French Kids Eat Everything (3 page)

So maybe it was the recipes? The meals that I saw ordinary French families eating were simple and quick to prepare—while still being healthy and tasty. But when I dutifully copied down a few promising recipes and tried them at home, they certainly didn't have a similar effect on my children.

What did French parents know that I didn't? More important, what did they
do
and
say
that I didn't? How, exactly, did they get their kids to eat everything
and
enjoy it? As I learned during our year in France, the secret lies not only in
what
, but also
how, when
, and (most important)
why
French kids eat.

Learning this secret was not the reason we moved to France. I am not a foodie, and Philippe is one of the rare French men I've met who has relatively little interest in food (which helps explain why he could entertain the thought of marrying a foreigner). I had little desire to improve my cooking skills; if anything, the thought of having to cook French food filled me with a vague sense of dread.

But living in France awakened my interest in how French parents cook for, eat with, and educate their children about food. I began to ask questions, and also to voice my objections.
My kids won't eat that way! It's too expensive! I don't have the time!
Luckily, the French love talking about food. In many French households, the most common topic of conversation around the breakfast table is what will be eaten for lunch. And at lunchtime, almost without fail, someone will bring up the topic of what should be eaten for dinner. Discussing food—
how
as well as
what
we eat—is the national hobby of the French. So when I asked questions, people were only too willing to talk.

From my many conversations with parents and teachers, doctors and scientists (and from the research I did to back up what I was hearing) I learned that feeding children well doesn't need to be conflict-ridden or complicated. I learned simple tricks for teaching children to enjoy eating a wide variety of foods, and I also learned that nutrition and healthy eating habits, while important, don't need to be the main focus. Rather, enjoying your food is the focus, and healthy eating habits are a happy by-product.

This view (food is fun!) helped inspire our family to reinvent the way we eat. Over the course of our year in France, we discovered ten Kids' Food Rules. Applying these rules challenged some of my most deeply held beliefs about children, food, and parenting. This was sometimes uncomfortable, but our quest to reinvent our family's food culture was also an experience that brought us closer together. I was inspired by seeing the French families all around us who fostered a healthy love of food—and a love of healthy food—in their children. I hope that our story will inspire you to do the same.

Alors, on y va!

Au nom du père

(In the name of the Father )

Parent touches the child's forehead

Et de la mère

(And the Mother )

… the nose…

Et de l'enfant

(And the Child)

… the left eyebrow…

Tout ce qui est bon

(Everything tasty)

… the right eyebrow…

S'fourr là-dedans!

(Gets stuffed inside!)

… and pops the food in the child's mouth.

—French nursery rhyme

Living in France is not like visiting France, my husband
warned me before we moved. I couldn't understand what he meant. We'd spent enough time there, I thought, that I truly felt at home. It was true that we had never
lived
in France. But when we were studying in England, we spent every spare moment we could there. Most of our friends were other international students who soon left England and scattered around the world. We did the same; a year after we were married, we moved to Vancouver, a city that neither of us knew. Despite the birth of our two daughters, we never really settled in, and I daydreamed about moving to France someday to be closer to Philippe's family. We'd find work somehow, I told myself. Our daughters would learn French and spend more time with their grandparents and cousins. I wanted out of the rat race, and rural France seemed like the perfect place to retreat.

As our children grew, so did my nostalgia for all things French. A brown donkey named Gribouille was partly to blame. At about the same time we returned to North America, our English friend Andy left New York to travel across the French countryside with Gribouille for a companion, and wrote a contemplative book about his journey. Later, I realized that his book wasn't really about living in France, as he didn't stop long enough to settle in. But at the time, his account of “finding tranquility in a chaotic world,” as Andy put it, seemed compelling. Where better to find tranquility than in the French countryside?

Finally, when Sophie had just turned four and Claire was a toddler, we decided—or rather
I
decided—that we'd make the move to France, to the small village where Philippe grew up: Pléneuf Val-André (population: 3,900), on the northwest coast of Brittany. Philippe didn't share my enthusiasm; he preferred living in a big city, with the mountains and ocean at our doorstep. As much as he missed his family and loved his large circle of intensely loyal French friends, he didn't want to move back home. Even his parents were ambivalent.

“What will you do here?” asked Jo, my father-in-law. “The village is so small.”

I tried to tell them that this was exactly what I was looking for. A big-city girl, I craved a cozy village life for my kids. I found it hard to understand why Philippe had left. In the end, we compromised: we'd try it for a year. Both of our employers (universities that often granted temporary leaves of absence) agreed that we could telecommute for one year. I was ecstatic.

We arrived in mid-July, at the height of Brittany's short summer season. Our new home was an old stone house overlooking the bay, only a few minutes' walk from where we had been married in a small chapel dedicated to local fishermen (we took our vows under a handmade replica of a schooner, proudly suspended from the plaster ceiling).

Although it had only five rooms (three of which were bedrooms), the house felt delightfully clutter-free and uncomplicated. We had traveled to France with only two suitcases; everything else was in storage back in Vancouver. Arriving with so little suited Philippe, who still had mixed feelings. But I couldn't share his ambivalence. Clichés sprang to life: fresh baguettes tucked under arms, cobblestone streets, church bells, café courtyards in the sun, ivy trailing up the stone walls of our house. It was the height of the local farm festival season (complete with pig roasts and cornfield mazes for the kids); between farm visits and family visits, we spent our days wandering the local countryside.

Just below the house was the beach: a glorious expanse of smooth white sand running a mile wide and half a mile deep at low tide, ringed by rocky cliffs and turquoise water. I knew that so much sand could only be produced by storm-driven waves, and I was well aware of Brittany's reputation as an incessantly rainy place, but as July turned into August, the weather was mostly balmy. The girls played for hours in the sand while we read books, lounged, and dozed (me) or sailed, windsurfed, and kayaked (Philippe).

Le paradis!

Gradually, we began meeting our neighbors. Early one rainy morning, I glanced out the window to see a man suspiciously clad in a large garbage bag, which he had fashioned like a cape by poking a hole through the end. He was standing amidst the bushes that separated our house from his, searching carefully through the leaves, popping things too small for me to see into another large garbage bag he was holding in his hands.

“What's he doing?” I whispered to Philippe.

“Collecting snails,” he replied, after a quick look out the window.

“To eat?” was my astonished response.

“If you're really nice, maybe he'll share!” teased my husband.

The neighbor did invite us over the next day to sample some of his harvest, which I politely declined (although Philippe happily went to eat a plateful of baked snails with garlic and came back two hours later looking highly satisfied).

Thankfully, Mr. Snail (as I took to calling him) was not our only visitor. In fact, a stream of family and friends came by to welcome us. Philippe was one of the first members of his family to leave the region, and many of his relatives hadn't strayed far from home. His mother and her two sisters—talkative, stylish, domineering matriarchs—now lived less than five miles from where they had grown up in a small farming hamlet. They typically visited in a pack—aunts, uncles, and cousins in tow—and would take over the kitchen for hours, cooking family meals, endlessly telling stories, filling the house to the brim.

Although I would often half-heartedly offer to help out with cooking, I was usually shooed away. My reputation as a cooking novice had been established soon after meeting Philippe's family, with a memorable culinary disaster. My sister-in-law, Véronique, had just met her future husband, Benoît, and they had traveled down from Paris to introduce him to the family. This being Benoît's first visit, Philippe and I had made the trip over on the ferry from England. When we arrived, my mother-in-law, Janine, was fussing over the arrangements for the meal. Boldly asserting that I could make a great apple pie, complete with a homemade crust, I proudly rolled up my sleeves and did indeed produce a lovely looking
tarte aux pommes
—with pastry so hard that it was impossible to cut. When enough force was applied, the crust shattered into tiny pieces. I had apparently come up with a great recipe for flour-based cement. After that, I was pretty much banned from cooking, which suited me just fine. I would do the dishes, or just sit and enjoy the endless bantering, yet affectionate, conversations.

Listening to Philippe's family talking to my daughters, I began to learn the endearments that the French reserve for small children. Many of them revolve around food. Janine's favorite was
ma cocotte
(
mon coco
for boys), literally, “my little chick.” Much to his discomfort, she still occasionally called my husband
mon petit chou
(my little cabbage). I soon learned some of my own endearments and would tease Philippe by calling him
mon trognon de pomme
(my apple core). Jo, Philippe's normally reserved father, would call his grandchildren
mon lapin
(my rabbit), which is, of course, an edible animal for the French.

Food was even a theme of the children's songs that our daughters learned from their cousins: “Savez-vous planter les choux” (Do you know how to plant cabbages?), “Dame tartine” (Bread-and-butter lady), “Les temps des cerises” (Cherry season), and my personal favorite, “Oh l'escargot” (an ode to snails that sounds wonderful in two-part harmony). Food, it was clear, was an important part of how French families interacted with their children. But before we moved to France I didn't really understand the central role that food plays in formal French education.

That all changed when Claire started day care in mid-August. The plan was that she would be settled before Sophie started school in September. But she wasn't settling in well at all. And eating, in particular, wasn't going well. Claire was expected (like all French children) to eat the freshly prepared three-course lunch prepared on site by one of the staff. But Claire's diet at the time was like that of many North American toddlers: made up largely of cereals (in her case, buttered toast and crackers), complemented by largely symbolic attempts at feeding her the standard vegetables (carrots, peas), most of which she simply refused to chew. This was normal, I thought. But, as I soon found out, that's not what the day-care staff thought.

It all started with beet puree, in an episode that was the first of my many culinary faux pas. In the last week of August, we were invited to a meeting at the day care: an information session, or so I thought, remembering the equivalent back home, where we had discussed hand-washing hygiene with a public nurse and toured the facilities. My expectations were wrong. When we dutifully arrived at 4:30 in the afternoon, no nurse or antiseptic hand wipes were to be seen. The smiling staff welcomed us with elegant
amuse-bouches
(a term for cocktail nibbles that literally means “entertain the mouth”). On the first tray, intriguingly colored dips were perched on top of delicate puff pastries: bright pink, light green, creamy off-white.
How imaginative
, I thought.
How French
.