French Kids Eat Everything Page 2

  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.

  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!

  2

  Baby Steps and Beet Puree

  We Move to France and Encounter Unidentified Edible Objects

  * * *

  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.

  Fleeting images of potato chips and hot dogs—standard fare at our day care back home—crossed my mind. By now, I was starting to feel hungry, as North American dinnertime approached (despite the disapproval of my in-laws, we still persisted in eating at the barbarically early hour of 5:30 P.M.). So I eagerly began sampling, congratulating our hostesses in garbled French. A frown crossed the face of the woman holding the tray. Assuming she hadn’t understood me, I repeated myself more slowly. But her frown only deepened. Puzzled, I looked around, only to observe that the other parents were dutifully feeding the treats not to themselves but … to their children.