Fruit and Vegetable Servings in Local Farm-Sourced and Standard Lunches Offered to Children in a Head Start Program

Abstract

This project compared servings of fruits and vegetables consumed in farm-to-school lunches to that in conventional lunches served to students attending a Head Start preschool. The sample used was the student population of a Head Start preschool. Students were observed eating lunch twice weekly for 25 weeks. In this observational study, research staff were trained to visually determine amounts of food items placed on subjects' plates and percentages consumed. Amounts were recorded and analyzed. Independent-samples t-tests were performed using SPSS. There were no significant differences in either fruit or vegetable consumption between conventional lunches and locally-sourced lunches. Even though there was more variety of fruit and vegetable offerings in the locally-sourced lunches, the consumption of those possibly unfamiliar foods to the sample may have been limited by the phenomenon of food neophobia. Future studies should focus on offering locally-sourced foods on a repeated basis, possibly in a rotating cycle menu.