CHILDREN’S OPINION ON VEGETABLES CONSUMPTION: A QUALITATIVE STUDY ON SCHOOL-AGERS IN CITY OF SEMARANG

It Is recommended that children consume adequate amount of vegetables. However, the problem still remained in every single family and community. Many studies to find out its causes have been done. Unfortunately, most of them were conducted on parents only. Little is known from children’s own perspective. Children’s perspective is important to help adults in choosing vegetables for the children. Thus, this study aimed to explore children’s opinion on vegetables consumption. Qualitative design was employed. Samples were selected using purposive technique sampling. Nine participants aged 6-12 years were interviewed in a focus group discussion. Data were analysed using qualitative data analysis by Miles and Huberman. The FGD indicates three themes: why kids dislike vegetables, sort of vegetables which kids love to consume, reasons why kids want to eat vegetables. Health education and involving children in their own food preparation is promising way to improve vegetables intake. Further research is to develop a new form of health education and a program in which children are involved to choose and prepare their own vegetables.

sample which fulfilled the criteria, the researcher asking for assistance from caders. The caders chose the participants from all neighborhood (RT). There were 9 (nine) children who met the criteria. Consent was obtained from parents due to participants' age which were under 17 years old. Then, the children were invited in a small focus group discussion (FGD) located in urban village hall (Balai Kelurahan) and being asked with semi structure questions. The FGD was chosen as data collection technique in order to give relax nuance for children and to encourage children who keep silent to also state their opinion as other children do.
At first the researcher was asking the names of vegetables pictures, such, water spinach, carrots, beans, spinach, broccoli, cabbage, and mustard in order to ensure they were familiar with such vegetables. Then, the participants were asked if they liked each vegetable. Data was analysed using data analysis by Miles and Huberman. The analysis includes: data collection, data presentation, data reduction, and verification (Miles et al., 2014). The credibility as a part of validity in qualitative study was conducted by giving back the result to all participants. The result was all participants confirmed the finding as what their thought were.

Results
There were nine participants consists of 4 girls and 5 boys. Demographic data of the participants is described in Table 1. The focus discussion with children demonstrates various opinion on vegetables consumption. Three themes emerged are reasons why kids dislike vegetables, sort of vegetables which kids love to consume, reasons why kids want to eat vegetables.

Reasons why kids dislike vegetables
There are two reasons why they dislike eating vegetables: vegetables are un-tasty and bitter The following is children's statements about the un-tasty vegetables: Kid A: "I don't like vegetables. They taste bad", Kid B: "No, I don't like". "Un-tasty", Kid C: "I don't like them", "They are un-tasty", Kid E: "Don't like", "Tastes not good.

Sort of vegetables which kids love to eat
Despite their dislike on vegetables, the children mentioned sort of vegetables they like to eat, like water spinach, spinach, and carrot. These are their statements: Kid A and Kid F: "I like water spinach", Kid D, Kid E, Kid H and Kid I: "I like spinach", Kid C and Kid G: "I like carrot"

Reasons why children love vegetables
The children have their own reasons why they want to eat vegetables. There are two reasons: the taste is good and vegetables are healthy as stated below: Kid A: "It's healthy" Kid B: "it's tasty"; Kid C: "It's healthy"; Kid D: "It's tasty"; Kid E: "It's tasty"; Kid F: "It's healthy"; Kid G: "It's healthy"; Kid H: "It's healthy"; Kid I: "It's healthy".

Discussion
The aim of this study is to explore school-age children's opinion on vegetable consumption. The investigation results on three themes, which are reasons why kids dislike vegetables, sort of vegetables which kids love to consume, reasons why kids want to eat vegetables.

Reasons why kids dislike vegetables
The kids stated that the reasons why they dislike vegetables were because it is un-tasty and bitter, unlike fruits which tasted sweet. This finding is in accordance with a study in Denmark and Lithuania which resulted children do not include fruits and vegetables as their preferences (Ragelienė, 2021). The participants seemed to be in a group of tasters as they said the vegetables were bitter and they were rare eating vegetables. A study in USA discovered children who were categorized as non-taster consumed more vegetables than those who were taster (Bell & Tepper, 2006).
Those taste issue has various reasons, such as natural taste of development, parental role model, dan vegetables choices. Assumption of Birch (1999) as cited by Bergström et al. (2012) was children tends to sweet meal in order to get adequate energy and obtain feeling of safety. On contrary, bitter taste indicate poison. Bitter taste of vegetables comes from compounds name glucosinolates and isothicoynates. It is evident in Brassica vegetables. However bitterness taste sensitivity is influenced by individual (Wieczorek et al., 2018).
According to studies, vegetables acceptability is affected by human development. A study using 6-propyl-2-thiouracil for bitterness sensitivity proved that children had more frequency of bitter sensation than adult and most of the children avoided bitter vegetables or greens (Negri et al., 2012). This because the sweet preference obtained at the earlier age of children (Mennella et al., 2016) and this is proven as a part of evolutionary selection (Mennella & Bobowski, 2015). However, there was a study that indicated gender and social economic status were more significant affecting children's vegetables intake (Feeney et al., 2014) as a study in Irish that figured there was no difference between TAS2R38 genotype or PROP taster status group in vegetables consumption (O'Brien et al., 2013). Furthermore, a research by Grimm et al., (2014) proved that vegetables introduction at earlier age was not related to its intake at age of 6.
Further, parental role model proved that had significant function to increase children vegetables consumption. Children who were given an example by their parents will consume more vegetables than those who were not (Draxten et al., 2014). Meanwhile a study by Albani et al., 2018 found that self-concept and affective attitudes played important role to increasing students' motivation to consume fruit and vegetables daily.

Sort of vegetables which kids love to consume
This study indicates children have their own favourite vegetables although they do not like vegetables in general. Those vegetables are water spinach, spinach, and carrot. This preference might be affected by repeated exposure of certain meals by parents to their children. This exposure allows children used to with the taste (Barends et al., 2019;Fildes et al., 2014;Keller, 2014). Water spinach, spinach, and carrot are typical vegetables served on the table in Indonesian family. Indonesian mothers provide those kinds of vegetables more often than other vegetables for their children during the week. Other study discovered that parents have important role on children's food choice. The children were told to eat certain vegetable. Therefore, they follow parents' instruction. The children also mentioned they like the nutritious meal because their mothers cook it good (Atik & Ozdamar Ertekin, 2013).
Water spinach, spinach, and carrot becomes the most favourite vegetables. Water spinach has evidenced to reduce heavy metal absorption (Yang et al., 2012). A study in Nigeria, heavy metals has increased the risk of having cancer (Adesiyan et al., 2018). While in India, a study discovered that slight concentrate of heavy metals in a surface water might be harmful for human (Singh & Kumar, 2017). Spinach is highly consumed by Indonesian people has huge benefits. A review disclosure that spinach functioned as anti-obesity, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, glucose lowering, and antioxidant (Roberts & Moreau, 2016). Spinach contains Vitamin K which has significant role in blood clotting (Miano, 2016;Seegers, 2013). Further, carrots has similar benefits as water spinach and spinach, which are antioxidant, anticarcinogen, and immunoenhancer (da Silva Dias, 2014).

Reasons why kids want to eat vegetables
The kids confirmed they preferred certain vegetables such as carrot, spinach, and water spinach because with various reasons: it tasted sweet and were considered as healthy food. The participants revealed they preferred sweet taste. This corresponds to a study that discovered the sweet preference develops by age. The opposite, sweet sensitivity was not related to age development (Vennerød et al., 2018). The participants stated that the consumed vegetables due to its advantage. This is similar to study result of Holsten et al., (2012) which revealed the children pick vegetables and fruit because of its advantages. The finding indicates that their willingness to eat vegetables was influenced by doctrine stated vegetables is healthy although only for certain vegetables. Therefore, optimism is here. Children might be educated that other variant of vegetables are also good for their healthy. The education might start at early age, preschool stage. Droog et al., (2013) using picture book to introduce vegetables and fruits for this stage. This method is in accordance with development milestone of pre-schooler who are very imaginative (Hockenberry & Wilson, 2015).
Later when children are in school age, they can be involved in some project as according to Erikson's theory of psychosocial development, children will perform children's development stage is creating something as a personal achievement (Hockenberry & Wilson, 2015). Hutchinson et al. (2015) using this milestone in their study by implementing a project which required schoolagers to participate in school garden and resulted the increase of vegetables consumption. While at home, a collaboration between parents and children in preparing food might increase children's vegetables consumption (Olfert et al., 2019).
Another milestone in psychosocial development based on Erikson, children loves to work with age maters. This help them learn from peer easily. Therefore, Staiano et al. (2016) use this milestone to attract children learn about vegetables in order to improve their vegetables intake. They compared two group students, watching a video displaying their peers consumed vegetables and not watching students. The first group demonstrated vegetables intake more progressed than those who did not watch video. Another activity involving peer project showing the improvement vegetables intake on children was repeating cooking together in a camp program (Ehrenberg et al., 2019).

CONCLUSION
This study aims to investigate school-age children's opinion on vegetables consumption. The exploration resulted on three themes which are reasons why kids dislike vegetables, sort of vegetables which kids love to consume, reasons why kids want to eat vegetables.
Health education and involving children in their own food preparation is promising way to improve vegetables intake. Further study is to develop a new form of health education and a project involving children to prepare their own vegetables meals in order to improve vegetables intake in school-agers.