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

in it, so maybe that didn’t quite count). At the gentle prompting of her papi, Sophie had even eaten a mussel.

Even Philippe and I had gotten in on the act: we both had an aversion to cauliflower, and to the girls’ delight, it had been making a regular appearance on our parental plates—although liberally doused with a creamy béchamel sauce—for the past month. The first few times, Claire and Sophie giggled uncontrollably at the exaggerated faces Philippe and I made when confronted with cauliflower. “Taste it! Taste it!” they would happily urge. Our gradual love affair with cauliflower was only half-pretend and made the process of encouraging the girls to eat new foods that much easier.

We had made real progress, and I felt proud. But something kept nagging at me: snacks. My children were tasting quite a few new things and even eating some of them in fairly reasonable quantities. But they were still snacking quite a bit, and the volume of food they were eating at snacktime rivaled (or surpassed) what they ate at meals.

But snacking didn’t seem to be an issue for the French parents we knew. In fact, none of the French children we met ever seemed to be snacking. They didn’t snack at the park. I never saw them snacking in their cars. I never saw a single French child rummaging in cupboards or the fridge. This was as true for the French children living in our little village as it was for the girls’ big-city cousins in Paris and Lyon.

“So when do kids snack?” I eventually asked my mother-in-law.

“They don’t snack, of course,” she replied. Her surprised look was a sign that I’d asked, yet again, one of those dumb foreigner questions. Deflated, I dropped the subject. But I kept thinking about her answer. No snacking? Really? At home in North America, any time spent with kids meant time spent feeding them snacks. I did a little research and found out that Sophie and Claire were typical: North American kids snack, on average, three times per day (in addition to their three meals per day). And I was amazed to learn that one out of every five American kids eats up to six snacks per day.

My mother-in-law was right, though. French kids don’t snack. I knew this from watching the families around us in the village. Their children ate four square meals per day, on a set schedule: breakfast in the morning, lunch at around 12:30, the goûter at around 4:30 P.M., and dinner between 7:00 and 8:00 P.M. That was it. Virginie confirmed my impressions. She even sent me France’s official food guide, which emphatically recommends no snacking. It doesn’t seem as if this advice is really necessary, anyway. For most French parents and children, this eating schedule is an ingrained, unquestioned habit. And it’s not that they are constantly struggling to avoid a secret raid on the pantry. Rather, eating at other times of day simply would rarely occur to them. Just in case anyone strays, snack food ads on French TV carry a large white banner (like the warnings on cigarette packages) bluntly stating: “For your health, avoid snacking in between meals.”

Why are French kids raised this way? Partly because French kids (like kids anywhere) are adults in training. And French adults, for the most part, don’t snack—at least not in public. They don’t walk down the street munching on muffins or sipping coffee. They don’t keep snack foods in their purses or pockets (or at least they’re not supposed to). When snacks are eaten regularly, and publicly, this is sufficiently out of the ordinary as to merit public comment. I remembered one anecdote about a well-known French politician: even before he made international headlines, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (former minister of finance, and then director of the International Monetary Fund in Washington) was slightly infamous for regularly indulging in a tartelette—a sort of miniature pie—for his late-afternoon treat. Hearing this from Véronique (who had written a book about DSK, as he is known to the French), I thought it best to keep some of the more questionable sides of my food past—like the “nibbling diet” I had tried, and actually kind of liked—to myself.

Still, I couldn’t quite believe that French adults didn’t snack. “But what about all of those cafés in Paris?” I asked Véronique on the phone one afternoon.

“It’s true that Parisians love to go out to the café, to wander the city,” she told me. (She used the word flâner, which roughly translates as “strolling slowly, aimlessly, while enjoying whatever there is to look at”). “But watch the people sitting in cafés, and after a while you’ll realize something: most of the people eating outside of mealtimes are tourists. The French customers might be having an espresso, but that’s usually it.” I was astounded by this and later asked Virginie to confirm what Véronique had said.

“Most French people don’t snack every day, and about half don’t snack at all,” she told me. “And if they do snack, most eat only one snack in the late afternoon, because they will be having an unusually late dinner—maybe starting only at 9:00 P.M. or later.”

Even the words that they used to describe snacking were revealing. Virginie talked about an en cas (which translates as “just in case,” implying a once-in-a-while deviation from your ordinary routine) and grignotage (from grignoter, which means to nibble or gnaw). The implication is that it is both unusual, and somehow deplorable, to snack. In fact, Virginie explained, it was only when researchers started doing food diaries a few years earlier that the French realized that adults snacked at all. This news of a “snacking epidemic” caused something of a scandal in France, with politicians and experts bemoaning the decline of healthy eating. She sent me some newspaper clippings, and I had to laugh when I read the catastrophic headlines. I found it hard to imagine what they would say about the fact that 98 percent of American adults snack