Today in Stupid Science: People More Likely to Eat Vegetables That Are Cooked Properly

The fact that people don’t eat enough vegetables in the US is old news; a 2015 study indicated that a whopping 91 percent of Americans aren’t eating the USDA recommended minimum of vegetables each day. There have been myriad efforts to get Americans to eat more vegetables: ad campaigns, about a billion lifestyle blog posts about how to sneak vegetables into other foods, weirdly great hip-hop about growing your own food, and many more. The new study tried something a little more basic: actually just cooking the vegetables well.

The study presented both seasoned and unseasoned vegetables – broccoli, green beans, and carrots – at a cafe, and measured how much diners both ordered and ate. The unseasoned vegetables were simply steamed the way Americans have been murdering vegetables for decades: mushy, bland, gross. The seasoned vegetables were given a hit of spices and herbs – in other words, they were prepared as if they were actual food to be enjoyed rather than some kind of disgustingly large chewable pill to be choked down for the sake of health.

As a result, the diners, especially young and male diners, were significantly more likely to both choose and eat the seasoned vegetables over the unseasoned, and overall those who “seldom” selected vegetables at lunch were an impressive 1.5 times more likely to snag the seasoned vegetables.

The study had a few problems; for one thing, it seems like even the seasoned vegetables were probably pretty gross. Here’s a quote from the study’s release:

Diners wasted twice as much of the seasoned carrots as green beans and three times more carrots than seasoned broccoli, even though they reported they liked carrots about as much as the other two vegetables. The researchers hypothesized that diners may have disliked the cinnamon seasoning that was used on the carrots in the study.

Yes…it certainly seems possible that the diners thought the scientific cinnamon-dosed steamed carrots were bad. Who knows how many vegetables we could get people to eat if we actually cared about the way they were cooked! Like, what if we…roasted them? Or grilled them? Or squeezed a fresh lemon over them? The sky’s the limit!

Science proves it: vegetables are more popular when they taste good.