French Kids Eat Everything (2 page)

The “strategies” used by parents we knew in Vancouver didn't seem very satisfactory. Force and pressure tactics didn't appeal to me (although I admit to trying them). And I didn't like bribing kids to finish (or even start) their meals. Vitamin pills seemed like a cop-out, particularly after I read that they don't supply nutrients the same way fresh food does. So I bought the cookbooks that suggested sneaking healthy foods into kids' meals, and I tried concocting specialized menus that required the skill of a chemist and the savoir faire of a chef. As I wasn't a particularly enthusiastic or efficient cook, I found this approach to be incredibly time consuming. And it didn't really work; in fact, it backfired. Sophie's sensitive “yucky food” detectors would be put on alert by the faintest whiff of anything odd, and she became even more suspicious of what was on her plate. And even if the “sneaky” method had worked, it made me wonder: Would my kids keep putting cauliflower puree in their brownies after they had left home? I didn't think so.

Admittedly, my failed attempt to sneak healthy foods into my kids' meals was, in part, a reflection on my limited cooking skills. Soon after we married, Philippe christened me
La Reine des Casseroles Brûlées
(the Queen of Burned Pots), given my unfortunate habit of going on the computer, or diving into a really good book, in the middle of making a meal. My cooking repertoire was limited to four or five dishes (at most) that would cycle over and over again, with potatoes featuring heavily throughout. This is the way I was raised. My mother came from a farming family;
her
mother had eight children to feed and little time for fancy extras. Every night, she would prepare one dish and serve it without ceremony. “We ate,” remembers my uncle John, “because we were hungry. And no one ever encouraged us to eat. If we didn't eat our share, so much the better: there'd be more for everyone else.” My grandmother's favorite was
stamppot
, a dish produced by boiling potatoes together with kale and then mashing everything up (yes, this results in green mashed potatoes). Dollops of butter and dashes of salt and pepper were the only flavorings used (my relatives considered garlic to be an exotic spice). That
stamppot
is still one of my favorite dishes tells you a lot about my culinary credentials.

So it was unsurprising that my first forays into French cuisine—as a consumer—were unsuccessful. The first time Philippe brought me to see his parents was perhaps the worst. On the spur of the moment one rainy April morning, just after we started dating, he invited me to visit his parents' house in Brittany. From Oxford (where we were both studying), it was only a short drive to Portsmouth, where we caught an overnight ferry. We left under gray clouds and drizzle, slept on the boat, and awoke to a magical sunrise, with breaking waves surging on the rocky shore surrounding the stone citadel of Saint-Malo. We drove in Philippe's battered Renault 5 car through one tiny, charming village after another, and then along the coast, alternating between rocky cliffs and enormous white sand beaches gleaming in the sun. It was the first time I had set foot in France, and I was utterly seduced.

We arrived at his parents' house—a picture-perfect stone cottage covered in vines—in time for lunch. The meal, for me, was unforgettable. Bathing in sunlight on the
terrasse
, Philippe and his parents treated themselves to a plate full of local seafood, most of which was suspicious-looking shellfish the likes of which I had never even seen, much less tasted. When I was a kid, the closest I got to fish (and the closest I wanted to get) was the canned tuna casserole that my sister and I loathed, and that my mother topped with potato chips in an attempt to bribe us to eat. (My sister usually caved in, but I never did.)

I gave the shellfish a pass, only to find myself confronted with a large sole purchased that same morning, Philippe's mother proudly announced, fresh off the fisherman's boat at the local wharf. Confronted with a whole fish on a plate, I felt totally helpless; never having eaten anything like this, I had no idea where to start. So I sat, cheeks burning, while Philippe cut up my sole in front of his bemused parents. It was years before I felt at ease eating fish, and I confess to feeling ambivalent (to say the least) about serving it to my children. So you could say (and I certainly felt) that my daughters came by their limited eating repertoires somewhat honestly.

Philippe, however, was frustrated by our family's eating saga. On most matters, the relaxed attitudes of North Americans suited him just fine (in fact, he preferred them to the more rigid, formal French manners). But he was perplexed by the way our daughters ate, particularly in comparison with their French cousins, all enthusiastic eaters. And his extended family back in France was more than perplexed. They were quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) outraged.

Looking back, I now realize they were expecting me to educate my children about food. According to the French, this should start when children are very young, well before their first birthday. After all, eating is one of the first acts that an infant performs consciously, and then independently, even before walking and talking. This provides a wonderful basis for discipline: firm but gentle guidance about life's rules. I use the word “rules” hesitantly, because although the French approach to food education is highly structured, these are not rigid regulations. Rather, they're more like commonsense routines, or social habits: unwritten, and often unspoken, but collectively accepted. Like most cultural codes, these rules are often mysterious to the outsider, but not particularly complicated once they've been explained; in fact, they are often deceptively simple. This was the case with the first “food rule” that I figured out:

French Food Rule #1:

Parents:
You
are in charge of your children's food education
.

The belief that parents should actively educate their children about food in a gently authoritative way is at the heart of the French approach to kids' food. Deep down, I knew that this approach—which was much more authoritative than my approach—might benefit my children. But for a long time, I resisted it. Fostering independent eating was an important step in building autonomy, right? The kids should be in charge of their own eating, right?

Absolument pas! Absolutely not! That is a recipe for disaster!
warned my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, the cousins, aunts and uncles, and Philippe's friends. Given how their children ate, I had to admit they seemed to have a point. During our first visit back to France after Sophie was born, when she was just eight months old, I watched in amazement as other babies her age devoured everything their parents gave them and contentedly napped for hours after every meal. Sophie, meanwhile, was fussy at mealtimes. She played with her food, spat it out, and clearly viewed eating as an annoying interruption in her daily schedule. Most of her meals—the sweetest apple puree, the smoothest mashed banana, the creamiest yogurt—would end up dribbled on her bib, her hands, and my lap (where she preferred to sit, regarding the highchair as some kind of torture device). It's not that she wasn't hungry. But when she woke up during the night, or after her achingly short naps, she wanted milk. And
only
milk. She had, to say the least, an ambivalent relationship with solid food, which didn't improve as she got older.

At the time, I assumed that Sophie took after me rather than after the French side of the family. One of my sister's favorite photos—and the first one she showed to Philippe when I took him home to meet the family—is of me in a highchair: pursed lips, cheeks red from crying, carrot puree smeared on my psychedelic 1970s-era overalls. The wallpaper behind me has a retro orange texture (a closer look reveals methodical splatters worthy of
Extreme Makeover
). The way my family tells it, I won every food fight we ever got into.

“Sophie is just like me,” I would sigh. “I hated vegetables when I was young.”

“
Mais non!
” I was told, “she just hasn't tried them enough times yet. When she's really hungry, serve them again. Then she'll eat anything and everything.” At this point, I started to wonder.
Maybe, just maybe, the French know something I don't
. And I was right. They did know some things I didn't. French parents are provided with very different information about food, and about children's eating habits, than American parents. This is because French doctors, teachers, nutritionists, and scientists view the relationship between children, food, and parenting very differently than do North Americans. They assume, for example, that all children will learn to like vegetables. And they have carefully studied strategies for getting them to do so. French psychologists and nutritionists have systematically assessed the average number of times children have to taste new foods before they willingly agree to eat them: the average is seven, but most parenting books recommend between ten and fifteen. So whereas I often assumed that my children didn't like a particular type of food, my French friends would simply assume their children hadn't tried it enough times. And their children usually proved them right. French children cheerfully taste new things with an air of calm curiosity that I've rarely seen displayed by American adults, much less children.

How exactly do the French manage this, you're thinking? What strategies do French parents use? What do they cook? And what do they say (and, just as important,
not
say)?

I couldn't answer these questions until we moved to France. When we were visitors, the French politely ignored my (to them) odd eating habits, and an allowance was made for my status as a foreigner. But once we had chosen to settle there—in the village where Philippe grew up—everything changed. The French are not known for their tolerance: there is normally one right way to do things (which, unsurprisingly, is almost always the French way). They are never shy about letting their views be known, and they have little tolerance for culinary faux pas. So our family, friends, and neighbors took on the task of teaching my children—and me—how to eat properly (in other words, like the French). In restaurants and grocery stores, at school and at day care, on the playground and in people's homes, my beliefs about food, kids, and parenting were challenged.

Slowly, I began to understand how the French think about children and eating. The first thing I had to do was redefine how I understood the word “éducation.” I kept being told that I had to “educate” my child, and so I would hasten to assure people that I had, in fact, already started saving for university. But that's not what they were talking about. The word “
éducation
” covers a lot of ground in French: it includes the knowledge acquired through formal schooling, but also the manners and behaviors, habits and tastes developed through discipline in the home. The goal is to produce a child who is
bien éduqué
(or
élevé
): who is well spoken, well mannered, and well behaved. In other words, a major goal of French parenting is to produce a child who knows and follows the unwritten rules of French society—which are much more strict than those in North America. French parents are very respectful of these social rules: training children to be
bien éduqué
is just as important as giving them self-esteem (in fact, they believe that the latter depends, in part, on the former).

Now, healthy eating is one of the most important skills that parents help their children develop. Underlying this focus on food education for young children is a simple principle:

Chances are, my children are not going to grow up to go to Harvard, or to be major league sports stars, concert musicians, or NASA astronauts. But no matter who they grow up to be
, how
and
what
my children eat will be of great importance to their health, happiness, success, and longevity
.

Don't get me wrong: it's great to encourage kids to be the very best they can be. But from the French perspective North American parents often cram schedules so full that little time is spent teaching kids some of the most basic, important things they need to know, like the proper way to prepare, cook, and eat healthy food. In order to explain to myself how important this really was, I finally settled on a simple comparison. French parents think about healthy eating habits the way North American parents think about toilet training, or reading. If your children consistently refused to read, or even learn the alphabet, would you give up trying to teach them? Would you be content to wait for your children to toilet train by themselves, assuming that they'd eventually “grow out of it” or “figure it out”? Probably not. You'd probably figure out strategies to help them develop this essential life skill. Philippe tried to sum this up by explaining a famous French dictum to me:
tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are
. In North America, many parents will simply shrug if their child refuses to eat well. The French, meanwhile, are thinking:
show me how your kids eat, and I'll know what kind of parent you are
.

The idea that French parents place high value on their children eating well is obvious. What is less obvious is
how
French parents get their children to eat well. Before we moved to France, I had my suspicions. Maybe tyrannical French parents
force
their kids to eat everything, I thought. Maybe this is just another version of the Asian “tiger mother” syndrome: the fierce French parent who insists that her children
mangent absolument de tout
(
must
eat some of everything). In fact, what we saw in France was just the opposite; fights over food were rare, and I never saw a parent force any child to eat anything.