Written By: Jon Finkel
My headline is true and here’s why: Cornell University, an esteemed Ivy League institution, just spent untold amounts of money and time to prove what every parent of grade-schoolers already knows: kids like sliced apples more than whole apples.
Rather than simply asking anyone with kids what their opinion is on the subject, or sitting in a McDonald’s for ten minutes while kids devour apple slices with their McNuggets, the Ivy League solution was to run a pilot program through six schools to prove such astonishing revelations as this one below, from the story in today’s Washington Post:
“A child holding a whole apple has to break the skin, eat around the core, and deal with the hassle of holding a large fruit. That barrier might seem silly or superficial, but Just [the studies author] says it’s significant when you’re missing teeth or have braces, as so many kids do.”
Kids have missing teeth? And braces? And breaking through the apples’ skin is tough for little mouths? Tell us more, oh wise one:
“It sounds simplistic, but even the simplest forms of inconvenience affect consumption,” said David Just, a professor of behavioral economics at Cornell who studies consumer food choices, and one of the study’s author. “Sliced apples just make a lot more sense for kids.”
That first sentence is truly only something that could come out of a professors mouth as if it were some brand new pearl of wisdom: “even the simplest forms of inconvenience affect consumption.”
Is there anybody out there who wouldn’t believe this if you told them? Anyone at all?
What’s next? A mind-blowing study to prove once and for all that kids like chocolate milk more than regular milk?
I know, I’m being snarky and over-the-top, but it bothers me when people, especially Ivy League people, attempt to package common sense as some sort of scientific breakthrough. The rest of the article goes on to prove that while Cornell ran the study, the problem of kids throwing away apples is one that the schools have been vexed by for a long time. This, too, is absurd.
Public schools have evidently been wasting hundreds of thousands of apples a week which would have been eaten if they were sliced, despite this recommendation from the federal government of all places:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the NSLP, couldn’t say how many schools are serving sliced apples instead of whole ones. That decision is made by local school food authorities, not the federal government. The USDA does, however, make recommendations, among which is that fruit be served in “age-appropriate pieces.”
The fact that a recommendation like that needs to be stated is proof of bloated bureaucracy at its finest.
There are schools where the local school food authorities continue to throw away perfectly good apples because they haven’t thought to serve them sliced. Don’t they have their own kids? At least of some them? How is this possible?
I make lunch for my kids every day and have since they started daycare. It took two mornings in a row of my kids lunch boxes coming back with uneaten apples in them for me to ask my kids why they weren’t eating them. The answer was that they were too big or hard or whatever. I sliced the apples up the next morning and like magic, the apple slices didn’t come home.
I did not need a PhD in pediatric behavioral sciences to discover this. I did not consult a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cohort study to prove this. I did not consult the USDA. I simply asked my kids. Not an Ivy League or local government board solution, but a solution nonetheless. And it was free.
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Jon Finkel is the author of Forces of Character with 3x Super Bowl Champion and Fighter Pilot, Chad Hennings, Heart Over Height with 3x NBA Slam Dunk Champion Nate Robinson, as well as Jocks In Chief, the hit fatherhood book, The Dadvantage – Stay in Shape on No Sleep with No Time and No Equipment, and all twelve volumes in the Greatest Stars of the NBA book series for the National Basketball Association, which won several ALA Young Reader Awards.
As a feature writer, he has written for Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Muscle & Fitness, GQ, Details, The New York Times, AskMen.com, ComedyCentral.com, Yahoo! Sports’ ThePostGame.com and many more. His work received a notable mention in the 2015 Best American Sports Writing anthology.