French Children Don't Throw Food (26 page)

If you drop the forlorn hope of fifty-fifty equality, and relax your exacting feminist standards, it becomes easier to enjoy the fact that some urban French husbands do quite a lot of childcare, cooking and dishwashing. A 2006 French study
¹⁰
found that just 15 per cent of fathers of infants participated equally in the babies’ care, and 11 per cent took primary responsibility. But 44 per cent played very active, supporting roles. You see these dads, adorably scruffy, pushing buggies to the park on Saturday mornings, and bringing home bags of groceries afterwards.

This latter category of dads often focuses on housework and cooking in particular. French mothers tell me that their husbands handle specific domains, like homework or cleaning
up
after dinner. Perhaps having this clear division of labour is the secret. Or maybe French couples are just more fatalistic about marriage.

‘One of the great feelings of a couple and of marriage is gratitude to the person who hasn’t left,’ says Laurence Ferrari, the anchorwoman of France’s top nightly news programme. Ferrari, forty-four, is a pretty blonde who’s six months pregnant with her second husband’s baby. She’s speaking to the raffish, professionally provocative French philosopher Pascal Bruckner. They are discussing ‘Love and marriage: are they a good combination?’ for a French magazine.

Ferrari and Bruckner are part of the French elite – a rarified circle of journalists, politicians, academics and businessmen who socialize with and marry each other. Their views represent an exaggerated, perhaps aspirational version of how ordinary French people think.

‘Today, marriage no longer has a bourgeois connotation. To the contrary, for me, it’s an act of bravado,’ Ferrari says.

Marriage is a ‘revolutionary adventure’, Bruckner replies. ‘Love is an indomitable feeling. The tragedy of love is the fact that it changes, and we’re not the masters of this change.’

Ferrari concurs. ‘It’s because of that that I persist in saying, marriage for love is a magnificent risk.’

In a sign of how far we’ve come socially, Simon and I are invited away for the weekend – with kids – to the country home of our French friends Hélène and William. They, too, have twins and a singleton. Hélène, who’s tall with a heart-shaped
face
and ethereal blue eyes, grew up in Reims, the capital of the Champagne region. Her family’s holiday home is nearby in the Ardennes, close to the Belgian border.

Many of the First World War battles took place in the Ardennes. For four years, French and German soldiers dug trenches here, and fired artillery and machine guns at each other. The two sides lived in such close proximity that they knew each other’s work shifts and habits, the way neighbours do. Sometimes they’d hold up handwritten signs for the other side to read.

In the small town where Hélène’s family home is, it feels as if the shelling only recently stopped. People don’t say ‘First World War’, they say ‘fourteen to eighteen’. Many of the homes destroyed in the war were never rebuilt, leaving a lot of the landscape as open fields.

Hélène and William are ultra-dedicated parents all day long. But each night we’re there, as soon as the kids are down, they bring out the cigarettes and the wine, turn on the radio, and have what is obviously adult time. They want to
profiter
– to take advantage of the company and the warm summer night.

On weekends, William gets up early with the kids. One morning he pops out of the house – while Simon babysits – to fetch some fresh
pains au chocolat
and a crusty baguette. Hélène eventually wanders downstairs in her pyjamas, her hair adorably mussed, and plops down at the breakfast table.

‘
J’adore cette baguette!
’ she says to William, as soon as she sees the bread he’s bought.

It’s a very simple, sweet, honest thing to say. And I can’t imagine saying anything like it to Simon. I usually say that he’s bought the wrong baguette, or I worry that he’s left a mess that I’ll have to clean up. He doesn’t make me beam with delight, at least not first thing in the morning. That sheer girlish pleasure –
j’adore cette baguette
– sadly doesn’t exist between us.

I tell Simon the baguette story as we’re driving home from the Ardennes, past fields of yellow flowers and the occasional stone war memorial. ‘We need more of that
j’adore cette baguette
,’ he says. He’s right; we absolutely do.

12

You Just Have to Taste It

THE MAIN QUESTION
people ask about twins, besides how they were conceived, is how they’re different from each other. Some parents have this all figured out: ‘One’s a giver and one’s a taker,’ the mother of two-year-old girls cooed, when I met her in a park in Miami. ‘They get along perfectly!’

It’s not quite that smooth with Leo and Joey. They seem like an old married couple – inseparable, but always bickering. (Perhaps they’ve learned that from Simon and me.) The differences between them become clearer when they start to talk. Leo, the swarthy one, says nothing but the odd noun for several months. Then suddenly at dinner one night, he turns to me and says, in a kind of robot voice, ‘I am eating.’

It’s no accident that Leo has mastered the present continuous. He lives in the present continuous. He’s in constant, rapid motion. He doesn’t walk anywhere, he runs. I can tell who’s approaching by the speed of the footsteps.

Joey’s preferred grammatical form is the possessive:
my
rabbit,
my
mummy. He moves slowly, like an old man, because he’s trying to carry his key possessions with him at all times.
His
favoured items vary, but there are always many of them (at one point he sleeps with a small kitchen whisk). He eventually puts everything into two briefcases, which he drags from room to room. Leo likes to swipe these, then run away. If I had to sum up the boys in a sentence, I’d say one’s a taker and one’s a hoarder.

Bean’s preferred grammatical form is still the command. We can no longer blame her teachers; it’s clear that giving orders suits her. She’s constantly speaking up for a cause, usually her own. Simon refers to her as ‘the union organizer’, as in: ‘The union organizer would like spaghetti for dinner.’

It was hard enough trying to instil French habits in Bean when she was an only child. Now that there are three kids in the house – and just two of us – creating some French
cadre
(framework) is even harder. But it’s also a lot more urgent. If we don’t control the kids, they’re going to control us.

One realm in which we’re succeeding is with food. Food is of course a source of national pride in France, and something that French people love to talk about. My French colleagues spend most of lunch discussing what they had for dinner. When Simon goes out for post-game beers with his French football team, he says they talk about food, not girls.

It becomes clear how French our kids’ eating habits have become when we visit America. My mum is excited to introduce Bean to that American classic, macaroni and cheese from a box. But Bean won’t eat more than a few bites. ‘That’s not cheese,’ she says (I think I detect her first sneer).

We’re on holiday when we visit America, so we end up
eating
out a lot. On the plus side, American restaurants – like British ones – are a lot more kid-friendly than those in France. There are unheard-of conveniences like high chairs, crayons, and changing tables in the bathrooms. (You might occasionally find one of these things in Paris. But almost never all three at once.)

But I grow to dread the ubiquitous ‘kids’ menus’ in American restaurants. It doesn’t matter what type of restaurant we’re in – seafood, Italian, Cuban. The kids’ menus all have practically identical offerings: hamburgers, fried chicken fingers (now euphemistically called chicken ‘tenders’), plain pizza, and perhaps spaghetti. There are almost never any vegetables, unless you count French fries or potato crisps. Occasionally, there’s fruit. Kids aren’t even asked how they want their hamburgers cooked. Perhaps for legal reasons, all the burgers come out a depressing shade of grey.

It isn’t just restaurants that treat kids like they don’t have fully developed taste buds. On one trip home I sign Bean up for a few days of tennis camp, which includes lunch. ‘Lunch’ for ten children turns out to be a bag of white bread and two packets of American cheese. Even Bean, who’d eat pasta or hamburgers for every meal if I let her, is taken aback. ‘Tomorrow is pizza!’ one of the coaches chirps.

The reigning view seems to be that kids have finicky, limited palates, and that adults who venture beyond grilled cheese do so at their peril. This belief is, of course, self-fulfilling. Many of the kids I meet in America and Britain do
have
finicky and limited palates. Frequently they spend a few years on a kind of mono-diet. A friend in Atlanta has one son who ate only white foods like rice and pasta. Her other son ate only meat. Another friend’s baby nephew in Boston was supposed to start eating solid foods around Christmas. When the boy refused to eat anything but foil-wrapped chocolate Santas, his parents hoarded bags of them, afraid they’d be out of stock after the holidays.

Catering to picky kids is a lot of work. A mother I know in Long Island makes a different breakfast for each of her four kids, plus a fifth one for her husband. An American father who’s visiting Paris with his family informs me in reverent tones that his seven-year-old is very particular about textures. He says the boy likes cheese and tortillas separately, but refuses to eat them when they’re cooked together because the tortilla becomes – he whispers this while looking at his son – ‘
too crispy
’.

Instead of resisting this pickiness, the parenting establishment seems to be capitulating to it.
What to Expect: The Toddler Years
says: ‘Letting a young child go for months on nothing but cereal, milk and pasta, or bread and cheese (assuming a few well-chosen fruits and/or vegetables are thrown in for good balance) isn’t indulgent or unacceptable, but perfectly respectable. In fact, there’s something inherently unfair about insisting that children eat what’s put in front of them when grown-ups enjoy a great deal of freedom of choice at the table.’

And then there’s snack food. When I’m with Anglophone friends and their kids, little bags of pretzels and Cheerios seem
to
appear all the time, in between meals. Dominique, a French mother who lives in New York, says at first she was shocked to learn that her daughter’s nursery feeds the kids every hour, all day long. She was surprised to see parents giving their kids snacks throughout the day at the playground too. ‘If a toddler starts having a tantrum, they will give food to calm him down. They use food to distract them from whatever the crisis is,’ she says.

The whole picture is different in France. In Paris, I mostly shop at the local supermarket. But just by going with the flow in Paris, my kids have never tasted high-fructose corn syrup or long-life bread. Instead of Fruit Shoots, they have fruit. They’re so used to fresh food that processed food tastes strange to them.

As I’ve mentioned, French kids typically only eat at mealtimes, and at the afternoon
goûter
. I’ve never seen a French child eating pretzels (or anything else) in the park at 10 am. There are kids’ menus at some French restaurants – usually at corner bistros or pizza places. These menus don’t always have
haute cuisine
either. There’s often steak with
frites
. (‘At home we never have
frites
, [my kids] know it’s their only way of getting them,’ my friend Christine says.)

But at most restaurants, kids are expected to order from the regular menu. When I ask for spaghetti with tomato sauce for Bean at a nice Italian restaurant, the French waitress very gently suggests that I order her something a bit more adventurous – say the pasta dish with aubergine.

It’s not that French children are clamouring for more
vegetables
. Of course they like certain foods more than others. And there are plenty of finicky French three-year-olds. But I’ve never met one who ate just one type of food. Their parents wouldn’t let them exclude whole categories of textures, colours and nutrients, just because the children want to. The extreme pickiness that’s come to seem normal in America and Britain looks, to French parents, like a dangerous eating disorder or, at best, a wildly bad habit.

The consequences of these differences are important. Just 3.1 per cent of French five- and six-year-olds are obese;
¹
in Britain, nearly 10 per cent of four- and five-year-olds are obese.
²
As they get older, the gap between French and British children just keeps widening. In America and the UK, I see overweight children even in prosperous neighbourhoods. But in five years of hanging out at French playgrounds, I’ve seen exactly one child who might qualify as obese (and I suspect she was just visiting).

With food in particular, I can’t help but ask the same question that I’ve been asking about so many other aspects of French parenting: how do French parents do it? How do they make their kids into little
gourmets
? And in the process, why don’t French kids get fat? I see the results all around me, but how do French kids get to be this way?

I suspect that it starts with babies. When Bean is around six months old and I’m ready to feed her solid foods, I notice that French supermarkets don’t sell the ground rice that my mother and all my Anglophone friends say should be a baby’s first
food
. I have to trek to health food stores to buy an expensive, organic version imported from Germany, tucked away below the recycled nappies.

It turns out that French parents don’t start their babies off on bland, colourless grains. From the first bite, they serve babies flavour-packed vegetables. The first foods that French babies typically eat are steamed and puréed green beans, spinach, carrots, peeled courgette, and the white part of leeks.

American babies eat vegetables too, of course, sometimes even from the start. But we Anglophones tend to regard vegetables as obligatory, vitamin-delivery devices, and mentally group them in the ‘dull’ category. A friend of mine gets so giddy when her kids eat avocado and broccoli that she shouts out the names of all the nutrients they’re getting.