Avoidance of plant foods in infancy.

Infants avoid touching plants. Here we examine for the first time whether infants are also reluctant to touch plant foods. We hypothesized that infants would avoid plant foods because food neophobia-the avoidance of novel foods-is particularly strong for fruits and vegetables. However, we predicted that infants would avoid processed plant foods to a lesser degree than whole leafy plants because they bear the markers of previous human engagement. In a first assessment, we presented 7- to 15-month-old infants, recruited from a predominantly White population around Berlin, Germany (