40 Percent of American Children Think Hot Dogs Are Vegetables

A few years ago I remember watching a particularly disturbing episode of British chef Jamie Oliver’s reality show Food Revolution where he went into West Virginia schools to try and impact the food that children were eating to make it healthier. In the episode, he asked kids to name various vegetables and they had no idea. At the time, I remember thinking how sad it was that we don’t teach our kids about food. According to a new survey, 40 percent of children interviewed believed that hot dogs come from plants and “41 percent were unable to correctly pinpoint that bacon comes from an animal.”

Apparently the confusion comes down to something the researchers termed the “meat paradox” - where kids know that animals are harmed to make food and therefore prefer to assume some foods are not made from animals. The big picture implication for these findings is summed up nicely by the researchers: “Childhood may represent a unique opportunity during which to establish lifelong habits that help to mitigate climate change.”