French Kids Eat Everything (16 page)

“
No!
” replied Sophie, rolling over to face away from me.

“Don't you want a hug?”

“
Go away!
”

As I left the room, I heard quiet sobs. And I was barely holding back the tears. This was the first time in her life that Sophie had refused a bedtime story. Meanwhile, Claire was crying in her bedroom. Giving up, I heated up another bottle of milk, hoping it would induce her, at least, to fall asleep happily.

I felt sick to my stomach. Neither of them had eaten well. Sophie had gone to bed hungry and angry. Claire had reverted to the feeding habits of an infant. We'd had the worst fight we'd ever had. I realized that I'd made things worse, rather than better. The Plan wasn't going to work. This wasn't the way to get children to love food.

Not for the last time, I bitterly regretted having moved to France. We had few friends, the girls were miserable, and we were living in a house that was little better than a moldy wind tunnel. We'd left friends, great jobs, and a fun city to move to a village where people thought Parmesan was exotic. And they wanted
me
to change
my
eating habits?

Luckily, Philippe's train was delayed, so the girls were asleep before he arrived home. When I debriefed him later that night, his response was thoughtful. (One of the things I love about my husband is that he never [well, almost never] says
I told you so
.)

“The French way of eating
is
better for the kids, and for us,” he gently insisted. “But you can't do this through punishing them,” he said. “The rules are a good idea, but you're not going to convince the kids to love food by being too strict with them. It has to be enjoyable. Not necessarily loads of fun, but simply pleasurable.”

Philippe had put his finger on where I had gone wrong, I realized. I thought that I had been trying to create a new routine. But I had made my routine into a power struggle. I had been too literal about the rules. If badly applied, food rules can be a form of emotional violence that shows a lack of respect for the individual.

I remembered one of my favorite parenting books: Jane Nelsen's
Positive Discipline
. My mistake, I decided, was that I'd been too permissive in the past, but had now overcompensated by being too authoritarian (strict, controlling, punitive). What I needed instead was to be
authoritative
(firm, but kind, and gently supportive).

Looking back, I also realized that I had forgotten about the two other “pillars” of French food culture: making eating a source of social pleasure and making things taste good. I probably shouldn't have served squash on our first night. And I probably could have been a little more flexible.

There was a reason that the French food rules weren't written down, I reflected. After all, they are habits and customs rather than
regulations
. I remembered what Madame had said at school. Rules are not (or don't need to be) about suppressing individual preferences but rather about fostering individual taste. Just as kids need a well-rounded education, they also need a well-rounded palate. I wouldn't achieve that by forcing my children to eat large servings of every vegetable they hated. The Plan had failed.

After the dismal start to our food experiment, I gave up.
Christmas loomed, but I just didn't have the energy to try again. My mood matched the weather: cold, rainy, miserable. I was terribly lonely and regretted having decided to move our family to France. What had I been thinking? It wasn't even snowing: we were going to have a wet, rather than white, Christmas. I spent long hours on the phone with my sister in Montreal, who tried in vain to cheer me up.

The only bright spot was the girls' enthusiasm for their first family Christmas in France. Before we moved, we had never managed to come for Christmas: flights were too expensive, and neither Philippe nor I could get enough time off work. The girls were thrilled at the thought of all their cousins gathered around the table. They wanted to help prepare food for the big dinner that Tante Monique was hosting (our contribution to this seven-course meal was a few hors d'oeuvres) and happily accompanied me on our last-minute market outings. They even came with me on our last pre-Christmas visit to the farm. As usual, they ran to visit the animals as I picked up our baskets of food. Their favorite was Arthur the Pig, who had sadly disappeared (“Gone on a holiday to Canada,” Hubert the farmer told them with a twinkle in his eye).

Even without snow, Christmas did seem magical. Gorgeous lights went up in the village, and the shops were full of intricate, intriguing window displays (watching the girls stick their noses up against the windows made me understand why window-shopping in France is called
faire du lèche-vitrine
—literally “licking the windows”). The girls even got to visit with Père Noël, who arrived by boat every year a few days before Christmas. The village children waited in a little huddle at the port on the edge of an old stone walkway. As Père Noël rounded the corner in a skiff, they walked down the cobblestoned quay to meet him, confessing their sins and demanding their gifts with wavelets lapping their boots. Then Père Noël sailed off around the rocky headland. Sophie and Claire came back glowing from this encounter, which seemed much more magical than the shopping mall scene back home.

So, when Christmas Eve arrived (the traditional time for family dinners in France), I was feeling slightly (but only slightly) reconciled to being there. But I was still anxious about how the girls would behave, knowing that we'd be up well past midnight in the presence of almost every member of the extended family. Philippe tried his best to gently encourage me as we drove over to his aunt's house.

“Try to relax,” he said. “If they see you being anxious, they will be too. If they see you trying new foods, they will too. And if they see their friends and family enjoying new foods, it will be that much easier.”

I tried to take his comments to heart. It was easier than we had expected as we arrived at the already-full house, where animated conversations were in full swing. With thirty people there, the obligatory greetings and
bises
took us at least half an hour, during which I had already lost track of Claire and Sophie, who had been taken under the wing of older cousins and chaperoned to the children's table. I decided I would not let myself worry too much about what or how they were eating. People didn't seem to be that focused on it—there were simply too many children to keep track of (another advantage of large families, I decided). Plus, the
mises en bouches
were already circulating:
carpaccio de St. Jacques
, smoked salmon (with little morsels cleverly perched in tiny little white ladle-like spoons, surrounded by creamy lemon sauce), and tart
verrines aux agrumes
(tiny glasses filled with citrus mousse).

In the end, the dinner went more smoothly than I could have hoped. Meals at the
cantine
and
crèche
had apparently taught the girls more than I had been able to teach them at home; they proudly sat in their chairs, “just like the big kids,” right through dinner. And although both Claire and Sophie politely refused the foie gras (which I couldn't bring myself to eat either), they devoured the melt-in-your mouth
pintade de Noël
(guinea fowl) with gusto. They didn't eat much else, but nobody seemed to notice.

Just as at Hugo and Virginie's, the children ran off to play, leaving the adults to enjoy their conversation. After a
plateau de fromage
worthy of the Ritz (Monique actually wheeled the tray around on a cheese trolley, with a specially made cheese knife), everyone came back together for the
bûche de Noël
—the traditional Yule log cake, complete with bark (chocolate buttercream), holly leaves and berries (marzipan), and snow (powdered sugar). As the youngest person still awake (the babies having been put to bed), Claire got the first piece—and clearly reveled in every second of the attention she was getting.

In fact, I had expected Claire to break down in a tantrum by 10:00
P.M
., but she just kept going. It helped that new things to eat, each more delicious than the last, kept emerging from the kitchen. It also helped that her cousins were behaving as if this was all perfectly normal. By midnight, I was wondering aloud whether I should put her and Sophie to bed. But my apparently Puritanical fanaticism about the girls' bed-time was firmly overruled several times by the extended family (“
Why, you can't put them to bed now! They would miss all the fun!
”).

So Sophie and Claire managed to stay up well past the champagne at midnight (only one sip!) and, in the end, put themselves to bed. One after the other, they curled up (Claire on the sofa, Sophie in a carpeted corner with pillows) and contentedly drifted off to sleep. After sitting at the table for more than five hours, I blearily longed to join them. When it was time to go, after 2:00
A.M
., Philippe and I picked them up and put them over our shoulders, just as we'd seen with the French toddler in the restaurant (it seemed like ages ago). And just like that toddler, Claire popped her thumb into her mouth and placidly allowed herself to be carried out of the house without making a sound.

On the drive home, I mused about how well the dinner had gone. Philippe was right, I admitted. French families encouraged their children to eat well, but they did this largely without direct conflict. Rather, parents created good routines early on, and the kids absorbed good eating habits by osmosis, by seeing and copying other kids and adults around them. I'd have to treat the rules more like habits, or like long-term goals. And I'd have to include other people in the kids' French food education, starting with myself. I had been wrong to try to change my children's eating habits without changing my own. I'd have to reform my own eating first. I'd have to make eating fun. Luckily, something I had recently read gave me the perfect idea for how to go about it.

—This traditional French version of “This Little Piggy Went to Market” is counted by an adult on the fingers of a child's hand.

My New Year's resolution was simple. By March, the kids
should be eating ten new foods—and loving them
. Christmas dinner (and an equally lavish New Year's dinner that had followed it) had inspired me to try again. But this time, I'd be more strategic. The kids would learn to eat new things, I told myself, even while learning how to make eating fun—for the whole family. I would (temporarily) give up on strict scheduling and on eating slowly. And I would relax my strict snacking regimen. For the moment we'd simply focus on developing the kids' ability to eat, and enjoy, a variety of foods; we'd move on to the other food rules after that.

My resolve was strengthened by some scientific research that I had stumbled across in my late-night Internet searches. A decade ago, two American researchers designed a novel experiment. It was based on decades of research showing that children's food tastes and habits begin forming in early childhood. The experiment was simple, but ingenious. Nine day-care programs were chosen to participate, involving nearly 120 children between the ages of three and five. The scientists divided them into three groups: A, B, and C.

On the first day of the experiment, children in all three groups were served vegetables as a snack, and their eating choices were recorded. One of the choices was a vegetable deliberately chosen to be unfamiliar: kohlrabi, served whole and sliced. After the snack, each child was interviewed, but not a single one could identify the target vegetable. (If you don't know what kohlrabi is, don't worry: I didn't either. A main constituent of the national dish of Kashmir, it's a member of the cabbage family that looks like a hairy turnip on steroids. But its sweet, mild taste belies its Frankenstein appearance: the hearts of young kohlrabi plants can be as juicy and crunchy as an apple.)

On the second day, a university student came in to read a picture book to each group just before snack time. Group A heard a story about a young boy going through his grandfather's garden and discovering that he liked vegetables, with the exception of kohlrabi. The book was modified so that the boy's refrain—“at least I didn't have to eat kohlrabi”—was mentioned on every page. Group B heard the same story, but with a positive refrain: “almost as good as kohlrabi.” Group C was read a book of similar length, but with no reference to food.