Ratatouille & Cabrioles (R&C) is a three-year intervention consisting of sessions run collaboratively by CODES 83 project managers and the educational teams for children in pre-school settings in priority neighbourhoods. Families are involved in order to cut across different areas of the children’s lives. In 2018-19, R&C ran across 36 schools, involving 213 teachers, 106 teaching assistants, 1449 parents and 3331 benefiting children; there were 529 co-delivered classroom sessions and 74 interactions with parents in the form of discussions or parent-child workshops.
An outcomes assessment for the final-year pre-school children (4-5 years old) was carried out based on the protocol developed by Caroline Reverdy (2008), Edusens Project and Association SAPERE Classes du Goût, which aims in particular to reduce food neophobia through verbalisation and improving vocabulary.
The statistical analysis reveals that the children in the R&C project (123 children) talked less subjectively than the control children (96 children) – meaning they had a more realistic view of the foods they tasted. They were less influenced by their individual representations and their personal attraction (hedonism) to the food offered. So the children become agents of their sensory experience, which can be an indicator for reducing food neophobia, very present at that age.
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