <0.001 (M=2.44, SD=0.67).

With the full dataset, we hope to explore age effects on the face-to-food matching task, individual differences in evaluations of the lunchbox by question and food type, and conduct zip code analysis to ascertain the diversity of children’s neighborhoods and school settings.

Group Authors

Shruthi Venkatesh, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Jasmine DeJesus, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Authors

• Shruthi Venkatesh, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Presenting Author

• Jasmine M. DeJesus, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author