Food for Boys and Food for Girls: Do Preschool Children Hold Gender Stereotypes about Food?

Family meals are occasions for socializing children to gender roles and the symbolic meaning of food and eating. One of the relevant symbolic meaning of food concerns its gender connotation: Meat, especially red meat, is considered the quintessential male food, whereas fruit, vegetables, dairy, desserts, and fish are considered typical female food. These food-gender associations have been mainly investigated in adulthood; only a few studies involved children. The present study examined preschool children’s explicit and implicit food-gender stereotypes, their stereotypical food likings, and mothers’ influence in the transmission of such stereotypes. A group of 137 Italian preschool children (4–6 years-old) performed two tasks: (a) an Implicit Association Test (IAT) measuring the association between meat and vegetable dishes and male and female faces and (b) a “waiter’s game” in which they assigned images of different foods to men, women, boys, and girls depicted on cards. Moreover, they were asked to indicated their likings for the food employed in the waiter’s game. Mothers were given a questionnaire assessing gender-based stereotypes about food and eating habits. The results showed that boys already associated meat with men and vegetables with women at the implicit level and expressed a preference for masculine foods. Such stereotyping did not emerge at the implicit level for girls or at an explicit level for either girls or boys. Moreover, mothers’ attitudes and behaviors predicted, at least in part, their children’s food-gender explicit stereotypes but not children’s implicit stereotypes. Stereotyped food likings were predicted by children’s explicit stereotypes.