Nursery World - A Unique Child: Food preferences

The ways that young children learn about tastes and flavours should influence how we present food to them, says Mary Whiting.

Seven months before they are born, babies begin to acquire food preferences. This may sound extraordinary, but it is just one part of the fascinating story of how we develop our sense of taste and perception of flavours.

What happens in the womb is that babies breathe in and out the amniotic fluid, which contains the tastes of foods that the mother has eaten. These tastes gradually become familiar to her baby. One particular piece of research showed this quite dramatically. In a test involving two groups of pregnant women, the first group were asked to eat lots of carrots during the final three months of their pregnancy, while a second group were not. The babies were later fed formula milk which was sometimes made up with carrot juice instead of water. The babies in the 'carrot' group noticeably preferred the carrot juice formula. The babies in the other group showed no preference. When mothers breastfeed, their milk is flavoured by what they have eaten recently, which further acclimatises babies to their families' food culture.

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