The handbook also suggests a talking cure, à la Dolto. ‘It’s important to reassure him, and to talk to him about this new food,’ it says. The conversation about food should go beyond ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it’. They suggest showing kids a vegetable and asking, ‘Do you think this is crunchy, and that it’ll make a sound when you bite it? What does this flavour remind you of? What do you feel in your mouth?’ They suggest flavour games like offering different types of apples and having the child decide which is the sweetest and the most acidic. In another game, the parent blindfolds the child and has him eat and identify foods he already knows.
All the French baby books I read urge parents to remain calm and cheerful at mealtimes, and above all to stay the course, even if their child doesn’t take a single bite. ‘Don’t force him, but don’t give up on proposing it to him,’ the government handbook explains. ‘Little by little, he’ll get more familiar with it, he’ll taste it … and without a doubt, he’ll end up appreciating it.’
To get more insight into why French children eat so well, I attend the Commission Menus in Paris. It’s here that those sophisticated menus posted at Bean’s crèche every Monday get vetted. The commission’s goal is to thrash out what the crèches of Paris will be serving for lunch for the next two months.
I’m probably the first foreigner ever to attend this meeting. It’s held in a windowless conference room inside a government building on the banks of the Seine. Heading the meeting is Sandra Merle, the chief nutritionist of Parisian crèches. Merle’s deputies are also there, along with a half-dozen chefs who work in various crèches.
The commission is a microcosm of French ideas about kids and food. Lesson number one is that there’s no such thing as ‘kids’ food’. When a dietician reads out the proposed menus, including all four courses for each lunch, there is no mention of French fries, chicken nuggets, pizza or even ketchup. The proposed menu for one Friday is a salad of shredded red cabbage and fromage blanc. Then there’s a white fish called ‘colin’ (hake) in dill sauce, with organic potatoes à l’anglaise. The cheese course is a coulommiers cheese (a soft cheese similar to Brie), and dessert is a baked organic apple. Each dish is cut up or puréed according to the age of the kids.
The commission’s second lesson is the importance of variety. Members take a leek soup off the menu when someone points out that the children will have eaten leeks the previous week. Merle deletes a tomato dish she had planned for late December – another repeat – and replaces it with a boiled-beetroot salad.
Merle stresses visual and textural variety too. She says that if foods are all the same colour one day, she inevitably gets complaints from crèche directors. She reminds the crèche chefs that if the older kids (meaning two- and three-year-olds) have a puréed vegetable as a side dish, they should have a whole fruit for dessert, since they might find two puréed dishes too babyish.
Some of the chefs boast about their recent successes. ‘I served mousse of sardines, mixed with a little cream,’ says a chef with curly black hair. ‘The kids loved it. They spread it on bread.’
There is much praise of soup. ‘They love soup, it doesn’t matter which beans or which vegetables,’ another chef says. ‘The soup with leeks and coconut milk, they really like it,’ a third chef adds.
When someone mentions fagots de haricots verts, everyone laughs. It’s a traditional Christmas dish that all the crèches were supposed to prepare last year. The dish requires blanching green beans, wrapping clusters of the beans in thin slices of smoked pork, piercing the combination with a toothpick and then grilling it. Apparently, this was too much even for the aesthetics-obsessed crèche chefs (though they don’t baulk at being told to cut a kiwi into the shape of a flower).
Not surprisingly, another driving principle of the Commission Menus is that if at first the kids don’t like something, they should try it and try it again. Merle reminds the chefs to introduce new foods gradually, and to prepare them in different ways. She suggests introducing berries first as a purée, since kids will already be familiar with that texture. After that, the chefs can serve them cut into pieces.
One chef asks what to do about grapefruit. Merle suggests serving it sprinkled with sugar to start with, then gradually serving it without. The same goes for spinach. ‘Our kids don’t eat spinach at all. It all goes in the bin,’ one chef grumbles. Merle tells her to mix it with rice to make it more appetizing, and says she’ll send out a ‘technical sheet’ to remind everyone how to do this. ‘You re-propose spinach in different ways throughout the year, eventually they will like it,’ she promises. She says that once one kid starts eating spinach, the others will follow. ‘It’s the principle of nutritional education.’
Vegetables are a big concern for the group. One cook says her kids won’t eat green beans unless they’re lathered in crème fraîche or béchamel sauce. ‘You need to strike a balance; sometimes with sauce, sometimes without,’ Merle suggests. Then there’s a long discussion of rhubarb.
After about two hours under the fluorescent lights, I’m fading a bit. I’d like to go home and have dinner. But the commission is just getting to the menu for the upcoming Christmas meal.
‘The foie gras, no?’ one chef suggests as an appetizer. Another counters with duck mousse. At first I assume that they’re both joking, but no one laughs. The group then debates whether to serve the children salmon or tuna for the main course (their first choice is monkfish, but Merle says it’s too expensive).
And what about the cheese course? Merle vetoes goat’s cheese with herbs, because the kids had goat’s cheese at their autumn picnic. The group finally settles on a menu that includes fish, broccoli mousse and two kinds of cow’s milk cheese. Dessert is an apple-cinnamon cake, a yogurt cake with carrots, and a traditional Christmas galette with pears and chocolate. (‘You can’t veer too much from tradition. Parents will want a galette,’ someone says.) For the afternoon goûter that day, Merle worries that a mousse made of ‘industrial chocolate’ won’t be sufficiently festive. They settle on a more elaborate chocolat liégeois – a chocolate mousse sundae in a glass, topped with whipped cream.
Not once does anyone suggest that a flavour might be too intense or complicated for a child’s palate. None of the foods is outrageously strong – there are a lot of herbs but no mustards, pickles or olives. But there are mushrooms, celery and many other kinds of vegetables in abundance. The point isn’t that every kid will like everything. It’s that he’ll give each food a chance.
Not long after I sit in on the Commission Menus, a friend loans me a book called The Man Who Ate Everything by the American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten. Steingarten writes that when he was named food critic for Vogue, he decided that his personal food preferences made him unfairly biased. ‘I feared that I could be no more objective than an art critic who detests the colour yellow,’ he writes. He embarks on a project to see if he can make himself like the foods he detests.
Steingarten’s hated foods include kimchi (the fermented cabbage that’s a national dish of Korea), swordfish, anchovies, dill, clams, lard, and desserts in Indian restaurants – which he says have ‘the taste and texture of face creams’. He reads up on the science of taste, and concludes that the main problem with new foods is simply that they’re new. So just having them around should chip away at the eater’s innate resistance.
Steingarten bravely decides to eat one of his hated foods each day. He also tries to eat very good versions of each food: chopped anchovies in garlic sauce in northern Italy; a perfectly done capellini in white-clam sauce at a restaurant on Long Island. He spends an entire afternoon cooking lard from scratch, and eats kimchi ten times, at ten different Korean restaurants.
After six months, Steingarten still hates Indian desserts. (‘Not every Indian dessert has the texture and taste of face cream. Far from it. Some have the texture and taste of tennis balls.’) But he comes to like, and even crave, nearly all of his other formerly detested foods. By the tenth portion of kimchi
, it ‘has become my national pickle, too,’ he writes. He concludes that ‘No smells or tastes are innately repulsive, and what’s learned can be forgot.’
Steingarten’s experiment sums up the French approach to feeding kids: if you keep trying things, you eventually come round to liking most of them. Steingarten discovered this by reading up on the science of taste. But French parents seem to know this intuitively, and do it automatically. In France, the idea of reintroducing a broad range of vegetables and other foods isn’t just one idea among many. It’s the guiding culinary principle for kids. The ordinary French parents I meet are evangelical about the idea that there is a rich world of flavours out there, which their children must be educated to appreciate.
This isn’t just some theoretical ideal that can only play out in the controlled environment of the crèche. It actually happens in the kitchens and dining rooms of ordinary French families. I see it first-hand when I visit the home of Fanny, the publisher, who lives in a high-ceilinged apartment in eastern Paris with her husband Vincent, four-year-old Lucie and three-month-old Antoine.
Fanny has pretty, rounded features and a thoughtful gaze. She usually arrives home by 6 pm and serves Lucie dinner at 6:30, while Antoine sits in a bouncy chair drinking his bottle. On week nights, Fanny and Vincent eat together once the kids are asleep.
Fanny says she rarely makes anything as complex as the braised endives and chard that Lucie used to eat at the crèche. Still, she views each night’s dinner as part of Lucie’s culinary education. She doesn’t worry too much about how much Lucie eats. But she insists that Lucie has at least a bite of every item on her plate.
‘She has to taste everything,’ Fanny says, echoing a rule I hear from almost every French mother I speak to about food.
One extension of the tasting principle is that, in France, everyone eats the same dinner. There are no choices or substitutions. ‘I never ask, “What do you want?” It’s “I’m serving this,”’ Fanny tells me. ‘If she doesn’t finish a dish, it’s OK. But we all eat the same thing.’
British or American parents might see this as exercising power over their helpless offspring. Fanny thinks it empowers Lucie. ‘She feels bigger when we all eat, not the same portions, but the same thing,’ Fanny says. Fanny says Anglophone visitors are amazed when they see Lucie at a meal. ‘They say, “How come your daughter already knows the difference between Camembert, Gruyère and Chèvre?”’
Fanny says she also tries to make the meal fun. Lucie is of course a seasoned chef, because she makes cakes most weekends. Fanny says she has Lucie play some role in making dinner too, by preparing some of the food or setting the table. ‘We help her, but we make it playful. And it’s every day,’ Fanny says.
When it’s time to eat, Fanny doesn’t austerely wave her finger at Lucie and order her to taste things. They talk about the food. Often they discuss the flavour of each cheese. And having participated in preparing the meal, Lucie is invested in how it turns out. There’s complicity. If a certain dish is a flop, ‘We all have a laugh about it,’ Fanny says.
Part of keeping the mood light is keeping the meal brief. Fanny says that once Lucie has tasted everything, she’s allowed to leave the table. The book Votre Enfant says a meal with young kids shouldn’t last more than thirty minutes. French kids learn to linger over longer meals as they get older. And as they start going to bed later, they eat more weeknight dinners with their parents. Eating together teaches the kids table manners, social skills, and how to make conversation.
Planning the dinner menu is a lesson in balance. I’m struck by how French mothers like Fanny seem to have the day’s culinary rhythm mapped out in their heads. They assume that their kids will have their one big protein-heavy meal at lunchtime. For dinner they mostly serve carbohydrates like pasta, along with vegetables.
Fanny may have just raced home from the office, but as they do at the crèche she calmly serves dinner in courses. She gives Lucie a cold vegetable starter, such as shredded carrots in vinaigrette. Then there’s a main course, usually pasta or rice with vegetables. Occasionally she’ll cook a bit of fish or meat, but usually she expects Lucie to have most of her protein at lunch. ‘I try to avoid proteins [at night] because I think I’ve been educated like that. They say once per day is enough. I try to focus on vegetables.’
Some parents tell me that, in winter, they often serve soup for dinner, along with a baguette or maybe a bit of pasta. It’s a filling meal, which also relies heavily on grains and vegetables. A lot of parents purée these soups. And that’s dinner. Kids might drink some juice at breakfast, or at the afternoon goûter. But at lunch and dinner they drink water, usually at room temperature or slightly chilled.
Weekends are for family meals. Almost all the French families I know have a large lunch en famille on both Saturday and Sunday. The kids are almost always involved in cooking and setting up these meals. On weekends ‘We bake, we cook, I have cookbooks for children, they have their own recipes,’ says Denise, the medical ethicist and mother of two girls.
After all these preparations, they sit down to eat. Sociologists Claude Fischler and Estelle Masson, authors of the book Manger, say that a French person who eats a sandwich at his desk for lunch doesn’t even count this as ‘having eaten’. For the French, ‘Eating means sitting at the table with others, taking one’s time and not doing other things at the same time.’ Whereas for Americans, ‘Health is seen as the main reason for eating.’3
At Bean’s fifth birthday party, I announce that it’s time for the cake. Suddenly all the kids – who’ve been raucously playing – file into our dining room and sit down at the table. They’re all sage at once. Bean sits at the head of the table and hands out plates, spoons and napkins. Except for lighting the candles and carrying out the cake, I don’t have much of a role. By five years old, sitting calmly at the table for any kind of eating is an automatic reflex for French kids. There’s no question of eating on the couch, in front of the television, or while looking at the computer.
Of course, one of the benefits of having some cadre in your home is that you can go outside the cadre without worrying that it will collapse. Denise tells me that once a week she lets her two girls – who are seven and nine – have dinner in front of the television.
On weekends and during those ubiquitous school holidays, French parents are more relaxed about what time their kids eat and go to bed. They trust the cadre to be there when they need it again. Magazines run articles about easing kids back on to an earlier schedule, once school starts again. When we’re on holiday with my friend Hélène and her husband William, I panic a bit when it’s 1:30 and William still hasn’t got home with some of the ingredients for our lunch.
But Hélène figures that the kids can adapt. They are people, after all, who like us are capable of coping with a bit of frustration. She breaks open a bag of potato crisps, and the six kids all gather at the kitchen table to eat them. Then they pile outside to play again, until lunch is ready. It’s no big deal. We all cope. A little while later we all have a long, lovely meal at the table that we’ve set up under a tree.
If over-parenting were an airline, Park Slope, Brooklyn, would be its hub. Every parenting trend and new product seems to originate or refuel there. Park Slope is home to ‘New York’s first baby-wearing and breastfeeding boutique’, and to a $15,000-per-year nursery where teachers ‘actively discourage and stop superhero play’. If you live in Park Slope, ‘Baby Bodyguards’ will kid-proof your duplex for $600. (The company’s founder explains that ‘Once I gave birth and my son became part of the external world, my fear and anxiety kicked in.’)
Despite Park Slope’s reputation for zealous parenting, I’m unprepared for what I witness in a playground there on a sunny Sunday morning. At first, the father and son I spot just seem to be doing a particularly energetic version of narrated play. The boy looks about six. The father – in expensive jeans and stylish weekend stubble – has followed him to the top of the jungle gym. In a bilingual twis
t, he’s giving the boy a running commentary in both English and what sounds like American-accented German.
The son seems used to his father heading down the slide behind him. When they move to the swings, the father continues his bilingual soliloquy, while pushing. This is all still within the bounds of what I’ve seen elsewhere. But then the mother arrives. She’s a rail-thin brunette in her own pair of expensive jeans, carrying a bag of produce from the farmers’ market next door.
‘Here’s your parsley snack! Do you want your parsley snack?’ she says to the boy, handing him a green sprig.
Parsley? A snack? I think I understand the intention: these parents don’t want their son to be fat. They want him to have a varied palate. They see themselves as original thinkers who can provide him with unusual experiences, German and parsley surely being just a small sample. And I grant them that parsley doesn’t run the risk of ruining their son’s – or frankly anyone’s – appetite.
But there’s a reason why parsley has never caught on as a snack. It’s a seasoning. It doesn’t taste good all by itself. I get the feeling that these parents are trying to remove their son from the collective wisdom of our species, and the basic chemistry of what tastes good. I can only imagine the effort this requires. What happens when he discovers cookies?
When I mention the ‘parsley snack’ incident to American parents, they’re not surprised. They concede that parsley isn’t a snack. But they admire the effort. At that impressionable age, why not try? In the hothouse environment of Park Slope, some parents have gone beyond the American Question: how do we speed up the stages of development? They’re now asking how they can override basic sensory experiences.
I realize I’m guilty of this too when I take Bean to her first Halloween party, when she’s about two. The French haven’t embraced this holiday yet, the way the British have. (I go to one adult Halloween party in Paris, where all the women are dressed as sexy witches, and most of the men are Draculas.) Each year a group of Anglophone mothers in Paris takes over the top floor of a Starbucks near the Bastille and sets up little trick-or-treat stations around the room.
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