French Kids Eat Everything (26 page)

“Call Véronique! She's out at the restaurant around the corner, with Inès!” I had forgotten that my sister-in-law was visiting for the weekend. She and Benoît were out for the evening with her best friend, Inès. This being France, Inès was also my husband's former girlfriend—in fact, she has been his very first serious girlfriend. She was also a doctor.

Inès was there in less than five minutes. She took one look at Philippe and whisked him into her car. By the time I got to the hospital, he was being examined by a bevy of worried-looking personnel wearing white protective suits. It was only after several agonizing hours in the waiting room that we heard the good news: it probably wasn't swine flu. And Philippe would probably be fine. They kept him in the hospital under observation, just in case. And I drove home after the longest night of my life.

Philippe's dad brought him home late the following morning. We put him straight to bed, where he fell immediately asleep. By evening, we still hadn't heard a thing. Véronique—who had just dropped in to say good-bye—went upstairs to check.

“He's fine,” she said, as she came back down the stairs. But she didn't look very happy. After a moment's hesitation, she continued, “You really upset Inès, and us, last night. You should definitely send her flowers, or chocolates. Better, send both.”

Slightly shocked, I rushed to apologize. “I'm so sorry,” I told her. “I know that it must have been awkward for Inès to help us out. You know, being Philippe's old girlfriend.”

“
Non, non!
” said Véronique, looking surprised. “Nobody cares about that.” It was my turn to look surprised. “It was because you
ruined our dinner
,” she explained impatiently. “Inès had just ordered her food, but she didn't even get to finish her
entrée
. We ate the rest of the meal alone. It was delicious, but you ruined it for everyone.”

I was stunned. My husband had been at death's door, and all Véronique could worry about was her stomach? And she had stayed to eat at the restaurant while we were rushing to the hospital!? Philippe explained to me later that Inès and Véronique didn't often get to see each other, much less eat out together, and that this was a new restaurant with a
menu gastronomique
. He would have done the same had he been in their place, he assured me. This shocked me even more. However, all of a sudden, I felt that life was too short for arguing. I would just have to accept that some aspects of the French approach to food would probably remain forever mysterious.

The swine flu false alarm did have one lasting effect: it
dissolved my resistance to Philippe's desire to start a family “slow food” experiment. While still recovering, he extracted a promise from me: when he got better (and, thankfully, he got better quickly), we'd tackle slow food, together. So, in mid-May, we embarked on the next phase of The Plan: our own, in-house Slow Food Experiment. Or, as we rechristened it, our Slower Food Experiment: I still wasn't quite sure that I could commit to slow food, but I agreed that I could try going
somewhat
more slowly.

Slow food also meant, I decided, getting away from the explicit emphasis on enforcing rules. French food culture was primarily about enjoying things (enabled by a well-honed set of routines). We needed to create a new ambiance at the dinner table in which the children would simply absorb the rules. With a little hesitation, I removed all of the accumulated pieces of paper on our fridge: the lists of rules, tips, The Plan, and the dog-eared pages of our food diary. The fridge looked clean and tidy now that the clutter was gone. It inspired us, in fact, to do a general house cleaning. We threw the windows open, scrubbed off the accumulated winter mold, aired out cupboards, and tidied things away. Even the car got a makeover, with new covers on the seats and new mats on the floor.

With a clean house and lovely weather outside (almost as gloriously sunny as it had been the summer before), I started to relax. May is a month with many holidays in France, and these are often cleverly scheduled on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that people can slot in a day off work on Monday or Friday and have a four-day long weekend. Most of our friends went away for little family trips. Everyone around us, it seemed, was slowing down. Why not join them?

To commemorate the launch of our Slower Food Experiment, Philippe and I agreed to select two mottos. Philippe's choice was
Manger Bien et Juste
(Eat Well and Right), a saying by the French playwright Molière. My choice was (as is usual with us) a little less elegant:
Slow Food Is Good Food
. But the two mottos paired up nicely. Philippe wrote them down in his lovely cursive script (which is still drilled into French children at an early age), and our pieces of paper (decorated by the girls) snuggled side by side on the fridge.

Next, inspired by my brother-in-law (who is an aficionado of French music), I put together some dinner music: our Slow/Happy Mix, as we christened it. Until now, I had never really paid attention to French music. I was vaguely familiar with household names like Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf, and traditional French
chansons;
some of these made it onto the playlist, along with some
parlé-chanté
(the French “spoken-sung” singing style made famous by singers like Serge Gainsbourg). But, with a bit of exploration, a new world opened up to me: whimsical, wonderful music by Yann Tiersen (composer for one of my favorite movies of all time,
Amélie
), dreamy Francis Cabrel, Manu Chao (fun post-punk folk-pop), and sassy yet serene acoustic French singers like Rose, Camille, Zaz, and Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of Serge).

I got into the habit of putting on our Slow/Happy playlist while I was cooking, and everyone would slowly unwind. Unexpectedly, listening to music was a perfect distraction while the kids were waiting for dinner. Soon, the girls were asking for
la musique
when they got home from school and would dance in and out of the kitchen as I cooked. Even Philippe got in on the act. “
La musique adoucit les moeurs
” (music soothes the savage breast), he would say, grinning, swaying into the kitchen and swinging me around.

Our Slow/Happy songs generally put everyone in a positive frame of mind for our “mindful dinners.” Interestingly, I couldn't find anything in French libraries about mindful eating. When I asked in libraries or bookstores about
manger en pleine conscience
(the best translation that Philippe and I could think of), the response was usually a blank look and a classic Gallic shrug (although one person eventually directed me to books about vegetarianism, wrongly assuming that I was talking about ethical eating). Like so many other French food rules, the habit of eating mindfully was so deeply engrained, and so widely practiced, that no one had even invented a term to describe it. So there was no French “Mindful Eating Guide” I could turn to.

Instead I resorted to reading American, vaguely Buddhist-influenced books, such as Susan Albers's
Eating Mindfully
(which a friend had mailed from home after hearing about our experiment). In here, I found some of the ideas I'd already stumbled upon myself (like the importance of
how
and
why
we eat, as well as
what
we eat). But these books were not really that helpful, as they focused mostly on adults with eating disorders or people struggling with weight issues. I also read books by French doctors (like Jean-Michel and Myriam Cohen's
Bien manger en famille
) and psychologists (like Natalie Rigal's
Winning the Food Fight
).

Unexpectedly, though, I came across something that really interested me in
The Simple Living Guide
(authored by Janet Luhrs, former editor of
Simple Living
newsletter), which my godmother had given to me as a “bon voyage” present when we started our year in France. The
Guide
talks quite a bit about “sensual eating,” which I would have dismissed as self-indulgent foodie rhetoric before moving to France. But now I was more open-minded. In fact, I read, underlined, and reread the following passage:

“Cooking can be an act of love and delight, or it can be yet another exercise in racing through life on automatic pilot—never stopping for a moment to notice, feel, or taste. Cooking performed as an act of love brings us renewed energy and vigor.”

This, I realized, was amazingly similar to the “taste training” in French schools that I had learned about from Sophie's teacher. But I hadn't thought about the fact that this approach could apply to adults as well as children, and to cooking as well as eating. Given that the kitchen was usually the place where I was most tense, this was quite a revelation.

“Cooking,” the
Guide
goes on to say, “is like an embrace.”

This is the kind of statement that would have made me run from the room prior to moving to France. But now it brought to mind something I'd read by Natalie Rigal: food education for children should not be about nutrition (although of course this is important information for adults), but should be primarily sensual and sensory because this is how kids learn best. Embracing the act of eating, children learn to listen to their body's signals (such as the “I'm full” feeling) and grow to appreciate the act of savoring food.

All of this gave me enough information to cobble something together for our Slower Food Experiment. Our goal of mindful eating, I decided, was to get our kids to pay attention to their food
and
their bodies. But it had to be easy, so we'd only “Slow Food” one type of food or dish per meal. For this particular item, we'd all try to eat mindfully: slowly and appreciatively, using all of our senses to really savor the food.

Now, how to explain this to the girls? I decided to keep it super simple, and told them:
If you eat your food more slowly, it lasts longer and tastes better
. And instead of long lists of complex words that the adult-focused books used (like “aware,” “compassionate,” or “sensual”), we'd use just one word:
déguster
. The girls had already heard this word many times from their grandparents, as it tends to get used a lot when French people speak about food. Like many French words concerning food,
déguster
is difficult to translate. It often gets translated simply as “taste” (as in “let's taste the food”). But French people usually use the word “
goûter
” to refer to the physical act of tasting something. The word “
déguster
” actually means to eat something slowly and carefully, to savor, and to appreciate (but not to revel in food, for which the French use the term “
se régaler
”). In the culinary world, the word “
dégustation
” is used to refer to a formal event at which food tasting is conducted with almost surgical precision (like a
dégustation de vin
). But ordinary French people also use the word at home, most often when they are telling their children to slow down when they're eating.

“
Il faut déguster!
” my mother-in-law would often say, which means “Slow down and appreciate your food!” Often this was said with a slightly reproving or exasperated tone—because the kids had been gobbling their food. Most of the time, however, gobbling food was not a problem with our kids, who usually picked at everything except dessert. Sophie, in particular, was a painfully slow eater, serving herself tiny morsels on the tip of her fork, and taking forever to chew. Telling her to speed up only seemed to slow her down even more. But when served a piece of chocolate, she was transformed into a champion speed-eater: she'd literally snatch it from her plate, stuff it in her mouth, chomp the absolute minimum number of times, and swallow. And smile.

Chocolate, I decided, was probably a good place to start. Going back to my motto, I reasoned that if we picked something yummy, the girls would associate slow food with good food. Plus, it would be more likely to capture their attention if it was something they savored. Then the girls would be attentive enough to talk about the food; this was important because a key part of mindful eating is being observant. We'd ask the girls to talk about the smell, the appearance, and the texture of the food they were eating.

So, on our first day of our Slower Food Experiment, I made homemade
mousse au chocolat
. Contrary to what you might think, this is one of the easiest French desserts to make, as it has only four ingredients and doesn't require any baking. I admit that it took me a while to get comfortable making mousse, given my North American concern (paranoia, from the French perspective) about raw eggs. But my concerns started to seem a little silly given all of the raw, unpasteurized things that French people consumed. Mamie made mousse all the time for the grandchildren. And the kids loved watching me make it; they would hover around to lick the bowls (which they were allowed to do only on the condition that they
never
do this in front of my in-laws).

After we got home from school one rainy Monday afternoon, with Rose and Zaz playing in the background and the girls eating their
goûter
at the table, I started melting the chocolate. Usually, given that I was always in a hurry, I'd put it in a pot and start separating the eggs, dashing back and forth from dealing with the eggs to stirring the chocolate. But this, I decided, was not a Slow Food approach (plus it usually resulted in sticky, dry chocolate—which ended up producing crumbly chunks, resulting in oddly crunchy mousse). So, instead, I just stood in front of the stove and stirred, inhaling the slowly unfurling odors. I had never noticed before that the smell deepened, and got rounder, as the chocolate melted.