Tweens Can't Recognize Common Fruits and Veg

I could have gotten them all at 11 except a gooseberry.
I still wouldn't get that one right.
What's a gooseberry?

@Heather: what I remember picking them from my youth is a gooseberry is a green fruit like a grape but a little hairy and grew on bushes.

I wouldn't have recognised a pomegranate in my youth.

You are absolutely right!! Fruits and vegetables are the natural diets which helps to healthy growth in teens as well as for adults. Colorful fruits and fresh vegetables are always best options to mix with our food items. Thanks for your info.

I'd have gotten all of them except for gooseberries, which you never saw in the U.S. when I was a wee lass. Nowadays you can find them at fancier food shops, but I doubt my kid will ever see one because they are so expensive!

How would the parents of those kids scored?

With kids, the best you can hope for is "monkey see - monkey do"

If the parents aren't setting a good example by eating fruits and veg in place of junk food, how can we expect the kids to eat healthily?

ajh, yes, that's a good description of a gooseberry! They're not uncommon in the UK (but I doubt I knew what one was aged 11 -- I can't remember ever eating one, either).

I think this also applies to cooking as well. When I left home for collage, I had no clue how to cook the simplest dish and by the end of my freshmen year, I gained 15 - 20 pounds. It took almost another year to lose that weight. I think we should get our kids familiar with not only the fruits and vegetables but also some healthy recipes.

Those findings are amazing. I can't believe kids aren't being exposed to these fruits and veggies. Again it has to go back to the parents...

I am a bit shocked by the findings. Even if the kids didn't eat or see the real veggies, they should have at least seen the pictures in books, papers or online.

To me it's common sense/knowledge to know the veggies that are mentioned in the article.

Maybe it's not so "common" anymore now...

This reminds me of that one study that asked kids in Europe to draw a cow. And apparently they all drew purple cows due to an advertisement.

When me and my sis were kids, we'd go with my dad to the grocery store and every week, we got to pick out a piece of fruit or a new kind of vegetable to try. So by the time I was 11, I knew what a pomegranate was...I also knew what starfruit, passion fruit, mango, papaya, and boysenberries were. I also knew what parsnips, carrots, celery, fennel, artichokes, etc. were. Any time I found a "new" veggie or fruit, I'd ask if we could try it. That's how I found out that I decidedly did NOT care for artichokes, but that fresh spinach was WAY better than the frozen kind.

Some of those fruits/veggies are a little obscure, but c'mon, potatoes and celery? Those are EASY.

Just out of curiosity, what's a courgette? Is that another UK term?

Well... I know the common top ones but these?
* turnip - yup
* pomegranate - saw for the first time about a year ago
* eggplant - didn't know it til about 14
* artichoke - um... Not common here in NZ
* gooseberry - I know in theory what it looks like!

a courgette is also known as a zucchini, at least here in australia..and i grew up in the country where we had a huge vegie patch and grew a lot of our own fruit and veg - and I was taught to cook from the age of 4!!

growing up we had pomegranate, kumquat, and guavas in our backyard. now i am on the east coast and these while available in my local store they are never as fresh or as ripe as remembered. i like many others would have missed the gooseberry!

My mom is a very picky and frightened eater (she's 60 now, but has never been one to try new foods - I think it genuinely scares her), so growing up, we ate a pretty limited diet. I was scared of trying a lot of things because my mom turned up her nose at them so strongly. I would not have identified a lot of these as a child, or even into early adulthood. I still couldn't tell you a gooseberry, and I'm not sure I've ever eaten a turnip.

Another thought I had reading this: I grew up in a rural area in a town of around 2,000 people. We did most of our grocery shopping in the "big" town of 15,000 down the road. But still, because of the small population and rural nature, we didn't have a huge selection of produce - the basics, a few exotic things every now and then. I didn't try a mango until I was over 25, for example - I know the local store wouldn't have had them, and the bigger store wouldn't have on a regular basis. When we moved to where we are now, I was shocked at the variety of produce and the kinds I'd never seen before - 3 different varieties of mangoes, golden raspberries, many different peppers, baby and red bananas. I never would have seen all these things - and more - if I'd stayed in that small town.

It would be interesting to see how adults would do. I'm not sure what a pomegranate looks like. I love artichokes though and they are fun to eat.

A gooseberry is another name for a kiwi, which it's more commonly known as across the pond.

I knew a lot of fruits and vegetables when I was 12 and I was quite a keen cook. Gooseberries are vanishingly rare in the US and are getting rarer in the UK, too. I would have flunked that one, and possibly the pomegranate. I would not have known what an artichoke was. I still remember vividly my first artichoke, which was given to me by a beloved French teacher when I was 15, and she also told me how to cook it. I took it home, followed her directions, at the whole thing myself with a little lemon butter dip (none of the family was interested) and I have never looked back!

Some of my earliest memories involve a vegetable patch my parents had in the back yard, where we grew carrots, tomatoes and zucchini.

Later on, in school, as part of the nature classes, we grow some vegetables like eggplant & watermelons, spices like basil and fruit trees like pecan, almond and citrus.

So as a kid I could name almost everything on the list (except for gooseberry, which we don't have in this country), I could also tell you how the plant looked like before they where picked!

And I was a city girl, mind you.

This is sad.

My 11-year-old knows them all. Artichokes and pomegranates are two of her favorite foods. We buy gooseberries from a local farm during the summer. Everything else is so common for her it's ridiculous.

We live in upstate NY, where we have had our own garden, shop regularly at the farmer's market, and belong to a CSA (where they are free to roam the farm). But even when we lived in the middle of NYC, we still shopped at farmer's markets and belonged to a CSA. And I've always cooked from scratch and involved them in shopping and cooking.

The only one of these that would have stumped me as an 11-year-old (in NYC) is the gooseberry.