One realm in which we’re succeeding is with food. Food is of course a source of national pride in France and something that French people love to talk about. My French colleagues in the office where I rent a desk spend most of lunch discussing what they had for dinner. When Simon goes out for post-game beers with his French soccer team, he says they talk about food, not girls.
It becomes clear how French our kids’ eating habits have become when we visit America. My mom is excited to introduce Bean to that American classic, macaroni and cheese from a box. But Bean won’t eat more than a few bites. “That’s not cheese,” she says. (I think I detect her first sneer.)
We’re on vacation when we visit America, so we end up eating out a lot. On the plus side, American restaurants are a lot more kid-friendly than those in France. There are unheard-of conveniences like high chairs, crayons, and changing tables in the bathrooms. (You might occasionally find one of these in Paris but almost never all three at once.)
But I grow to dread the ubiquitous “kids’ menus” in American restaurants. It doesn’t matter what type of restaurant we’re in—seafood, Italian, Cuban. The kids’ menus all have practically identical offerings: hamburgers, fried chicken fingers (now euphemistically called chicken “tenders”), plain pizza, and perhaps spaghetti. There are almost never any vegetables, unless you count French fries or potato chips. Occasionally, there’s fruit. Kids aren’t even asked how they want their hamburgers cooked. Perhaps for legal reasons, all the burgers come out a depressing shade of gray.
It isn’t just restaurants that treat kids as if they don’t have fully developed taste buds. On one trip home I sign up Bean for a few days of tennis camp, which includes lunch. “Lunch” for ten children turns out to be a bag of white bread and two packages of American cheese. Even Bean, who’d eat pasta or hamburgers for every meal if I let her, is taken aback. “Tomorrow is pizza!” one of the coaches chirps.
The reigning view in America seems to be that kids have finicky, limited palates, and that adults who venture beyond grilled cheese do so at their peril. This belief is, of course, self-fulfilling. Many of the American kids I meet do have finicky and limited palates. Frequently they spend a few years on a kind of mono-diet. A friend in Atlanta has one son who eats only white foods like rice and pasta. Her other son eats only meat. Another friend’s baby nephew in Boston was supposed to start eating solid foods around Christmas. When the boy refused to eat anything but foil-wrapped chocolate Santas, his parents hoarded bags of them, afraid they’d be out of stock after the holidays.
Catering to picky kids is a lot of work. A mother I know in Long Island makes a different breakfast for each of her four kids, plus a fifth one for her husband. An American father who’s visiting Paris with his family informs me in reverent tones that his seven-year-old is very particular about textures. He says the boy likes cheese and tortillas separately, but refuses to eat them when they’re cooked together because the tortilla becomes—he whispers this while looking at his son—“too crispy.”
Instead of resisting this pickiness, the parenting establishment is capitulating to it. What to Expect: The Toddler Years says: “Letting a young child go for months on nothing but cereal, milk and pasta, or bread and cheese (assuming a few well-chosen fruits and/or vegetables are thrown in for good balance) isn’t indulgent or unacceptable, but perfectly respectable. In fact, there’s something inherently unfair about insisting that children eat what’s put in front of them when grown-ups enjoy a great deal of freedom of choice at the table.”
And then there are snack foods. When I’m with friends and their kids in America, little bags of pretzels and Cheerios just seem to appear all the time in between meals. Dominique, a French mother who lives in New York, says at first she was shocked to learn that her daughter’s preschool feeds the kids every hour all day long. She was also surprised to see parents giving their kids snacks all throughout the day at the playground. “If a toddler starts having a tantrum, they will give food to calm him down. They use food to distract them from whatever crisis,” she says.
The whole picture is different in France. In Paris, I mostly shop at the local supermarket. But just by going with the middle-class flow, my kids have never tasted high-fructose corn syrup or long-life bread. Instead of Fruit Roll-Ups, they eat fruit. They’re so used to fresh food that processed food tastes strange to them.
As I’ve mentioned, French kids typically eat only at mealtimes and at the afternoon goûter. I’ve never seen a French child eating pretzels (or anything else) in the park at ten A.M. There are kids’ menus at some French restaurants—usually at corner bistros or pizza places. These menus don’t always have haute cuisine either. There’s often steak with frites—French fries. (“At home we never have frites; my kids know it’s their only way of getting them,” my friend Christine says.)
But at most restaurants, kids are expected to order from the regular menu. When I ask for spaghetti with tomato sauce for Bean at a nice Italian restaurant, the French waitress very gently suggests that I order her something a bit more adventuresome—say the pasta dish with eggplant.
McDonald’s does a thriving business in France, and you can certainly find processed foods to eat if you want them. But a government campaign reminding people to eat at least “five fruits and vegetables per day” has become a national catchphrase. (A lunch restaurant near my office is called 5 Fruits et Légumes Chaque Jour [five fruits and vegetables every day].)
Though French kids eat hamburgers and fries sometimes, I’ve never met a French child who ate just one type of food or a parent who allowed this. It’s not that French kids are clamoring for more vegetables. Of course they like certain foods more than others. And there are plenty of finicky French three-year-olds. But these children don’t get to exclude whole categories of textures, colors, and nutrients just because they want to. The extreme pickiness that’s come to seem normal in America and Britain looks to French parents like a dangerous eating disorder or, at best, a wildly bad habit.
The consequences of these differences are important. Just 3.1 percent of French five- and six-year-olds are obese.1 In America, 10.4 percent of kids between two and five are obese.2 This gap is much wider for older French and American kids. Even in prosperous American neighborhoods, I see fat children all the time. But in five years of hanging out at French playgrounds, I’ve seen exactly one child who might qualify as obese (and I suspect she was just visiting).
With food in particular, I can’t help but ask the same question that I’ve been asking about so many other aspects of French parenting: How do French parents do it? How do they make their kids into little gourmets? And in the process, why don’t French kids get fat? I see the results all around me, but how do French kids get to be this way?
• • •
I suspect that it starts with babies. When Bean is around six months old and I’m ready to feed her solid foods, I notice that French supermarkets don’t sell the ground rice that my mother and all my Anglophone friends say should be a baby’s first food. I have to trek to health food stores to buy an expensive, organic version imported from Germany, tucked away below the recycled diapers.
It turns out that French parents don’t start their babies off on bland, colorless grains. From the first bite, they serve babies flavor-packed vegetables. The first foods that French babies typically eat are steamed and pureed green beans, spinach, carrots, peeled zucchini, and the white part of leeks.
American babies eat vegetables, too, of course, sometimes even from the start. But we Anglophones tend to regard vegetables as obligatory vitamin-delivery devices and mentally group them in a dull category called “vegetables.” Although we’re desperate for our kids to eat vegetables, we don’t always expect them to. Bestselling cookbooks teach parents how to sneak vegetables into meatballs, fish sticks, and macaroni and cheese, without kids even noticing. I once watched as friends of mine urgently spooned vegetables coated in
yogurt into their kids’ mouths after a meal, while the kids watched television, seemingly oblivious to what they were eating. “Who knows how much longer we’ll be able to do this,” the wife said.
French parents treat their légumes with a whole different level of intention and commitment. They describe the taste of each vegetable and talk about their child’s first encounter with celery or leeks as the start of a lifelong relationship. “I wanted her to know the taste of carrot by itself. Then I wanted her to know the taste of zucchini,” swoons Samia, the mother who showed me topless pictures of herself. Like other French parents I spoke to, Samia views vegetables—and also fruits—as the building blocks of her daughter’s incipient culinary éducation and a way of initiating her into the richness of taste.
My American baby books recognize that certain foods are an acquired taste. They say that if a baby rejects a food, parents should wait a few days and then offer the same food again. My Anglophone friends and I all do this. But we assume that if it doesn’t work after a few tries, our babies just don’t like avocado, sweet potatoes, or spinach.
In France, the same advice to keep reproposing foods to babies is elevated to a mission. Parents take for granted that, while kids will prefer certain tastes over others, the flavor of each vegetable is inherently rich and interesting. Parents see it as their job to bring the child around to appreciating this. They believe that just as they must teach the child how to sleep, how to wait, and how to say bonjour, they must teach her how to eat.
No one suggests that introducing all these foods will be easy. The French government’s free handbook on feeding kids says all babies are different. “Some are happy to discover new foods. Others are less excited, and diversification takes a little bit longer.” But the handbook urges parents to be dogged about introducing kids to new foods and not giving up even after a child has rejected a food three or more times.
French parents advance slowly. “Ask your child to taste just one bite, then move on to the next course,” the handbook suggests. The authors add that parents should never offer a different food to replace the rejected one. And they should react neutrally if the child won’t eat something. “If you don’t react too much to his refusal, your child will truly abandon this behavior,” the authors predict. “Don’t panic. You can keep giving him milk to be sure he’s getting enough food.”
This long-term view of cultivating a child’s palate is echoed in Laurence Pernoud’s legendary parenting book J’élève mon enfant. Her section on feeding solids to babies is called How Little by Little a Child Learns to Eat Everything.
“He refuses to eat artichokes?” Pernoud writes. “Here again, you have to wait. When, a few days later, you try again, try putting a little bit of artichoke into a lot of puree,” for instance, of potatoes.
The government food guide tells parents to offer the same ingredients prepared many different ways. “Try steaming, baking, in parchment, grilled, plain, with sauce or seasoned.” The handbook’s authors say, “Your child will discover different colors, different textures and different aromas.”
The guide also suggests a talking cure, à la Dolto. “It’s important to reassure him, and to talk to him about this new food,” it says. The conversation about food should go beyond “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” They suggest showing kids a vegetable and asking, “Do you think this is crunchy, and that it’ll make a sound when you bite it? What does this flavor remind you of? What do you feel in your mouth?” They suggest playing flavor games like offering different types of apples and having the child decide which is the sweetest and which is the most acidic. In another game, the parent blindfolds the child and has him eat and identify foods he already knows.
All the French baby books I read urge parents to stay calm and cheerful at mealtimes, and above all to stay the course, even if their child doesn’t take a single bite. “Don’t force him, but don’t give up on proposing it to him,” the government handbook explains. “Little by little, he’ll get more familiar with it, he’ll taste it . . . and without a doubt, he’ll end up appreciating it.”
• • •
To get more insight into why French children eat so well, I attend the Commission Menus in Paris. It’s here that those sophisticated menus posted at Bean’s crèche every Monday get their final imprimatur. The commission decides what the crèches of Paris will be serving for lunch for the subsequent two months.
I’m probably the first foreigner to ever attend this meeting. It’s held in a windowless conference room inside a government building on the banks of the Seine. Heading the meeting is Sandra Merle, the chief nutritionist of Parisian crèches. Merle’s deputies are also there, along with a half dozen chefs who work in crèches.
The commission is a microcosm of French ideas about kids and food. Lesson number one is that there’s no such thing as “kids’ food.” A dietician reads out the proposed menus, including all four courses for each lunch, as if she’s entering them into the official record. There is no mention of French fries, chicken nuggets, pizza, or even ketchup. The proposed menu for one Friday is a salad of shredded red cabbage and fromage blanc. This is followed by a white fish called colin in dill sauce and a side of organic potatoes à l’anglaise. The cheese course is a Coulommiers cheese (a soft cheese similar to Brie). Dessert is a baked organic apple. Each dish is cut up or pureed according to the age of the kids.
The commission’s second lesson is the importance of variety. Members take a leek soup off the menu when someone points out that the children will have eaten leeks the previous week. Merle scratches a tomato dish she had planned for late December—another repeat—and replaces it with a boiled-beet salad.
Merle stresses visual and textural variety, too. She says that if foods are all the same color one day, she inevitably gets complaints from crèche directors. She reminds the crèche chefs that if the older kids (meaning two- and three-year-olds) have a pureed vegetable as a side dish, they should have a whole fruit for dessert, since they might find two pureed dishes too babyish.
Some of the chefs boast about their recent successes. “I served mousse of sardines, mixed with a little cream,” says a chef with curly black hair. “The kids loved it. They spread it on bread.”
There is much praise of soup. “They love soup; it doesn’t matter which beans or which vegetables,” another chef says. “The soup with leeks and coconut milk, they really like it,” a third chef adds.
When someone mentions fagots de haricots verts, everyone laughs. It’s a traditional Christmas dish that all the crèches were supposed to prepare the previous year. The dish requires blanching green beans, wrapping clusters of the beans in thin slices of smoked pork, piercing the combination with a toothpick, and then grilling it. Apparently this was too much even for the aesthetics-obsessed crèche chefs (though they don’t balk at being told to cut a kiwi into the shape of a flower).
Another driving principle of the Commission Menus is that if at first the kids don’t like something, they should try it repeatedly. Merle reminds the chefs to introduce new foods gradually and to prepare the foods all different ways. She suggests introducing berries first as a puree, since kids will already be familiar with that texture. After that, the chefs can serve the berries cut into pieces.
One chef asks what to do about grapefruit. Merle suggests serving a thin slice sprinkled with sugar, then gradually serving it on its own. The same goes for spinach. “Our kids don’t eat spinach at all. It all goes in the garbage,” one chef grumbles. Merle tells her to mix it with rice to make it more appetizing. She says she’ll send out a “technical sheet” to remind everyone how to do this. “You repropose spinach in different ways throughout the year; eventually they will like it,” she promises. Merle says that once one child starts eating spinach, the others will follow. “It’s the principle of nutritional education,” she says.
Vegetables are a big concern for the group. One cook says her kids
won’t eat green beans unless they’re slathered in crème fraîche or béchamel sauce. “You need to strike a balance; sometimes with sauce, sometimes without,” Merle suggests. Then there’s a long discussion of rhubarb.
After about two hours under the fluorescent lights, I’m fading a bit. I’d like to go home and have dinner. But the commission hasn’t even gotten to the menu for the upcoming Christmas meal.
“The foie gras, no?” one chef suggests as an appetizer. Another counters with duck mousse. At first I assume that they’re both joking, but no one laughs. The group then debates whether to have salmon or tuna for the main course (their first choice is monkfish, but Merle says it’s too expensive).
And what about the cheese course? Merle vetoes goat cheese with herbs, because the kids had goat cheese at their fall picnic. The group finally settles on a menu that includes fish, broccoli mousse, and two kinds of cow’s milk cheese. Dessert is an apple-cinnamon cake, a yogurt cake with carrots, and a traditional Christmas galette with pears and chocolate. (“You can’t veer too much from tradition. Parents will want a galette,” someone says.) For the afternoon goûter that day, Merle worries that a mousse made of “industrial chocolate” won’t be sufficiently festive. They settle on a more elaborate chocolat liégeois—a chocolate mousse sundae in a glass, topped with whipped cream.
Not once does anyone suggest that a flavor might be too intense or complicated for a child’s palate. None of the foods are outrageously strong—there are a lot of herbs, but no mustards, pickles, or olives. But there are mushrooms, celery, and every other manner of vegetable in abundance. The point isn’t that every kid will like everything. It’s that he’ll give each food a chance.
• • •
Not long after I sit in on the Commission Menus, a friend loans me a book called The Man Who Ate Everything by the American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten.
Bringing Up Bébé Page 22
