Vegetables kids will eat: the 20 easiest to start with

Children like sweet, mild and crunchy vegetables best, and bitter, soft ones least. That is most of the list right there. Carrot, cucumber, cherry tomato, sweetcorn and peas land with most children long before sprouts or spinach do, and none of that is about character. How to introduce a new vegetable is covered in the guide on learning to eat everything; this page is about which vegetable to pick for that, and how to put it on the table. The cucumber beats the sprout, and it has done for thirty years.

Why these ones

Children taste bitter more strongly than adults do. It is not fussiness but a real difference that fades with age, and it explains why sprouts, chicory and kale come back untouched while carrot and sweetcorn simply disappear. Texture matters just as much: crunchy feels safe and predictable, watery and limp feels unpleasant in the mouth.

Familiarity does the rest. A child likes a food more the more often they have tasted it, and in two-year-olds that link has been measured directly (Birch, 1982). So the vegetables below are not only the easiest to like, they are the easiest to offer often without it turning into a fight.

The seven to start with

• Carrot. Raw, in sticks or coins, ideally with a dip. Cooked it is softer and blander, so begin raw.
• Cucumber. Neutral, crunchy, cool. The safest first vegetable there is.
• Cherry tomato. Sweet and small. Halve them for children under 4 because of the choking risk.
• Sweetcorn. Sweet and easy to pick up. Straight off the cob often works better than loose in a bowl.
• Peas. Sweet, small and round. From frozen, briefly cooked, they stay firmest.
• Pepper, red or yellow. Noticeably sweeter than green. Raw strips beat fried ones.
• Sweet potato. Roasted until the edges caramelise. The closest a vegetable gets to a chip.

Seven that follow easily

• Cauliflower. Raw florets with a dip often go down better than boiled. Roasting turns it sweet.
• Broccoli. Same approach. Many children will eat the "trees" long before the stalk.
• Green beans. Briefly cooked so they still snap, not boiled until limp.
• Courgette, or zucchini. In slices from the pan or the oven. Boiled, it is too watery for most.
• Butternut squash. Roasted it is sweet and soft, and the colour helps.
• Mushroom. Fried with a little salt. The texture takes getting used to, the flavour is mild.
• Leek. Softened slowly it turns sweet. Raw it is far too sharp for children.

Six that need more time

• Sprouts. Bitter, but halved and roasted with honey or apple they are a different food from boiled.
• Chicory. Most bitter raw. Baked, or served with something sweet alongside, is the first step.
• Spinach. Raw in a salad or blended into a smoothie lands sooner than cooked.
• Kale. Bitter and tough. As oven crisps it does far better with children than in a stew.
• Aubergine, or eggplant. Soft and spongy. Works best in thin slices from the oven.
• Cabbage. Sharp when raw and strong when boiled. Finely shredded in a slaw is the gentler version.

These six do not have to leave the table. They can join the queue like everything else, just not first. Expect them to come round once tasting itself has become ordinary, and that happens faster than the first one did.

Frozen and tinned count

Frozen vegetables are often better for this job than fresh. Peas, sweetcorn, green beans and spinach are frozen soon after picking, they are always in, and you can take a handful without the rest going off. Which is exactly what you need when you are offering one small piece every day for weeks.

Tinned and jarred work too, just watch for added salt or sugar in jars. What does not appear in any study is fresh produce working better for learning to like something. What counts is how often your child tastes it, not where it came from.

The same vegetable, a different shape

Before you switch to a different vegetable, try the same one in a different form. To a child, raw carrot and cooked carrot are two separate foods: one crunchy and sweet, the other soft and bland. The same goes for batons against coins, roasted against boiled, and with a dip against without.

That order saves a lot of time. A child who refuses boiled cauliflower but eats raw florets does not need a new vegetable, they need a different chopping board. How often a vegetable needs to come back before anything shifts is covered in the article on the number of tastes it takes.

Putting them on the table

Put one piece on a separate saucer beside the plate, not a spoonful on the plate itself. That way the new vegetable touches nothing else, the amount stays small enough to face, and there is no plate that has to be emptied.

Add a dip and say nothing about it. Yoghurt with herbs, hummus, a mild sauce: it makes the piece less daunting and gives hands something to do. And pick one vegetable to offer for weeks at a time. New food turns frightening around the age of 2 and stays that way until about 6 (Dovey, 2008), so repeating the same thing beats a different thing every evening.

What you do not need to do

You do not need twenty vegetables in the house. Two or three from the first group, offered for weeks, do more than a full drawer of which most gets thrown away. You do not need to hide anything to make progress, though it can sit alongside the visible piece quite happily. And you do not need to say how good something is for them, because that demonstrably does not make a food more appealing to a child.

Project Food keeps count of which plants have been tasted. After dinner you tap what went round, person by person, and every taste counts towards that plant's card: silver after 5, gold after 10. That way you can see which vegetable is nearly there and which is still at the start, without keeping a list yourself.