French Kids Eat Everything (21 page)

J'ai faim!
Mange ton poing,
Et garde l'autre pour demain.
Et si tu n'en a pas assez,
Mange un de tes pieds
Et garde l'autre pour danser!

I'm hungry!
Then eat your fist.
If you're still hungry, you can eat your wrist.
Then if you still want to eat,
You can nibble one of your feet
And keep the other for tomorrow's treat!

—Traditional French nursery rhyme

By early March, we had reached a turning point. We had
met my New Year's resolution goal: the girls were eating ten new things: spinach, beet salad, ratatouille (thanks to our friend Laurence in Provence), salad with vinaigrette (thanks to Sandrine), vichyssoise (potato-leek soup), red peppers (even raw), broccoli (a real victory), tomatoes (ditto), tapenade (mostly Claire, who had developed a fiendish love of olives), and quiche (with a liberal dose of ratatouille in it, so maybe that didn't quite count). At the gentle prompting of her papi, Sophie had even eaten a mussel.

Even Philippe and I had gotten in on the act: we both had an aversion to cauliflower, and to the girls' delight, it had been making a regular appearance on our parental plates—although liberally doused with a creamy béchamel sauce—for the past month. The first few times, Claire and Sophie giggled uncontrollably at the exaggerated faces Philippe and I made when confronted with cauliflower. “Taste it! Taste it!” they would happily urge. Our gradual love affair with cauliflower was only half-pretend and made the process of encouraging the girls to eat new foods that much easier.

We had made real progress, and I felt proud. But something kept nagging at me: snacks. My children were
tasting
quite a few new things and even eating some of them in fairly reasonable quantities. But they were still snacking quite a bit, and the volume of food they were eating at snacktime rivaled (or surpassed) what they ate at meals.

But snacking didn't seem to be an issue for the French parents we knew. In fact, none of the French children we met ever seemed to be snacking. They didn't snack at the park. I never saw them snacking in their cars. I never saw a single French child rummaging in cupboards or the fridge. This was as true for the French children living in our little village as it was for the girls' big-city cousins in Paris and Lyon.

“So when do kids snack?” I eventually asked my mother-in-law.

“They don't snack, of course,” she replied. Her surprised look was a sign that I'd asked, yet again, one of those dumb foreigner questions. Deflated, I dropped the subject. But I kept thinking about her answer. No snacking? Really? At home in North America, any time spent with kids meant time spent feeding them snacks. I did a little research and found out that Sophie and Claire were typical: North American kids snack, on average, three times per day (in addition to their three meals per day). And I was amazed to learn that one out of every five American kids eats up to six snacks per day.

My mother-in-law was right, though. French kids don't snack. I knew this from watching the families around us in the village. Their children ate four square meals per day, on a set schedule: breakfast in the morning, lunch at around 12:30, the
goûter
at around 4:30
P.M
., and dinner between 7:00 and 8:00
P.M
. That was it. Virginie confirmed my impressions. She even sent me France's official food guide, which emphatically recommends no snacking. It doesn't seem as if this advice is really necessary, anyway. For most French parents and children, this eating schedule is an ingrained, unquestioned habit. And it's not that they are constantly struggling to avoid a secret raid on the pantry. Rather, eating at other times of day simply would rarely occur to them. Just in case anyone strays, snack food ads on French TV carry a large white banner (like the warnings on cigarette packages) bluntly stating: “For your health, avoid snacking in between meals.”

Why are French kids raised this way? Partly because French kids (like kids anywhere) are adults in training. And French adults, for the most part, don't snack—at least not in public. They don't walk down the street munching on muffins or sipping coffee. They don't keep snack foods in their purses or pockets (or at least they're not supposed to). When snacks are eaten regularly, and publicly, this is sufficiently out of the ordinary as to merit public comment. I remembered one anecdote about a well-known French politician: even before he made international headlines, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (former minister of finance, and then director of the International Monetary Fund in Washington) was slightly infamous for regularly indulging in a
tartelette
—a sort of miniature pie—for his late-afternoon treat. Hearing this from Véronique (who had written a book about DSK, as he is known to the French), I thought it best to keep some of the more questionable sides of my food past—like the “nibbling diet” I had tried, and actually kind of liked—to myself.

Still, I couldn't quite believe that French adults didn't snack. “But what about all of those cafés in Paris?” I asked Véronique on the phone one afternoon.

“It's true that Parisians love to go out to the café, to wander the city,” she told me. (She used the word
flâner
, which roughly translates as “strolling slowly, aimlessly, while enjoying whatever there is to look at”). “But watch the people sitting in cafés, and after a while you'll realize something: most of the people eating outside of mealtimes are tourists. The French customers might be having an espresso, but that's usually it.” I was astounded by this and later asked Virginie to confirm what Véronique had said.

“Most French people don't snack every day, and about half don't snack at all,” she told me. “And if they do snack, most eat only one snack in the late afternoon, because they will be having an unusually late dinner—maybe starting only at 9:00
P.M
. or later.”

Even the words that they used to describe snacking were revealing. Virginie talked about an
en cas
(which translates as “just in case,” implying a once-in-a-while deviation from your ordinary routine) and
grignotage
(from
grignoter
, which means to nibble or gnaw). The implication is that it is both unusual, and somehow deplorable, to snack. In fact, Virginie explained, it was only when researchers started doing food diaries a few years earlier that the French realized that adults snacked at all. This news of a “snacking epidemic” caused something of a scandal in France, with politicians and experts bemoaning the decline of healthy eating. She sent me some newspaper clippings, and I had to laugh when I read the catastrophic headlines. I found it hard to imagine what they would say about the fact that 98 percent of American adults snack every day, and nearly half of American adults snack three times per day. And I doubted that Americans were eating what French people ate at snacktime: fruit and tea or coffee topped the list, followed by yogurt, and bread and butter.

So the reason that French kids don't snack is simple: they are just like their parents. And the no-snacking rule has some clear advantages for their parents. Their kids' car seats and strollers are not covered in crumbs (fresh white baguette, one of our family favorites, is also one of the world's best crumb-making devices) or sticky juice residue (an excellent adhesive for crumbs). Their purses are not secret storehouses of goodies that send their kids into whining low blood sugar–inspired tantrums (and that leak disastrously onto keys, brushes, and credit cards). One astonishing observation that I made in our first few weeks in France just about sums it up: strollers made in France don't have cup-holders and neither (at least traditionally) do French cars.

This means that snacking is one of the many things to which unwritten food rules apply in France. No snacks are served at school—with the rare exception of three- and four-year-old kindergarteners in some schools (and pressure is mounting in France to ban this somewhat controversial practice altogether). And no French parent expects food to be made available at any event outside the home, except a birthday party (which will be scheduled to coincide with the timing of the traditional afternoon
goûter
). In fact, offering a snack to a child at the “wrong” time is definitely a major food faux pas. I had been reminded of this the week before when we were visiting my mother-in-law's house. We'd been there longer than expected, and I was rushing to leave at 6:00
P.M
. when I stopped to offer a snack to Sophie, as I knew she was feeling desperately hungry (mostly because I was feeling the same way).

“It's nearly dinnertime,” my mother-in-law protested. “You'll spoil her appetite!” And before my unbelieving eyes, she removed the cookies from Sophie's hands, holding firm despite the wailing protests that followed. Sophie would simply have to wait to eat. Tight-lipped, I gave in, and hauled Sophie to the car. “You're right! Of course she'll have to wait” was all I said to Janine. And wait she did, but not for long; as soon as the car was out of the driveway, I slipped her a baguette in the backseat. “
Grignote
all you like!” I told her, feeling defiant.

This incident was one of many. Since we had arrived, snacking had gradually become a major source of tension in our family. When we moved to France, our family snacking habits were definitely more North American than French. Our daughters had been breast-fed on demand. As they grew older and got more demanding, one of the things they demanded most often was food. And, generally, we gave it to them, pretty much whenever they wanted. In order to respond to the frequent requests for food, I stashed snacks in every possible location: the car, the stroller, the purse, the diaper bag.

This seemed normal because most of the people we knew did the same thing. Back in Vancouver, the little kids we knew grazed constantly. They snacked at school and after school. They snacked at after-school events, sports practices, at the park, and at almost any gathering lasting for more than about fifteen minutes. They snacked in their strollers and cars. The key turning in the ignition generated a Pavlovian response in my kids: “I want something to
eat
.” Snacking is so widespread—and so ingrained in North American parenting routines—that I had just taken it for granted. I brought snacks with us everywhere we went (or they were brought to us by devoted armies of volunteer moms who had more flair for baking than I have ever demonstrated).

So I didn't feel as if our family was unusual. And I was resistant to changing our habits.
Kids have little tummies
, so my thinking went.
They need to eat regularly, every couple of hours or so, or they'll get too hungry
.

“Hmmm,” my husband responded, when I told him this theory, after I'd had a bristling disagreement with his mother about feeding snacks to the kids.

“Is that how you grew up?” he gently asked. “It's certainly not how I grew up.”

He had a good point. I didn't remember a lot of snacking growing up. We certainly didn't snack in the car (music on the eight-track player, not food, was our major distraction). Curious, I went to do some more research. What I found confirmed my memories: our kids snack more than we did when we were their age. When I was growing up in the 1970s, most kids ate one snack per day. And one-quarter of kids didn't snack at all.

Thinking about my own family history, this made sense. My grandparents had been through the Depression and two world wars, so frugality and homemade meals were their norm. This was how they raised my parents. When I was young, we rarely went out to restaurants (even though fast food was readily available then), because it was not how my parents had been raised. And I spent my afternoons playing with the neighbor kids outside, not being ferried in the car from one lesson to the next. We would come home from school, change clothes, and head out to play until dinnertime—without stopping to snack.

I didn't grow up snacking.
But that doesn't mean snacking is bad
, I argued. And argued. (Persistence, as my husband likes to point out, is one of those good qualities that I sometimes don't know how to rein in.)

But my husband is persistent too. He quietly asked Virginie to send him some research, which he started discreetly leaving on the kitchen table. Once I started reading, I couldn't stop. As it turns out, snacking isn't so harmless. One reason is that kids' snack food is (surprise!) not particularly healthy. Sugary desserts are the number-one favorite snack food, followed by salty snacks and sweetened beverages (like soft drinks and sports drinks). Our kids are drinking less milk and eating less fresh fruit than we did when we were their age. Basically, just like adults, they are filling up on “fake food” at snacktime and consuming more calories, but fewer nutrients, as a result. In one article I read, worried nutritionists characterized this as a dangerous trend toward “constant eating.” Thinking about all of this made me wonder about the rates of overweight kids in France. Few people in the village seemed overweight—and not a single one of Sophie's classmates. The statistics I read confirmed what I was seeing: 20 percent of kids in the United States are obese, but only 3 percent in France.

Still, I worried that giving up snacking would be a bad thing. To counter my husband's research, I found other studies, which showed that snacking could improve mood, memory, and blood sugar levels.

“Not snacking makes kids stressed,” I said, triumphantly, pointing to printouts of some of the studies I'd found.

“I think,” Philippe said mildly, “that not snacking makes
you
stressed.” It was true that my kids got upset, restless, whiny, and jittery when they didn't snack. But it was also true that I got upset, restless, whiny, and jittery when they didn't snack. I decided to try my next argument.