How much thought do you give the food you eat in a day? Are you worried about eating healthy, or concerned about body image? Where do our perceptions of food and diet come from?
Athabasca University researcher and assistant professor Alexa Ferdinands asked the first two questions on a regular basis in her work as a clinical dietician.
And this week, she’s presenting her preliminary findings on the last question at Canada’s largest academic conference, Congress 2025. Her latest study aimed at uncovering when and how narratives around eating evolve by asking another: how do kids feel about their food?
“I used to work at a weight management clinic as a dietician, and (patients) would often be recounting stories of weight stigma, being bullied as a child in school, and these memories were really vivid for them,” said Ferdinands.
“I was curious about the messages that kids were hearing about food and their relationships with food, because we know that the relationship children develop with food and their bodies can have lasting, long-term health impacts well into adulthood.”
To get the answers she was looking for, Ferdinands partnered with the Girl Guides of Canada and conducted a qualitative study, focused on the whys and hows rather than hard data collection, on a group of young Sherwood Park-based kids.
Twenty-nine Guides and Pathfinders, varying in age from nine to 15, participated in group cooking sessions with researchers, making either trays of nachos or cookies. Researchers and participants ate together, and the youth were then asked questions in a one-on-one interview.
“The most significant observation we made is that kids are actually keenly interested in learning about healthy eating and want to improve their food skills, they just need more opportunities to learn without being criticized or graded, or having a parent hovering over their shoulder,” said Ferdinands in a press release.
Social norms around healthy eating and diet culture were also a focus of the study; Ferdinands said understanding the way girls develop perceptions about their bodies and how to fuel them and integrating positive education on the topic has been a priority for the Girl Guides of Canada organization and participating parents.
“The hope is that our findings will be able to inform that programming and potentially integrate more opportunities for kids to be learning about food and experimenting with food in the process,” said Ferdinands.
Initial findings
While in-depth analysis of the data is currently underway, Ferdinands will be sharing the preliminary findings with more than 7,000 fellow academics, researchers, policy-makers and more at the 2025 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, hosted this year at George Brown College in Toronto, Ont. May 30 to June 6.
In the sample size chosen, Ferdinands and team found, to their surprise, a largely positive relationship with food among participants. The kids saw food as fun, were eager to learn more, and displayed skill in following and executing recipes.
The study found social media also has an impact on youth’s relationship to food; young people are able to follow celebrity chefs and take in cooking videos and creative food content as entertainment.
And despite the prevalence of fast food options around them, participants indicated their consumption was lower than researchers anticipated, averaging to about once per week. Participants showed an enthusiasm for grocery shopping, particularly when accompanied with samples and good deals.
While the initial results of the study shed light on how kids view and relate to food, Ferdinands noted the findings aren’t necessarily universal. Her sample size did contain differences in socio-economic backgrounds, but she said family finances and other variables such as location can impact the type of feedback received.
“Not all kids have a kitchen at home that’s fully stocked with equipment that they can practice cooking in,” said Ferdinands. “Even grocery shopping, we did see a little bit of that. Some of the youth were quite conscious about food prices and were very well-versed in what things were on sale and budgeting.”
Following her presentation at Congress 2025, Ferdinands hopes her study will prompt other researchers to look into different contexts around kids relationship with food, and help parents and communities think about food learning in new ways. And with many of her own questions still unanswered, Ferdinands work on the subject is far from over.
“I want to learn about how kids in rural and remote communities — those spaces tend to be much more under researched — how kids in those spaces are learning about food and what kind of discourses they’re engaging with.”
In addition to pursuing more research on the topic, she hopes to implement the recommendations out of the study herself by way of creating an after-school pilot project in her local community as one way to create new food opportunities for youth.
“This is very much in the preliminary brainstorming phase, but there are certain spaces like youth hubs or teen centres that have done this in other contexts,” said Ferdinands, noting while some can be pricey, others offer programming for free.
“Their early findings suggest these can be really helpful places for kids to be able to just have spaces to play with food and learn about and talk about it and do it with their peers and have the opportunity to make mistakes without any repercussions.”
And beyond the pages of research papers and the walls of family or communal kitchens, Ferdinands wants to see her study and subsequent work open doors for kids’ first-hand perspectives on food, including how curricula is designed for schools and the upcoming rollout of the National School Food Program.
She also wants to challenge narratives around food, such as classifying all foods into the healthy versus unhealthy binary, and rethink kids’ role in the kitchen.
“The biggest take home message at this point is that if young people don’t have opportunities to learn about and experiment with food, they may not develop the skills that they need to build and maintain healthy eating habits into adulthood.”
