Toward understanding children’s conceptualization of category ambiguity in foods

Children’s ability to mentally represent the world through concepts and categories is a core cognitive development achievement. Young children can classify foods using taxonomic, script, thematic, and evaluative categories. However, emerging food innovations with ambiguous category membership increasingly complicate these boundaries (e.g., plant-based meat analogs, dairy alternatives, hybrid foods, and veggie-based carbohydrate substitutes), as their properties, often shaped by how they are engineered, named, and marketed, fit imperfectly with children's existing categorization systems. Despite the increasing prevalence of emerging food innovations, little is known about how children conceptualize and categorize these foods. This paper introduces the construct of category ambiguity, distinguishing this construct from related ones such as graded typicality, epistemic uncertainty, and cross-classification, and situates it within the broader categorization literature. Category conflict of this kind is not unique to food, but novel food innovations make this general problem unusually visible because these products are engineered to decouple properties that ordinarily converge to determine category membership. The paper proposes a tentative framework identifying three possible responses (category extension, boundary revision, and maintaining competing representations), and considers how language and labeling, essentialist and teleological reasoning, and executive function may jointly influence which response a child exhibits across development. Future research directions generated by the framework address labeling, cultural variation, and the link between conceptual representation and food acceptance, with implications for supporting openness to new foods and sustainable eating.