Steingarten writes that when he was named food critic for Vogue, he decided that his personal food preferences made him unfairly biased. “I feared that I could be no more objective than an art critic who detests the color yellow,” he writes. He embarks on a project to see if he can make himself like the foods he despises.
Steingarten’s hated foods include kimchi (the fermented cabbage that’s a national dish of Korea), swordfish, anchovies, dill, clams, lard, and desserts in Indian restaurants—which he says have “the taste and texture of face creams.” He reads up on the science of taste and concludes that the main problem with new foods is simply that they’re new. So just having them around should chip away at the eater’s innate resistance.
Steingarten bravely decides to eat one of his hated foods each day. He also tries to eat very good versions of each food: chopped anchovies in garlic sauce in northern Italy; a perfectly done capellini in white clam sauce at a restaurant on Long Island. He spends an entire afternoon cooking lard from scratch and eats kimchi ten times, at ten different Korean restaurants.
After six months, Steingarten still hates Indian desserts. (“Not every Indian dessert has the texture and taste of face cream. Far from it. Some have the texture and taste of tennis balls.”) But he comes to like, and even crave, nearly all of his other formerly detested foods. By the tenth portion of kimchi, it “has become my national pickle, too,” he writes. He concludes that “no smells or tastes are innately repulsive, and what’s learned can be forgot.”
Steingarten’s experiment sums up the French approach to feeding kids: if you keep trying things, you eventually come around to liking most of them. Steingarten discovered this by reading up on the science of taste. But middle-class French parents seem to know it intuitively and do it automatically. In France, the idea of reintroducing a broad range of vegetables and other foods isn’t just one idea among many. It’s the guiding culinary principle for kids. The ordinary, middle-class French parents I meet are evangelical about the idea that there is a rich world of flavors out there, which their children must be educated to appreciate.
This isn’t just some theoretical ideal that can only play out in the controlled environment of the crèche. It actually happens in the kitchens and dining rooms of ordinary French families. I see it firsthand when I visit the home of Fanny, the publisher who lives in a high-ceilinged apartment in eastern Paris with her husband, Vincent, four-year-old Lucie, and three-month-old Antoine.
Fanny has pretty, rounded features and a thoughtful gaze. She usually arrives home from work by six and serves Lucie dinner at six thirty, while Antoine sits in a bouncy chair drinking his bottle. On weeknights, Fanny and Vincent eat together once the kids are asleep.
Fanny says she rarely makes anything as complex as the braised endive and chard that Lucie used to eat at the crèche. Still, she views each night’s dinner as part of Lucie’s culinary education. She doesn’t worry too much about how much Lucie eats. But she insists that Lucie has at least a bite of every dish on her plate.
“She has to taste everything,” Fanny says, echoing a rule I hear from almost every French mother I speak to about food.
One extension of the tasting principle is that, in France, everyone eats the same dinner. There are no choices or substitutions. “I never ask, ‘What do you want?’ It’s ‘I’m serving this,’” Fanny tells me. “If she doesn’t finish a dish, it’s okay. But we all eat the same thing.”
American parents might see this as lording it over their helpless offspring. Fanny thinks it empowers Lucie. “She feels bigger when we all eat, not the same portions, but the same thing.” Fanny says American visitors are amazed when they see Lucie at a meal. “They say, ‘How come your daughter already knows the difference between Camembert, Gruyère, and chèvre?’”
Fanny also tries to make the meal fun. Lucie already knows how to make cakes, since she and her mother bake together most weekends. Fanny has Lucie play some role in making dinner, too, by preparing some of the food or setting the table. “We help her, but we make it playful. And it’s every day,” she says.
When it’s time to eat, Fanny doesn’t austerely wave her finger at Lucie and order her to taste things. They talk about the food. Often they discuss the flavor of each cheese. And having participated in preparing the meal, Lucie is invested in how it turns out. There’s complicity. If a certain dish is a flop, “we all have a laugh about it,” Fanny says.
Part of keeping the mood light is keeping the meal brief. Fanny says that once Lucie has tasted everything, she’s allowed to leave the table. The book Votre Enfant says a meal with young kids shouldn’t last more than thirty minutes. French kids learn to linger over longer meals as they get older. And as they start going to bed later, they eat more weeknight dinners with their parents.
Planning the dinner menu is a lesson in balance. I’m struck by how French mothers like Fanny seem to have the day’s culinary rhythm mapped out in their heads. They assume that their kids will have their one big protein-heavy meal at lunchtime. For dinner, they mostly serve carbohydrates like pasta, along with vegetables.
Fanny may have just raced home from the office, but, as they do at the crèche, she calmly serves dinner in courses. She gives Lucie a cold vegetable starter, such as shredded carrots in a vinaigrette. Then there’s a main course, usually pasta or rice with vegetables. Occasionally she’ll cook a bit of fish or meat, but usually she expects Lucie to have had most of her protein at lunch. “I try to avoid proteins [at night] because I think I’ve been educated like that. They say once per day is enough. I try to focus on vegetables.”
Some parents tell me that, in winter, they often serve soup for dinner, along with a baguette or maybe a bit of pasta. It’s a filling meal that relies heavily on grains and vegetables. A lot of parents puree these soups. And that’s dinner. Kids might drink some juice at breakfast or at the afternoon goûter. But at lunch and dinner they drink water, usually at room temperature or slightly chilled.
Weekends are for family meals. Almost all the French families I know have a large lunch en famille on both Saturday and Sunday. The kids are usually involved in cooking and setting up these meals. On weekends “we bake, we cook. I have cookbooks for children; they have their own recipes,” says Denise, the medical ethicist and mother of two girls.
After all these preparations, they sit down to eat. The French sociologists Claude Fischler and Estelle Masson, authors of the book Manger, say that a French person who eats a sandwich on the fly for lunch doesn’t even count this as “having eaten.” For the French, “eating means sitting at the table with others, taking one’s time and not doing other things at the same time.” Whereas for Americans, “health is seen as the main reason for eating.”3
At Bean’s fifth birthday party, I announce that it’s time for the cake. Suddenly the kids—who’ve been raucously playing—file into our dining room and sit down calmly at the table. They’re all sage at once. Bean sits at the head of the table and hands out plates, spoons, and napkins. Except for lighting the candles and carrying out the cake, I don’t have much of a role. By five years old, sitting calmly at the table for any kind of eating is an automatic reflex for French kids. There’s no question of eating on the couch, in front of the television, or while looking at the computer.
Of course, one of the benefits of having some cadre in your home is that you can go outside of the cadre without worrying that it will collapse. Denise tells me that once a week she lets her two girls—who are seven and nine—have dinner in front of the television.
On weekends and during those ubiquitous school holidays, French parents are more relaxed about what time their kids eat and go to bed. They trust the cadre to be there when they need it again. Magazines run articles about easing your kids back onto an earlier schedule, once you get back from vacation. When we’re on holiday with Hélène and William, I panic a bit when it’s one thirty and William still hasn’t got
ten home with some of the ingredients for our lunch.
But Hélène figures that the kids can adapt. They are people, after all, who like us are capable of coping with a bit of frustration. She breaks open a bag of potato chips, and the six kids all gather at the kitchen table to eat them. Then they pile outside to play again until lunch is ready. It’s no big deal. We all cope. A little while later we all have a long, lovely meal at the table that we’ve set up under a tree.
• • •
If overparenting was an airline, Park Slope, Brooklyn, would be its hub. Every parenting trend and new product seems to originate or refuel there. Park Slope is home to “New York’s first baby wearing and breast-feeding boutique,” and to a fifteen-thousand-dollar-per-year preschool where teachers “actively discourage and stop superhero play.” If you live in Park Slope, Baby Bodyguards will kid-proof your duplex for six hundred dollars. (The company’s founder explains that “once I gave birth and my son became part of the external world, my fear and anxiety kicked in.”)
Despite Park Slope’s reputation for zealous parenting, I’m unprepared for what I witness in a playground there on a sunny Sunday morning. At first, the father and son I spot just seem to be doing a particularly energetic version of narrated play. The boy looks about six. The father—in expensive jeans and a stylish weekend stubble—has followed him to the top of the jungle gym. In a bilingual twist, he’s giving the boy a running commentary in both English and what sounds like American-accented German.
The son seems used to his father heading down the slide behind him. When they move to the swings, the father continues his bilingual soliloquy, while pushing. This is all still within the bounds of what I’ve seen elsewhere. But then the mother arrives. She’s a rail-thin brunette in her own pair of expensive jeans, carrying a bag of produce from the farmer’s market next door.
“Here’s your parsley snack! Do you want your parsley snack?” she says to the boy, handing him a green sprig.
Parsley? A snack? I think I understand the intention: These parents don’t want their son to be fat. They want him to have a varied palate. They see themselves as original thinkers who can provide him with unusual experiences, German and parsley surely being just a small sampling. And I grant them that parsley doesn’t run the risk of ruining their son’s—or frankly anyone’s—appetite.
But there’s a reason why parsley has never caught on as a snack. It’s a seasoning. It doesn’t taste good all by itself. I get the feeling that these parents are trying to remove their son from the collective wisdom of our species and the basic chemistry of what tastes good. I can only imagine the effort this requires. What happens when he discovers cookies?
When I mention the “parsley snack” incident to American parents, they’re not surprised. They concede that parsley isn’t a snack. But they admire the effort. At that impressionable age, why not try? In the hothouse environment of Park Slope, some parents have gone beyond the American Question: How do we speed up the stages of development? They’re now asking how they can override basic sensory experiences.
I realize I’m guilty of this, too, when I take Bean to her first Halloween party, when she’s about two. The French don’t widely celebrate the holiday. (I go to one adult Halloween party where all the women are dressed as sexy witches and most of the men are Draculas.) So each year a group of Anglophone mothers in Paris takes over the top floor of a Starbucks near the Bastille and sets up little trick-or-treat stations around the room.
As soon as Bean grasps the concept—all these people are giving her candy—she begins to eat it. She doesn’t just eat a few pieces; she tries to eat all the candy in her bag. She sits in a corner of the room stuffing pink, yellow, and green gooey masses into her mouth. I have to intervene to slow her down.
It occurs to me then that I’ve taken the wrong approach to sweets. Before this Halloween, Bean had barely ever eaten refined sugar. To my knowledge, she hadn’t had a single gummy bear. Like the parsley parents, I’d tried to pretend that such things didn’t exist.
I’ve watched other Anglophone parents agonize about giving their kids sweets. One afternoon a British mother I know tells me her little girl can’t have a cookie, although all the other kids are having them, explaining, “She doesn’t need to know about that.” Another mom I know—a psychologist—looks to be in agony over whether to let her eighteen-month-old have a Popsicle, even though it’s the end of a hot summer day and all our kids are playing outside. (She finally concedes.) I see a couple with three advanced degrees between them convene a nervous meeting over whether their four-year-old can have a lollipop.
But sugar does exist. And French parents know it. They don’t try to eliminate all sweets from their children’s diets. Rather, they fit sweets inside the cadre. For a French kid, candy has its place. It’s a regular-enough part of their lives that they don’t gorge on it like freed prisoners the moment they get their hands on it. Mostly, children seem to eat it at birthday parties, school events, and as the occasional treat. At these occasions, they’re usually free to eat all they want. When I try to limit the boys’ intake of candy and chocolate cake at the crèche’s Christmas party, one of their caregivers intervenes. She tells me I should just let them enjoy the party and be free. I think of my skinny friend Virginie, who pays strict attention to what she eats on weekdays, then eats whatever she wants on weekends. Kids, too, need moments when the regular rules don’t apply.
But parents decide when these moments are. When I drop Bean off at a birthday party for Abigail, a little girl in our building, she’s the first guest to arrive. (We haven’t yet figured out that you’re not supposed to be punctual for kids’ birthdays.) Abigail’s mom has just set out plates of cookies and candy on a table. Abigail asks her mom if she can have some of the candy. Her mom says “non,” and explains that it isn’t yet time to eat it. In what seems to me like a minor miracle, Abigail looks longingly at the candy, then runs off with Bean to play in another room.
Chocolate has a more regular place in the lives of French kids. Middle-class French parents talk about chocolate as if it’s just another food group, albeit one to eat in moderation. When Fanny describes what Lucie eats in a typical day, the menu includes a bit of cookies or cake. “And obviously she’ll want chocolate in there somewhere,” Fanny says.
Hélène gives her kids hot chocolate when it’s cold outside. She serves it for breakfast, along with a hunk of baguette, or makes it their afternoon goûter, along with some cookies. My kids love reading books about T’choupi, a French children’s-book character modeled on a penguin. When he’s sick, his mom lets him stay home and drink hot chocolate. I take my kids to see a performance of Goldilocks and the Three Bears at a theater near our house. The bears don’t eat oatmeal; they eat bouillie au chocolat (hot chocolate thickened with flour).
“It’s a compensation for going to school, and I guess it gives them some energy,” explains Denise, the medical ethicist. She shuns McDonald’s and makes her daughters’ dinner from scratch each night. But she gives each girl a bar of chocolate for breakfast, along with some bread and a bit of fruit.
French kids don’t get a huge amount of chocolate; it’s a small bar, or a drink’s worth, or a strip in a pain au chocolat. They eat it happily and don’t expect a second helping. But chocolate is a nutritional fixture for them, rather than a forbidden treat. Bean once comes home from the summer camp at her school with a chocolate sandwich: a baguette with a bar of chocolate inside. I’m so surprised I take a picture of it. (I later learn that the chocolate sandwich—usually made with dark chocolate—is a classic French goûter.)
With sweets, too, the cadre is key. French parents aren’t afraid of sugary foods. In general, they will serve cake or cookies at lunch or at the goûter. But they don’t give kids chocolate or rich desserts with dinner. “What you eat in the evening just stays with you for years,” Fanny explains.
After dinner, Fanny typically serves
fresh fruit or a fruit compote—those ubiquitous little tubs of applesauce with other pureed fruits mixed in. (These come with or without added sugar.) There’s a compotes section in French supermarkets. Fanny says she also buys all different types of plain yogurt and then gets jams for Lucie to mix in.
As in most realms, French parents aim at mealtimes to give kids both firm boundaries and freedom within those boundaries. “It’s things like sitting at the table and tasting everything,” Fanny explains. “I’m not forcing her to finish, just to taste everything and sit with us.”
• • •
I’m not sure exactly when I started serving my kids meals in courses. But I now do it at every meal. It’s a stroke of French genius. This starts with breakfast. When the kids sit down, I put plates of cut-up fruit on the table. They nibble on this while I’m getting their toast or cereal ready. They can have juice at breakfast, but they know that for lunch and dinner we drink water. Even the union organizer doesn’t complain about that. We talk about how clean water makes us feel.
At lunch and dinner I serve vegetables first, when the kids are hungriest. We don’t move on to the main course until they at least make a dent in the starter. Usually they finish it. Except when I introduce an entirely new dish, I rarely have to resort to the tasting rule. If Leo won’t eat a food the first time I serve it, he’ll usually agree to at least smell it, and he’ll take a nibble soon after that.
Bean sometimes exploits the letter of the rule by eating a single piece of zucchini and then insisting that she has fulfilled her obligation. She recently declared that she will taste everything “except salad,” by which she means the actual green lettuce leaves. But for the most part, she quite likes the starters we serve. These include sliced avocado, tomato in a vinaigrette, or steamed broccoli with a bit of soy sauce. We all have a good chuckle when I serve carottes rapées—shredded carrots in a vinaigrette—and try to pronounce it.
Bringing Up Bébé Page 23
