French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Billon (classic english novels txt) 📕

with eating. The French, on the other hand, almost never mention any of these topics when asked for their thoughts about food. Rather, they talk about pleasure, tasty food, socializing, culture, identity, and fun. In one of the most revealing studies, Fischler showed a picture of a chocolate cake to both American and French people and asked them for the first word that popped into their head. For Americans, the most common word was “guilt.” For the French, the most common word was “celebration.”

How do French kids learn these ideas? Part of the explanation is the amount of time they spend at the table with their parents, where (naturally) the conversation focuses on food. The tradition of the family meal is alive and well in France, where the entire workday is structured around mealtimes. Stores shut for one and a half or even two hours between noon and 2:00 P.M., so that everyone can go home for lunch. In repeated surveys of French families, nearly all the kids eat a traditional, sit-down, three-course lunch every day. More than half of them eat at school: French schools have a two-hour break at noon in order to allow kids the time required to eat (at least thirty minutes) and to properly digest their food (during the sixty- to ninety-minute recess that follows lunch). As a result, school finishes later: usually at 4:00 or 4:30 P.M., which is when the traditional goûter is eaten. Shops close at 7:00 P.M. in order to allow everyone to get home in time for dinner at the traditional French hour of 7:30 or 8:00 P.M. By 9:00 or 9:30, most kids are in bed.

So more than 90 percent of French kids eat their evening meal at home every day, with all of their family members. In contrast, only 40 percent of American adolescents and 55 percent of kids under eleven eat dinner with their families every day. And one in three eat with their families less than three times per week.

But French families do eat together, and most do so every day of the year. This provides ample opportunities for teaching kids about food. And one of the most important things French children learn at these meals is that “new is normal.” French adults love variety and will eat varied diets as a matter of course. Naturally, their children grow up to do the same. This was even evident in the comments people made in passing about food choices.

“I had an apple yesterday, so I’ll have a peach today,” my mother-in-law would say, when considering which fresh fruit to pick for dessert at lunchtime. Or, when discussing at breakfast what we should eat later that day: “We already had chicken this week, so we shouldn’t have that again.”

Thinking about Janine’s example led me to write down the fifth French Food Rule:

French Food Rule #5:

Eat vegetables of all colors of the rainbow.

Don’t eat the same main dish more than once per week.

This French habit of varied eating is pervasive. French parents will scrutinize the school menus at the start of every week—not only to see what their children are eating, but also so that they can avoid serving the same dish at home that week. (In Paris, my sister-in-law told me, the schools actually send home suggestions for evening meals.) When Philippe’s parents visited us before we moved to France, I learned that they would expect a different dish at every meal (my record is three weeks of new dishes, which more than exhausted my repertoire). The only exception seemed to be breakfast, which was almost invariably the same: juice, coffee or tea (milk for the kids), white baguette, butter, and jam or honey. I had trouble reconciling the French approach to breakfast with the healthy approach to eating the rest of the day, but I had to admit that starting my morning with fresh baguette smeared with butter and honey did wonderful things for my mood.

Variety and trying new foods were probably the most difficult things for my kids to handle, I realized. And because of their resistance, I’d fallen into bad food habits. Before they were born, my diet had been much more diverse. When I had started university, my culinary skills were limited to reheating frozen dinners in the microwave, boiling eggs, and cooking pasta, but I soon branched out to salads and comfort foods like chili. But with the arrival of kids, our family eating habits had fallen back into a narrow rut, with little variety and almost no novelty.

After more than a week of research, I decided I had enough information to create the next phase of The Plan. I wanted to create a set of personalized routines that would help us to improve our eating habits. They had to cover what, how, and when we ate. So I decided to include issues like scheduling, parental discipline, and variety.

In order to keep things organized, I decided to write everything up in a simple table. In the left-hand column, I would write down the new, specific rule that we would adopt. In the right-hand column, I’d write down what we had to change in order to be successful with the new rule.

THE PLAN

Our New Food Routines

What We Have to Change

Eat four meals per day: breakfast, lunch, after-school goûter, dinner.

No more random, extra snacks, especially bedtime snacks.

Eat only at the table.

No eating in the stroller, car, or anywhere else.

Eat slowly.

No gulping or gobbling. Every bite has to be chewed slowly.

Children eat what they are served. Adults, not children, decide what is served.

No substitute or replacement dishes, and no extra “fillers” like bread and butter.

Kids eat what adults eat.

No special dishes for the kids.

Don’t eat the same dish more than once a week.

Stop relying on pasta and bread.

Eat processed foods only once a week.

Shop only at the local market. No ketchup, except on hot dogs and hamburgers.

No complaining about food.

If you complain about