Children's liking for vegetarian and non-vegetarian school meals at the scale of a French city.

In Western countries, a behavioural shift towards more plant-based diets is helpful in protecting population and planet health. School canteens are an important public policy target to achieve this transition. Increasing the frequency of vegetarian meals in school canteens has been proposed as a solution to decrease greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining a good nutritional quality. However, vegetarian meals acceptance by children is key to limit unintended consequences such as increased food waste or increased nutritional inequalities. We aimed to examine children's liking for vegetarian and non-vegetarian main dishes at school canteens; and whether it varied across socioeconomic level. Connected scoring devices displaying a five-point smiley scale were installed in all the 38 primary school canteens of a French city, located in socially diverse neighbourhoods. Every day after their school lunch, children were asked to rate the main dish they had just eaten. During one school year, from September 2021 to June 2022, we collected 208,985 votes for 125 main dishes, including 32 vegetarian (i.e., no meat or fish) and 93 non-vegetarian dishes, for an average of 1672 (SD 440) votes per day across the 38 school canteens. We showed no difference in children's liking for vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes. Additionally, the socioeconomic level of the schools was found to interact negatively with children's liking for vegetarian main dishes whereby vegetarian main dishes tended to be more liked in schools of lower socioeconomic level. In this French city, children's acceptance would not be a barrier to increase the frequency of vegetarian school meals and would not increase social dietary inequalities.