French Kids Eat Everything (24 page)

Three weeks into our new phase of The Plan, things seemed to be going almost too well. The girls weren't requesting snacks very often any more. They had seemed to settle into their new routine. We didn't even have to continue making up new snack menus, we decided. On weekends, they'd flip through the cookbooks and pick a couple of new things, but they were mostly happy (as was I) with the things that they were already eating for snack.

Most surprising of all, they didn't seem to miss the bedtime snack. I missed it, though. I missed those moments of quiet complicity we had at the table late at night when I nibbled alongside the girls—who were sleepy enough to be well behaved. We'd dim the lights, and a magical calm would pervade the kitchen. And I missed the second bedtime snack I was used to having later with Philippe after the girls were asleep. But Philippe and I found other things to do together. Jo, who was more than happy to support our transition to French eating routines, would often come over to babysit on the weekend after the girls had been put to bed. Philippe and I started going out to movies—although they were only shown once a week, in the local village hall that doubled as the community center, theater, marriage reception room, and indoor gym. We went out for drinks with Eric and Sandrine and met a few other couples. It was amazing how much Philippe cheered up after an evening outing; we hadn't been on “date nights” since Claire was born.

Banishing snacks, it turns out, was easier and happier than I had expected—at least for Philippe and me. But I still wondered how the girls really felt about giving up snacks. Were
they
happy with the new routine? I had my answer (and knew we'd really turned a corner as a family) when I overheard the girls talking to each other late one afternoon.

“I'm hungry,” whined Claire.

“Me too,” echoed Sophie. “But don't worry!” she continued brightly. “That means you'll really appreciate your dinner. It's in two hours. Let's go check what's on the menu.”

And they did just that.

—This eighteenth-century French song, still one of the most popular songs for French children, is the original source of the melody for “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

By the end of April, nine months after our arrival in
France, our family food experiment was well under way. The girls were eating more new things than I would ever have imagined possible. Our meals were on a good schedule (the French four square meals a day). Food was no longer a bribe or a reward or a distraction. Instead, it was a source of pleasure and family closeness. And “eating French” had turned out to be less time-consuming than I thought; the simple recipes I was using didn't actually take that much time to prepare. True, backsliding happened once in a while. At the end of a long workday, I'd sometimes just cook a pot of pasta. The girls sometimes still whined and fidgeted at the table. And although we were eating a more varied set of menu items, I'd fallen into a bit of a rut; new things weren't being introduced at the same rate as they had been earlier in the year. But overall we'd made progress; our family mealtimes, though far from perfect, were a lot more fun.

However, I had to confess that I still didn't look forward to spending time in the kitchen. I'd usually leave cooking to the last minute, then rush around throwing things together. I thought of this as part of my personality: I walk and talk quickly and am often impatient when things move slowly. In fact, I felt perversely proud of my brisk eating habits.
Why waste time eating when you could be doing something else?
So I would often eat quickly and get up from the table and wash the dishes even before everyone else was finished. Philippe despaired of the fact that I couldn't shelve my multitasking tendencies. He wanted to relax at mealtimes, like any Frenchman would. But when he protested, I resisted.

“It's normal for me to eat this quickly!” I shot back at my husband one evening after he had chided me for jumping up too soon from the table. (To be precise, he had ordered me, in an exasperated tone, and in front of our wide-eyed children, to “sit down and stay put!”)

“I'm busy! We don't have the luxury of a thirty-five-hour week back home. I don't have the time to sit for hours at the table. I like working hard!” I triumphantly concluded, and then couldn't resist adding, “And harder than the French!”

This was a strategic error. Within a day, Philippe had the statistics to prove me wrong. He had asked Véronique to double-check them, and then he printed them out and cheerily posted them on our now-crowded fridge (Note to self: Try to look on the bright side of having a Parisian economic journalist as a sister-in-law).

As Philippe pointed out, both French and American mothers work (and hold full-time jobs) at about the same rates. And, he eagerly added, the average length of the workday is actually
shorter
in the United States. To top it all off, he smilingly noted that labor productivity per hour in France was just as high as in the United States.

His point was clear: it's not because the French work shorter hours that they have more time to spend preparing meals and eating. They're busy, harried, working hard, and often running late—just like North American parents. But the big difference is that French parents
choose
to spend more time shopping, preparing meals, and eating—in spite of having the highest number of children per family of almost any wealthy country.

For Philippe, as for most French people, food can only be properly enjoyed if it is eaten slowly: the French love to savor their food and find it genuinely relaxing—even meditative—to take their time eating. But this was a message I didn't really want to hear. After nearly nine months in France, I was deeply restless. I had moved our family to France in order to slow down, but I found that I wasn't well suited to the “tranquil life.” Instead, I found myself enjoying the surprisingly fast aspects of French life. French trains run at several hundred miles per hour and are an amazingly efficient way of getting around. People speak quickly; I soon learned to add the word “
lentement
” (slowly) when asking people “Could you please repeat that?” The owner of the tiny café in our village took great pride in the speed with which the little espresso-style coffees would be served (putting to shame the pace at most Starbucks I've visited). The French even walk quickly; the first time I visited Paris, I was amazed at how the tiny Parisian women would outpace me, seemingly serene as they trotted past. Their chic, efficient walking style made me feel lumbering, large, and ungraceful—that is, until I ditched my bulky sneakers (which no self-respecting Frenchwoman would wear on city streets) for a wonderful pair of ballerina flats, which were as comfortable as slippers and could make even my feet seem small and elegant.

But the glacial pace of life in the village remained, for me, maddeningly slow. I spent too much time waiting in long lines at the market, the bakery, the post office, and the bank. There seemed to be endless paperwork every time we interacted with France's famed bureaucracy. (To sign Sophie up for swimming lessons required three forms filled out in triplicate, a visit to the doctor for a medical certificate, two signed photos of the child, one signed photo of each of the parents, and a birth certificate.)

The slowest part of French daily life (and the hardest for me to handle) was mealtime. It wasn't the amount of time spent cooking (the French spend, on average, forty-eight minutes per day cooking, while Americans spend just thirty, the least amount of time of any developed country). Rather, it was the amount of time spent
eating
(or, more accurately, sitting at the table) that I found hard to cope with.

Back home, I was used to eating lunch at my desk in five or ten minutes. I'd wolf down my breakfast if I had time, while rushing to get the kids ready for school. Dinner was similar—I'd try to gobble something down while the children were eating. We might spend fifteen minutes at the table—during most of which I'd be jumping up and down getting things the kids needed, wiping up spills, or managing sibling rivalry. Over the course of a day (including my treasured bedtime snack), I would spend, on average, fifty minutes eating. I'm a typical North American, it turns out. We spend just over one hour per day eating.

In contrast, the French spend more than two hours per day eating: fifteen minutes eating breakfast, just under an hour for lunch, and just over an hour for dinner. And this doesn't include shopping, food preparation, or cleaning up. This length of time is very consistent; French people almost never wolf down their food or eat on the run. And they expect their children to behave the same way. After all, eating is social; more precisely, it is a social
exchange
, in which the most important conversations of the day take place (both at work and at home). So it's no surprise that the French like to take their time.

If this was difficult for my kids, it was just as difficult for me. When we moved to France,
I
found it hard enough to sit at the table for an hour. Meals with our extended family were even longer: they might start at 12:30, but not finish until 2:30 or 3:00
P.M
., or even later if guests were visiting (the family record was an Easter lunch that started at noon but didn't finish until the last guest wobbled out the door at close to 7:00
P.M
.). Christmas dinner started at 8:00 or 8:30 and finished well past midnight. Each of these meals felt like a marathon, as I fidgeted in my chair and surreptitiously checked the time. Volunteering for errands in the kitchen whenever I could didn't win approval either; I was expected to sit still, just like everyone else.

Bit by bit, however, these long family meals began to grow on me. In part, I learned the art of “slow food” through watching my husband enjoy himself. It's difficult for a foreigner to appreciate how much the French delight in these moments at the table. Even though he had left France as a young man, my husband still missed—even craved—these moments of true relaxation (
détente
) that arise during a long, delicious meal with good friends.

Their nonstop jokes certainly helped make longer mealtimes bearable, and some of the funniest ones were regularly recounted—like the first time Philippe's friends visited our home for a meal—one of the first I had ever made for French
invités
. Everything went smoothly until the cheese course, when Olivier cut the first wedge of a local organic Camembert I had served, proudly proclaiming its virtues. In the midst of recounting yet another joke, he distractedly brought the cheese up to his mouth—and was stopped, just in time, by his wife, who wordlessly pointed to the white maggots wiggling and writhing in the little morsel he'd been about to consume. When questioned by my horrified mother-in-law afterward, it turned out that I hadn't realized that cheese had to be well covered and kept away from flies—particularly in the summer—to avoid Mother Nature taking its course. But no one took offense (certainly not Olivier), and the episode became just one more story to be retold at future gatherings when the cheese arrived on the table. “Is it organic, Karen?” someone would often ask smilingly before taking the first bite.

These meals taught me that pleasure (
le plaisir
) is the most important goal for the French when they're seated around the table. The French children I met seemed to know this intuitively. This was confirmed when I looked up surveys of French children's eating habits. In the biggest one to date, the following statement got the highest “agreement” out of kids: