Smart Meals for Stupid Kids

How do you get a child to reach for an apple rather than a chocolate? The Cornell Centre for Behavioral Economics has just figured out how.

It’s a question that every parent has pondered. How do you get a child to reach for an apple rather than a chocolate? With a million dollars of funding, The Cornell Centre for Behavioral Economics in New York has just figured out how. Food scientist Brian Wansink and his team have shown that it takes ‘healthy low-cost nudges’ to run school lunch rooms. In a New York school, they increased the salad consumption by 300 per cent simply by moving the salad bar six feet from a wall, placing it at a bottleneck in the checkout line. In another instance, they simply pulled the apples and oranges from a stainless steel bin and plonked them in a cane basket. Fruit eating went up by 105 per cent. A nudge can do what finger-wagging cannot.

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Pramila PHATARPHEKAR