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

every day, and nearly half of American adults snack three times per day. And I doubted that Americans were eating what French people ate at snacktime: fruit and tea or coffee topped the list, followed by yogurt, and bread and butter.

So the reason that French kids don’t snack is simple: they are just like their parents. And the no-snacking rule has some clear advantages for their parents. Their kids’ car seats and strollers are not covered in crumbs (fresh white baguette, one of our family favorites, is also one of the world’s best crumb-making devices) or sticky juice residue (an excellent adhesive for crumbs). Their purses are not secret storehouses of goodies that send their kids into whining low blood sugar–inspired tantrums (and that leak disastrously onto keys, brushes, and credit cards). One astonishing observation that I made in our first few weeks in France just about sums it up: strollers made in France don’t have cup-holders and neither (at least traditionally) do French cars.

This means that snacking is one of the many things to which unwritten food rules apply in France. No snacks are served at school—with the rare exception of three- and four-year-old kindergarteners in some schools (and pressure is mounting in France to ban this somewhat controversial practice altogether). And no French parent expects food to be made available at any event outside the home, except a birthday party (which will be scheduled to coincide with the timing of the traditional afternoon goûter). In fact, offering a snack to a child at the “wrong” time is definitely a major food faux pas. I had been reminded of this the week before when we were visiting my mother-in-law’s house. We’d been there longer than expected, and I was rushing to leave at 6:00 P.M. when I stopped to offer a snack to Sophie, as I knew she was feeling desperately hungry (mostly because I was feeling the same way).

“It’s nearly dinnertime,” my mother-in-law protested. “You’ll spoil her appetite!” And before my unbelieving eyes, she removed the cookies from Sophie’s hands, holding firm despite the wailing protests that followed. Sophie would simply have to wait to eat. Tight-lipped, I gave in, and hauled Sophie to the car. “You’re right! Of course she’ll have to wait” was all I said to Janine. And wait she did, but not for long; as soon as the car was out of the driveway, I slipped her a baguette in the backseat. “Grignote all you like!” I told her, feeling defiant.

This incident was one of many. Since we had arrived, snacking had gradually become a major source of tension in our family. When we moved to France, our family snacking habits were definitely more North American than French. Our daughters had been breast-fed on demand. As they grew older and got more demanding, one of the things they demanded most often was food. And, generally, we gave it to them, pretty much whenever they wanted. In order to respond to the frequent requests for food, I stashed snacks in every possible location: the car, the stroller, the purse, the diaper bag.

This seemed normal because most of the people we knew did the same thing. Back in Vancouver, the little kids we knew grazed constantly. They snacked at school and after school. They snacked at after-school events, sports practices, at the park, and at almost any gathering lasting for more than about fifteen minutes. They snacked in their strollers and cars. The key turning in the ignition generated a Pavlovian response in my kids: “I want something to eat.” Snacking is so widespread—and so ingrained in North American parenting routines—that I had just taken it for granted. I brought snacks with us everywhere we went (or they were brought to us by devoted armies of volunteer moms who had more flair for baking than I have ever demonstrated).

So I didn’t feel as if our family was unusual. And I was resistant to changing our habits. Kids have little tummies, so my thinking went. They need to eat regularly, every couple of hours or so, or they’ll get too hungry.

“Hmmm,” my husband responded, when I told him this theory, after I’d had a bristling disagreement with his mother about feeding snacks to the kids.

“Is that how you grew up?” he gently asked. “It’s certainly not how I grew up.”

He had a good point. I didn’t remember a lot of snacking growing up. We certainly didn’t snack in the car (music on the eight-track player, not food, was our major distraction). Curious, I went to do some more research. What I found confirmed my memories: our kids snack more than we did when we were their age. When I was growing up in the 1970s, most kids ate one snack per day. And one-quarter of kids didn’t snack at all.

Thinking about my own family history, this made sense. My grandparents had been through the Depression and two world wars, so frugality and homemade meals were their norm. This was how they raised my parents. When I was young, we rarely went out to restaurants (even though fast food was readily available then), because it was not how my parents had been raised. And I spent my afternoons playing with the neighbor kids outside, not being ferried in the car from one lesson to the next. We would come home from school, change clothes, and head out to play until dinnertime—without stopping to snack.

I didn’t grow up snacking. But that doesn’t mean snacking is bad, I argued. And argued. (Persistence, as my husband likes to point out, is one of those good qualities that I sometimes don’t know how to rein in.)

But my husband is persistent too. He quietly asked Virginie to send him some research, which he started discreetly leaving on the kitchen table. Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. As it turns out, snacking isn’t so harmless. One reason is that kids’ snack food is (surprise!) not particularly healthy. Sugary desserts are the number-one favorite