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

before asking myself what they meant) sum it up: growing up and adopting a reasonable, rational, responsible approach to life means abandoning childish tastes and behaviors.

Perhaps this is why “fast food” hasn’t really taken off in France to the same extent as in the United States. When we first arrived, I assumed it didn’t really exist at all because there wasn’t a single fast-food or takeout restaurant in our village. But then Sandrine pointed out the little french fry stand tucked away behind the marina. And, she told me, all of the bigger towns in France had fast-food restaurants—including McDonald’s. True enough: there was a McDonald’s off the highway in the nearest big town, and the parking lot often looked full as we drove by.

Curious about how much fast food the French ate, I asked Véronique to look up some statistics. As it turns out, Americans spend nearly half of their food budgets away from home. In France, only 20 percent of the food budget is spent on food outside the home, and much of this is for the high-quality meals that children (and their parents) get at the school (or office) cantine. And any food that isn’t prepared the proper, traditional way is called “la mal bouffe” (bad grub, a deliberately vulgar term). The distinction drawn by the French is absolutely clear: only “real” food is called nourriture (or aliments). The rest is somehow suspect. In particular, the French don’t want their food to be fast (on the assumption that food prepared quickly must have been carelessly prepared and will be of lower quality). One popular, home-grown French version of fast food captures this difference: the frozen food giant Picard (whose outlets in central Paris outnumber the metro stations). Parisians might shop at Picard, but when they do they buy meals like cuisses de grenouilles (frog’s legs) and pavés d’autruche grillés (yes, a grilled ostrich dish). Even “fast” food could be “slow.”

My daughters certainly heard this point of view from their grandparents. The first time we drove past the McDonald’s on the highway was a cross-cultural lesson for all of us. We’d been out visiting Philippe’s cousin Christine, who ran an art gallery on the other side of the bay. It was late and getting dark, and we were all tired and hungry.

“Yum!” said Sophie. “I want to stop at McDonald’s!”

“Their food tastes terrible,” replied Janine.

“But it won’t take long,” insisted Sophie.

“And that’s why the food tastes terrible!” responded Jo, with an air of absolute finality.

“We’ll make you much better French fries, from scratch, at home,” added Mamie—and that’s exactly what she did.

Needless to say, we didn’t go to McDonald’s, and my in-laws would never even think of bringing the children there. But some of the teenagers in the village thought otherwise. Our babysitter, Camille, was a frequent visitor.

“Why do you like McDonald’s?” I asked her one afternoon, out of curiosity. “There are so many good French restaurants you could go to.”

“Well, my parents don’t like me going, but it’s cheap, and I like it,” she replied. “There are no rules. Sort of like the United States, right?”

Describing a visit to McDonald’s as an act of teenage rebellion made me smile. But in a funny way it captured the idea of freedom that many French people associate with the United States. French youth—my husband among them—have been rebelling since the late 1960s against the rules that govern French society, and fast food is just one more means of doing so. Philippe still remembers one ad from his college days, when McDonald’s had just arrived in the rather remote corner of Brittany where he was studying. A child’s voice recites a long list of table manners (“Don’t play with your food,” “Don’t eat with your fingers,” “Don’t make noise at the table,” “Don’t put your elbows on the table”) as images of people eating in a McDonald’s—while breaking each rule—scroll across the screen. He remembers being fascinated by the bright colors, hard plastics, strangely friendly staff, and instant food. “It felt,” he recalls, “like a child had designed the restaurant, sort of like a playroom, but with adult-size furniture.”

Some of our friends worried about the attraction that fast food had for young French people (which Hugo referred to disdainfully as “McDonaldization” and Virginie called “vagabond feeding”). A documentary that Sandrine brought me to see—Nos enfants nous accuseront (Our Children Will Accuse Us)—summed up French fears: a combination of agro-industry, agricultural pollution, junk food, fast food, and globalization that threatened to undermine people’s health, French culture, and even the French landscape. By the end of the movie, we were both crying.

One of the people featured in the film was José Bové, a French farmer who was arrested for dismantling a McDonald’s in his hometown of Millau in southern France. By the time we moved to France, Bové was a national hero and an elected deputy to the European Parliament. But his McDonald’s antics were what the French remembered (and adored) him for. Together with other protestors, he had managed to disassemble much of the building, tile by tile and bolt by bolt, and cart the pieces away to be deposited on the lawn of the local town hall before being stopped by police. Bruno Rebelle, head of Greenpeace France, summed up the outpouring of national support: “You see, in the United States, food is fuel. Here, it’s a love story.”

But the problem was that food wasn’t a love story for me (at least not at first). The real issue, I had begun to realize, was how I prioritized (or, rather, didn’t prioritize) the time necessary for making, and enjoying, good food. I resented spending time in the kitchen but would happily spend hours every week ferrying Sophie to music lessons and insisting (no matter how much she protested) that she practice. I had to confess to myself that, deep down, my children’s success was more important to me than teaching them to eat well. I came to this realization one day