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

them to eat good food (refusing this food is not okay). In North America—a culture that prizes individual choice—kids don’t have to eat what they don’t like. But parents worry desperately that they are not eating well. This sets up a vicious cycle: we feel anxious about food and, sensing this, our children often eat less well.

French parents don’t give their children as much choice. Being able to eat well is a social survival skill, at school and in the workplace. Expressing a personal food preference in public is viewed as a sign of bad manners, which is not viewed lightly in French culture. If children have already eaten something in the past, and liked it, then a random caprice about that particular food is not tolerated. They’re simply told, gently but firmly, to eat it. And, for the most part, they do. (The odd French child will refuse to eat. But true refus alimentaire is a relatively rare medical phenomenon that doesn’t affect most children.)

French parents are also told something else that many North American parents don’t learn. French pediatricians warn families about neophobia, telling them that children’s appetite diminishes and becomes more fickle somewhere between the ages of two and four. This is in part physical (as kids’ growth rate slows down), and in part psychological (French children go through a “no” phase, just like kids everywhere). The French even have a formal term for this: la phase d’opposition. They know that they have a limited time frame to introduce new tastes, flavors, and textures, and to build the foundation for healthy food habits. So they focus on introducing a large variety of foods in the first two years of a child’s life.

I have to admit that I am still sometimes baffled by the “logical” order French parents follow for introducing new foods to babies and toddlers. Soft cheese comes before hard cheese, for example, because it is easier to chew. So Roquefort might be offered to a baby at nine months (typically, they love the salty taste and tangy texture), but Cheddar will be offered much later. Whatever your opinion about their logic, the goal seems sensible enough: to train children’s food tastes, experiences, and preferences. The goal here is to help children develop a love of variety.

But the French understand variety differently than North Americans do. Our parenting books (and parents) tend be focused on micronutrients, like omega-3s, or iron. The French, in contrast, tend to spend less time on micronutrients. Rather, French advice focuses on teaching young children to get used to variety in taste, texture, and color, for example. So the advice French parents get is not solely focused on which specific foods contain which particular nutrients; rather, it is focused on how specific tactics (like varying the colors of the purees at each meal) can help instill an expectation of novelty. And by giving their kids lots of vegetables, unprocessed foods, and high-quality treats, they train their kids’ palates to enjoy “real” food.

In fact, many French people are still relatively unused to processed “convenience” foods of any kind. I realized this soon after I married Philippe, when he came to me late one evening with a strained look on his face.

“What was in that ice cream you bought?” he asked rather queasily.

“We don’t have any ice cream in the house,” I responded, mystified. “We finished it last week, and I haven’t bought any more yet.”

“But there’s a big tub in the freezer,” he replied. “And it tastes, well, a bit odd.”

“Let me look,” I suggested, worried that some forgotten tub of ancient ice cream had given my newly wedded husband a case of food poisoning. Visions of him on his deathbed flashed through my head. I ran to the freezer and rummaged maniacally through the various plastic pots and tubs.

To my relief, I was right. I was sure there was no ice cream in the house. But what had Philippe eaten?

I ran back to the bedroom to find him lying down clutching his stomach.

“There is no ice cream in the freezer! What did you eat?” I asked, trying to keep the worried tone out of my voice.

“Of course there is!” my husband snapped. “It’s in that big white plastic tub!”

I ran back to the kitchen and pulled open the freezer door again. Was I going crazy? There was a white plastic tub, but it was full of raw, frozen chocolate chip cookie dough—the kind I bought at the supermarket, to make “fresh” cookies as a treat. Grabbing the tub, I ran back to the bedroom, where he was looking even worse.

“Is that what you ate?” I asked him in disbelief, bending over to wave the tub in front of his half-closed eyes. Seeing the look on his face, I tried to sound calm. “This isn’t ice cream—it’s cookie dough!”

It was his turn to look shocked. “Is that how you make cookies? I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

“How much did you eat?” I demanded, astounded that a spoonful of cookie dough could have given him a stomachache.

“Well, a bowl full,” he admitted. “It did taste a little odd, but I thought that this must be a new American flavor, and I didn’t want to waste it, so I ate it all.”

This, I realized (after several minutes of hysterical laughter, which Philippe sadly couldn’t share), was one of the potential downfalls of French food training: years of rigorously enforced messages about not being fussy might lead people to politely consume inedible foods, even against their better judgment. But from my husband’s perspective, the problem was not with his taste buds, but rather with my shopping habits. It took a long time before he forgave me for buying such a “fake food” item.

This is the other critical half of the French food equation for parents, and it boils down to something pretty simple: give your kids mostly unprocessed, nonindustrial, homemade foods, and this is what they’ll learn to love. This will become their comfort food.