French Kids Eat Everything (18 page)

French Food Rule #6b:

For fussy eaters:
You don't have to
like
it, but you do have to
eat
it
.

French parents apply this rule with familiar foods that their children are usually happy to eat. This rule had a magical effect on my kids (and on me). Before, when my children would say, “I don't like it,” when I served things they usually liked, I would immediately get worried. I'd try to change the taste of whatever they were refusing (More butter? More salt? What about a bit of soy sauce? Ketchup?). Unwittingly, I ceded the decision-making power over eating to my kids. Looking back, I realized that I was caught between my desire to support my kids' individual choice and autonomy (refusing this food is okay), and my desire to get 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. So the French are not primarily concerned with policing their children's food intake, or banning all “fake foods.” Rather, their goal is to train their children to eat a balanced diet and to realize how much healthier they feel if they eat mostly “real food.”

The results—in terms of vegetable and fruit consumption by French children—are impressive. Before I allowed myself to be truly convinced of the French approach, I actually looked up the statistics. The French recommendation is that kids eat five portions (about two and a half cups) of fruits and vegetables per day. Just under half (42 percent) of French children achieve this. And many of the rest were pretty close. In contrast, only about 10 percent of American children and adolescents (and 20 percent of toddlers) are estimated to consume the American government's recommended daily two and a half cups per day of fruits and vegetables. The most popular “fruit” in North America is actually fruit juice (just under half of fruit intake in toddlers). And the most common type of “vegetable” consumed by American kids is the french fry (up to one-half of all vegetables consumed, in some studies), which doesn't qualify as a vegetable in the French statistics.

I know what you're thinking. I had the same question.
How do French parents actually get their kids to
eat
all these fruits and vegetables?

A big part of the explanation lies in how early kids are introduced to a variety of foods, and with what intention. First of all, it's important to understand that French parents aren't solely focused on getting kids to eat their fruits and veggies. Rather, they're interested in training their kids' appetites. The French understand “appetite” as a psychological state, which primes you to eat (and be satisfied) by certain foods. So, for the French, an appetite is not just a measure of an empty stomach; it is also a state of mind. If eating is something that someone
does
, then appetite is what he or she
feels
like doing. This depends on many things: the time of day, your desire to eat, how you feel about the setting, and so on. The French deliberately train their kids' appetite, emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically. And they do this very differently than North American parents do.

In North America, parents tend to start with a very few foods, and introduce them very slowly. Beyond that, little guidance is given. As the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) informs parents on their parenting website: “For most babies it does not matter what the first solid foods are.”
Food Fights
, a book written by doctors and published by the AAP (and promoted on its website), devotes an entire chapter to ketchup as kids' condiment of choice. The book contains some views that would make French pediatricians wince (notably, using ketchup to encourage children to eat vegetables doesn't have long-term implications for their future acceptance of new foods and flavors).

The French equivalent of the AAP is the Société Française de Pédiatrie. The longest section of their publication on infant and toddler nutrition is titled “food diversification.” It does not mention ketchup. Reading through this (and other texts published by French pediatricians) provides some fascinating insights into how French parents approach variety in babies' diets. First of all, they are very precise about ages and stages for introducing new foods. Cookbooks (and baby food websites) will typically be divided into the following categories: 4 to 5 months, 6 to 9 months, 9 to 12 months, 12 to 18 months, and 18 to 36 months. Each phase has new types of foods, with the goal of children eating pretty much everything adults do by the age of three.

The French also differ in terms of what they feed their children. At four months, the first food for French babies is not necessarily cereal (as is usual in North America), but rather a thin vegetable puree or soup. Standard advice from pediatricians is to dilute this with milk, and serve it in a baby bottle. On Day 1, a dollop of soup (say, leek soup) in their milk introduces them to the taste. On successive days, the amount of soup is increased (and the amount of milk is decreased). Within less than a week, baby is drinking vegetable soup rather than milk for the main meal of the day. The next step is to gradually thicken the soup, moving to a sippy cup, and then to a spoon. By the time babies are developmentally ready to learn to eat with a spoon, they've already learned to like their veggies.

Fruits are started shortly after vegetables and are usually given at the afternoon
goûter
. Anticipating that French parents will be eager to introduce as many tastes as possible, French pediatricians gently caution, “It is preferable to introduce only one fruit per day, in order to allow a child to learn to appreciate the specific taste of each fruit.”

By nine months, the options have expanded dramatically. By now, baby is eating a wider range of vegetables. For some, these still come as a brothlike soup in a baby bottle; others have graduated to being fed with a spoon (the preferred method for breast-fed babies). On the menu are carrots (but not too many, in case of constipation), green beans, spinach, zucchini, baby (white) leeks, baby endive, baby chard, and squash. Again, parents are encouraged to give only one vegetable per meal, to foster the baby's budding taste buds. Cereals are not offered, except for a tablespoon or two stirred into the baby's milk for the morning and the evening bottle-feeding. (I don't agree with everything in the French model: despite all of the research demonstrating the advantages of breast-feeding, France has some of the lowest breast-feeding rates in the industrialized world. And if French mothers do breast-feed, they typically stop at two months.)

A second, more advanced phase of diversification starts at one year, and lasts until about three—the crucial period in which the French shape (some books even use the word “construct”) their children's tastes. The preferred vegetables they use are often curious choices, at least to American eyes. My mother-in-law was surprised, for example, that I started my daughters off with green peas—because she felt that their taste and texture was “too strong.” In fact, the French (somewhat haphazardly, at least in my opinion) classify vegetables into “mild” and “strong” categories, according to their taste. As she explained to me, “mild” vegetables (like baby leeks) should be given before “strong” ones like cabbage, turnip, onions, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and parsley. Our friend Laurence, who lives in the south of France, started off serving simple zucchini puree to her babies, then added parsley and tomatoes a few months later. By the time baby Antoine was a year and a half old, eggplant and peppers had been added, the texture had gone from smooth to lumpy, and Antoine was eating something that closely resembled ratatouille.

This list of “strong” vegetables would be daunting to most American parents, but French parents will usually feed these “unusual” vegetables to their children without a second thought. Ever heard of cardoons (
cardons
)? Neither had I (they're a kind of artichoke). The Society of French Pediatricians puts them on their recommended list, and you can find them in most French markets. Salsify also features on their list. I had to look this one up too, only to learn it was a plant called Jerusalem star (or vegetable oyster) that I'd never even seen, much less thought of giving to my children.