French Kids Eat Everything Read online

  Illustrations by Sarah Jane Wright

  Dedication

  To Philippe

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1 French Kids Eat Everything (and Yours Can Too)

  2 Baby Steps and Beet Puree: We Move to France, and Encounter Unidentified Edible Objects

  3 Schooling the Stomach: We Start Learning to “Eat French” (the Hard Way)

  4 L’art de la table: A Meal with Friends, and a Friendly Argument

  5 Food Fights: How Not to Get Your Kids to Eat Everything

  6 The Kohlrabi Experiment: Learning to Love New Foods

  7 Four Square Meals a Day: Why French Kids Don’t Snack

  8 Slow Food Nation: It’s Not Only What You Eat, It’s Also How You Eat

  9 The Best of Both Worlds

  10 The Most Important Food Rule of All

  Tips and Tricks, Rules and Routines for Happy, Healthy Eaters

  French Recipes for Kids: Fast, Simple, Healthy, and Tasty

  List of Recipes

  Soups and Purees

  Salads and Main Courses

  Snacks and Desserts

  Resources

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  This book is a very personal story about our family. But it also addresses issues that affect all of our children. Because of poor eating habits, the current generation of North American children will suffer far more health problems—and perhaps have a shorter life expectancy—than their parents. We may be training our kids to eat themselves into an early grave.

  It’s hard to change the way our families eat. Although we know what we should be eating—more fruits and vegetables and as little processed food as possible—we don’t do it. Or, even if we prepare healthy food, our children often won’t eat it. Food insecurity (unaffordability, lack of access) is a serious issue, but even families with adequate resources don’t always eat as healthily as they should. So we need to figure out better strategies for how as well as what to feed our kids. This is where the French approach to food education offers valuable lessons. Living in France taught our family that children can eat well and enjoy it too. The healthy eating habits, smart routines, and tasty recipes used by French families and schools were the basis of our family’s reinvention of our approach to eating. They inspired us, and my hope is that our story will inspire you too.

  But this is not solely a question of parental responsibility or personal behavior. In France, schools, governments, and communities have worked together to create food and education systems that support parents in feeding their children well. In North America, it often seems as if the opposite is true. So we urgently need to have a collective conversation about how to reinvent kids’ food culture—in homes and schools, on farms and in stores via market and governmental reform. My hope is that this story (which is not about haute cuisine, but rather about how ordinary French families are empowered to feed their children well) will inspire you to join in that conversation.

  1

  French Kids Eat Everything (and Yours Can Too)

  * * *

  Le plaisir de la table est de tous les âges, de toutes les conditions, de tous les pays et de tous les jours.

  The pleasures of the table belong to all ages, all conditions, all countries, and to each and every day.

  —Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (1826)

  * * *

  Ask my children what their favorite foods are, and the answer might surprise you. Seven-year-old Sophie loves beets and broccoli, leeks and lettuce, mussels and mackerel—in addition to the usual suspects, like hot dogs, pizza, and ice cream. Claire, her three-year-old sister, loves olives and red peppers, although her all-time favorite is creamed spinach. Living as we do in Vancouver, where the world’s largest salmon-spawning river flows through one of the continent’s largest Chinatowns, our daughters also happen to love seaweed, smoked salmon and avocado sushi.

  Our daughters’ enthusiastic eating habits are no surprise to my French husband, Philippe. But they still surprise me, because food fights used to be frequent at our house. Before our family moved to France and embarked on our (unintended) experiment with French food education, dinnertime was parenting purgatory. Fries were my daughters’ favorite “vegetable.” Anything green was met with clenched teeth. Whining stopped only when dessert appeared. Our daughters subsisted on the carbohydrate and dairy-rich diet that is the mainstay of North American families. Our standbys were Cheerios, pasta, and buttered toast. We considered goldfish crackers to be a separate food group.

  Sophie was a picky eater right from the start. By the time she was three, she had developed a fear of new foods that reminded me a lot of myself as a child. Anything objectionable on her plate would trigger her little “crazy food dance” (as we called it): arms waving, eyes rolling, Sophie would whine, sometimes yell, and even jump up from the table to avoid being confronted with the fearsome food in question. Her somewhat quirky tastes didn’t make it easy to avoid setting off this behavior. For example, Sophie didn’t like vegetables, or anything white or creamy: cheese, yogurt, any sauce of any description, or even ice cream. And she refused to eat things that most other children like, including macaroni and cheese, and sandwiches of any kind.

  In contrast, Claire—her younger sister—was our little Buddha baby, calm and contented. You’ve won the lottery, our midwife told us on the day she was born. While Sophie specialized in twenty-minute naps (but only while being walked in the stroller or snuggled in the baby carrier), Claire would enjoy lazy two-hour siestas and still sleep for a blissful ten hours at night. And she ate almost anything. That is, she would eat almost anything until she started behaving like her older sister. This gave me a serious case of parental performance anxiety, combined with a good measure of guilt.

  You see, my husband’s friends, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and other sundry and assorted relatives all expected our daughters to eat like French children. And French kids eat everything, from fruit salad to foie gras, spinach to stinky blue cheese. They eat things most North American kids (and some of their parents) would never dream of eating, like cardoons. (Don’t worry, I’d never heard of them either.) They also regularly consume things that most of us wish our kids would eat, like salad. I have seen my French nieces and nephews greeting radishes with as much delight as popcorn. I have witnessed three-year-olds devouring seafood of all sorts and toothless babies sipping everything from béchamel sauce to vegetable bouillon. Some have even more exotic preferences: Didier, who would cheerfully savor la langue de boeuf (beef tongue), or little Fabrice, whose favorite food was museau à la vinaigrette (pickled pig snout), or baby Claire, who gummed her daily ration of Roquefort cheese with obvious delight.

  Now, French kids don’t eat this way because of some genetic predisposition for liking exotic foods. Just like kids anywhere, their favorites include things like pasta, potato chips, chicken, and chocolate. But that’s not what they usually eat. As amazing as it may sound, French children love all kinds of food, and most of what they eat is healthy. True, you might find the rare French child who has an aversion to specific foods (cauliflower, in my husband’s case). But, for the most part, French kids consume anything put in front of them. They eat in a straightforward, joyous, and all-embracing way that seems baffling to the ordinary North American. And everyone assumes this is normal—including the kids.

  This is, in fact, a junior version of the famous “F
rench Paradox,” which has had scientists scratching their heads for years. In a nutshell: French adults spend twice as much time as Americans eating, and they consume foods like butter, pork, and cheese in apparently uninhibited quantities, yet are less overweight (and very rarely obese) and have lower rates of heart disease than Americans. Yes, this is one of those unfair facts of life: the French, it seems, can truly have their cake and eat it too.

  The way French kids eat is equally paradoxical. French parents gently compel their children to eat healthy food. They expect their kids to eat everything they are served, uncomplainingly. They ask them to spend long hours at the table (where they are expected to be extremely well behaved) rather than watching TV or playing video games. Despite this, French kids think eating is fun. And that’s not all: France’s rate of child obesity is one of the lowest in the developed world. And while rates of overweight and obese children are at an all-time high and are rapidly increasing in most wealthy countries (with the United States leading the pack), they are stable and even declining in France. This is not because they’re all on a weight-loss program; diets for French children are relatively rare because few of them need it.

  Before we moved to France, I was stumped about how French parents achieved this. I knew (and worried) about the negative effects of poor diet on my children’s health, teeth (cavities!), sleeping patterns, school performance, and even their IQ. But I felt powerless to do anything to change the way they ate. I wanted to change, but I didn’t know how.

  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 h
er 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.