Let’s face it, kids aren’t that smart.

Now, before you get angry, we all know it takes time and experience to learn what you need to get through day-to-day life as a human being. And according to a study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, kids are very often wrong about some important things in life, including where their food comes from.

The researchers asked 176 children who lived in a southeastern metropolitan area of the US about where different foods came from. The goal was to see if kids were able to properly identify whether a food was plant based or animal based. To be clear, the researchers were gathering this information to help come up with ways to encourage plant-based eating.

It is difficult to get adults to give up animal products since they are so used to eating them, they say. If they can get kids to focus on plant-based eating from a young age, they will be less likely to consume animals later on.

What they found was that kids are often unable to correctly categorize where different foods come from. Cheese, for example was said to be plant-based by 44% of respondents. 41% of the kids said that bacon was also a plant-based food.

Chicken nuggets were a little more accurate with just 38% saying they were plant based even though the word chicken is right in the name.

In the study, the team  wrote:

“Popcorn and almonds were also commonly misclassified [as animal-based], each by more than 30% of children.”

Another part of the study asked kids what types of things were edible and inedible, and with this the kids got it wrong a lot as well. 77% said that cows were inedible, and 73% said the same of pigs. On the opposite end, 1% said that sand could be a food and 5% that cats were edible. When discussing these results, the team wrote:

“Most children in the United States […] eat animal products, but unlike adults who have built up an arsenal of strategies to justify the consumption of animals, children appear to be naïve meat eaters. The current study suggests that children eat meat unknowingly, and perhaps in violation of a bias against animals as a food source. Childhood may therefore represent a unique window of opportunity during which lifelong plant-based diets can be more easily established compared to later in life.”

The team points out that a lot of the ignorance likely comes from the parents not being entirely honest with the kids about where food comes from. Many parents don’t want to have the conversation that tells a child that their hamburger was once a living cow.

The team hopes that this study will help plant-based lifestyle activists to be able to more effectively move people away from eating animal products.

They say:

“By refraining from eating foods that violate their beliefs about the well-being of animals, children would also be acting in a manner consistent with their moral views of the environment. In addition to reducing their own carbon footprints, children’s principled eating behaviors may also influence those of their parents.”

Teaching kids about food from a young age is important, regardless of whether they are vegan, vegetarian, or meat-eaters.

Helping kids to become more educated about food can help them to make healthy choices for the rest of their life.

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