French Kids Eat Everything (7 page)

Order was important, Madame noted, because (by government decree) the children spent a minimum of thirty minutes at the table. I thought of the older kids I knew back home, allotted ten minutes to gobble down a cold sandwich at their desks, but I said nothing. How could Madame possibly understand?

In French schools, continued Madame, mealtime is meant to allow students to socialize, to take pleasure in new foods and to discover them in a relaxed environment. Eating the same thing is also an important factor in diversifying children's diets. At school, under the influence of peers, children taste and eat things that would have them turning up their noses at home (peer-induced behavioral change is also confirmed by American research). The French system is actually a highly perfected peer-pressure-driven food diversification program. With a few hundred attentive kids watching, would
you
make a fuss over your food?

Teachers, too, played an active role in educating the children about food, explained Madame as we walked along the corridors to the exit. They had three key goals. The first was to protect children's health and support their academic performance by feeding them nutritious food. The second goal was to educate children: to cultivate their palates, teach them basic rules of food hygiene and nutrition, and open their minds to food as culture, art, and national heritage. And the third goal was to discipline their eating habits, setting up healthy routines for when, where, how, what, and
why
kids ate what they did.

At this point, I almost said something. Madame's approach seemed incredibly rigid, and I didn't think it was going to work with Sophie. But Madame was in full swing, and I decided to stay quiet.

Proudly, Madame quoted, from memory, the French National Ministry of Education: “School is a privileged place in which children are educated about good taste, nutrition, and food culture. Good taste must be taught and learned, and can only be acquired over time.”

The exact approach to serving food, she explained, was governed by rules set out by the Ministry. Vegetables had to be served at every meal: raw one day, cooked the next. Fried food could be served no more than once per week. Real fish had to be served at least once per week. Fruit was served for dessert every second meal, at a minimum; sugary desserts were allowed—but only once per week. The rules even specified the quantities of nutrients expected to be in the average meal (if you're curious, these include 11 grams of high-quality protein, 220 milligrams of calcium, and 2.8 milligrams of iron for adolescents).

Meal planning was overseen by a nutritionist and a committee of parent volunteers. Parents were intensely interested in what their children were eating. That last part didn't surprise me: I had already heard parents greeting their children as they exited the classroom. Instead of the usual “What did you do in school today?” they all asked, “So how did you like your lunch?”

This reflected, I later learned, French parents' general lack of concern (at least to my North American eyes) with accelerating young children's intellectual development. No flashcards, no toddler violin classes, no Baby Einstein. In fact, French parents are puzzled by the intensity with which American parents try to stimulate intellectual precociousness in their offspring. (Flash cards? Really? You must be joking!) The French are deeply committed to formal schooling (which was more advanced than at home, as far as I could tell). But most parents believe that teaching reading and writing is a task best left to professional teachers. Instead, French parents focus on what they think young kids can and should learn: how to savor and enjoy food. All food. A typical question one French parent will ask another is: “So, what does she like to eat”? The other parent will proudly respond: “
Elle mange un peu de tout
.” (She eats a little bit of everything.)

Entire books on this topic are written for new parents, with tempting titles like
The Birth of Taste: How to Give Children the Gift of Enjoying Food
. In fact, French parents love to recount anecdotes about kids' first foods (much the same way North American parents share stories about first words). During our visits to village families with young children, we would almost invariably discuss what the children had been eating. Parents would share their children's food conquests in a kind of one-upmanship that North Americans usually reserve for sporting or academic achievements. Our friend Yves, for example, was incredibly proud that his nine-month-old daughter Nicole would eat Roquefort cheese (yes, the stinky green-blue moldy kind) and would excitedly offer little blobs to her in front of any and all visitors. I had to admit that Nicole did look exceedingly happy while gumming her cheese (“It's the salt,” whispered my husband in an effort to console me).

So I knew first-hand that French parents thought variety was important. What Madame was saying made sense. But I hadn't known until now that the school played such an active role in educating children about food in the classroom. According to Madame, food education actually occurred through formal lessons. She gestured to a diagram on the wall that looked like a food pyramid. Edging closer, I noticed something curious. Instead of the regular food groups, there were nine recommendations, like rungs in a ladder. The food groups were there (fruits and vegetables; milk products; grains and legumes; and meat, fish, and eggs), but there were also recommendations, Madame explained, about limiting fats, sugar, and salt. The bottom row—the base of the pyramid—was devoted to drinking water.
Was this a food group according to the French?
I wondered.

But before I had time to ask, Madame had moved on to talk about her personal favorite: the lessons organized during “La Semaine du Goût” (Tasting Week), held every October in schools across France. Throughout the week, celebrity chefs (from top restaurants like the Ritz) visited classrooms charming young children as they cooked and tasted foods together. The online videos of their performances sometimes became national news stories. More humbly, local cooks, bakers, butchers, cheese makers, and assorted food lovers of all types visited classrooms and campuses, offering teachable moments like “Authentic Fruit Juice Workshops.” Over 5,000 of these lessons had been organized across France the previous year. (Simultaneously, restaurants all over France offer special “Tasting Week” menus at affordable prices.) In spite of myself, I felt a skeptical look come to my face; I doubted that any gourmet chef, no matter how good, could convince Sophie to eat things she didn't want to eat.

But teaching kids about food didn't stop there, Madame continued. Great care was taken in teaching children how to eat well and wisely, and in “awakening their taste-buds,” as she poetically put it. The school followed the teaching method developed by the national French Institute of Taste (no, I am not making this up). Each year, teachers began with simple lessons on the senses that encouraged children to develop skills of introspection and verbalization. Through exploring how food experiences are composed of taste, vision, smell, touch, and hearing, children learn to explore food through their five senses. This “taste training,” as it is commonly known in France, is based on lots of fun games. A favorite teaching tactic for Sophie's age group is the
sac fourre-tout
. Children take turns reaching into a small hole in this “stuff sack” (which is filled with fresh vegetables and fruit), handling and describing what they find, before seeing its contents. In another lesson, children are given trays with many small pieces of different foods and asked to classify them into categories like salty, sweet, acidic, and bitter. Later on, they're blindfolded and asked to taste, describe, and identify a piece of food they are offered. The goal is to encourage children to develop a sensory appreciation of food, using all five senses. That, I admitted, sounded like something Sophie might like.

Madame looked encouraged. She referred enthusiastically to French research on “sensory appreciation” and its importance for healthy eating habits. Schools, she proudly noted, used these research results in their curriculum. In classroom lessons, students learned to reflect on food and to speak about their thoughts and feelings. Once this happened, she continued, children began to develop richer ideas about food. The same food—avocado, for example—might be prepared three or four different ways and offered to the children, who would learn about the different culinary expressions and about their own sensory skills. Spices were introduced in older grades, where children were also asked to critically analyze media messages about food, and learned about France's
patrimoine culinaire
(culinary heritage) as part of their social studies lessons. That even sounded like it would be useful for me.

The lessons then moved on to introduce complex aromas, explore food preferences, and prepare dishes (usually regional specialties), finishing with Tasting Week's grand finale: a
repas de fête
. This is a difficult concept to translate but is best understood as a celebratory meal at which eating is the primary vehicle for celebrating. All children had to go through this process together, Madame insisted. For those really interested, special after-school classes were available (like the summer cooking camps that our older nieces and nephews attended). The local government had even organized a field trip the year before, to the Epicurium—the world's first museum dedicated to fruits and vegetables—in the heart of the southern French city of Avignon.

“So,” concluded Madame triumphantly, “Sophie will have a wonderful time eating at school, just like everyone else.” I didn't know what to say. All of this sounded like fun, but I still didn't think it was going to change Sophie's mind about beet salad.

“That does sound wonderful,” I stammered, feeling as if I was on thin ice. Gathering my courage, I insisted: “I don't think this will work for Sophie. She needs to eat well in order to learn well. She needs to snack at least twice a day. She can't concentrate when she's hungry. And I'm not sure she'll be able to handle the food in the
cantine
. Could she not bring her own lunch, or at least her own snacks?”

“NO!” came the reply. It was clear there was no room for negotiation. “Snacking provides poor nutrition, which doesn't help children learn,” said Madame, with a firm tone. “It's my job to teach healthy eating habits to
all
of my students.” For Madame, it was clear that learning to eat the French way was mandatory.

I must have looked mutinous because Madame stopped at the exit to add a couple more points. Throughout the year, Sophie would come home with fun ideas about food, Madame promised. The children would grow their own vegetables in special plots set aside in the schoolyard. The class would go on field trips to the local market, which was only a five-minute walk away. And they'd blend studies of food with other subjects, like science, particularly in their module on snails.

Madame must have noticed my reaction at her mention of snails, for she stopped her monologue to suggest that if I had any other questions I should perhaps see the school's psychological counselor.

I froze in alarm. “Isn't Sophie a bit young to see a counselor?” I gasped out weakly.

Silence.

“The counselor would be for
you
,” Madame finally said before turning away to welcome the arriving students.

My husband laughed when I told him this later. “French people don't get anxious about food,” he said. “Most believe that children's eating problems are due to the parents.” I found this insulting. Did he think that
I
had caused Sophie's eating problems? It turns out he did (sort of), and we ended up having one of our first big fights of our year in France.

“I'm not anxious,” I told him. “I'm simply protecting Sophie.”

“From what?” he replied. I didn't have a good answer.

The bell rang, and the students streamed into class towing Sophie in their wake. I was left clutching her brown paper lunch bag and wondering what would come next.

The answer was: nothing. No special allowances would be made for Sophie, who would have to adapt, and the sooner the better. The purpose of school was to educate Sophie, in spite of me. No one would pander to her or to her parents. Or, in my case, to her anxious foreign parent.

None of this made me feel very comfortable. But, as I quickly learned, French schools are not interested in making parents feel comfortable. They have a punitive model of education (which applies equally to both parents and children who get out of line). When I learned that one of Sophie's classmates was getting detentions because she didn't finish her in-class work fast enough (in kindergarten!), I started to realize what we were up against. But I felt powerless to do anything about it.

“Why do they have to be so rigid?” I later asked my husband.

“Why do you think I left France intending never to come back?” was his reply. It was true: my husband didn't cope well with the many rules and routines of French society.

But he also pointed out something really important about the French schooling system: by making food education mandatory, the government ensured that healthy diets would not be restricted to the elite. In countries where food education and nutrition are not mandatory at school, children from wealthier families with higher levels of education tend to eat much more healthily. In contrast, our village school—which included families from all walks of life (from farmers to pharmacists, fishermen to factory workers)—had a mission to teach everyone to eat well, supporting what children learned at home. And low-income parents had more help, I knew, than did North American parents, through tax breaks, reduced fees for all sorts of things (even train fares), and government-subsidized day care and after-school care. The French approach levels the playing field (although the exclusion of Muslim children due to the lack of halal foods is a longstanding issue).