French Children Don't Throw Food (27 page)

Although we’re desperate for our kids to eat vegetables, we don’t always expect them to. Bestselling cookbooks teach parents how to sneak vegetables into meatballs, fish fingers and macaroni and cheese, without kids even noticing. I once watched as friends of mine urgently spooned vegetables coated in yogurt into their kids’ mouths after a meal, while the kids watched television, seemingly oblivious to what they were eating. ‘Who knows how much longer we’ll be able to do this,’ the wife explained.

French parents treat their
légumes
with a whole different level of intention and commitment. They describe the taste of each vegetable, and talk about their child’s first encounter with celery or leeks as the start of a lifelong relationship. ‘I wanted her to know the taste of carrot by itself. Then I wanted
her
to know the taste of courgette,’ my neighbour Samia swoons. Like other French parents I spoke to, Samia views vegetables – and fruit – as the building blocks of her daughter’s incipient culinary
éducation
, and a way of initiating her into the richness of taste.

My English baby books recognize that certain foods are an acquired taste. They say that if a baby rejects a food, parents should wait a few days and then offer the same food again. My Anglophone friends and I all do this. But we assume that if it doesn’t work after a few tries, our babies just don’t like avocado, sweet potatoes or spinach.

In France, the same advice to keep re-proposing foods to babies is elevated to a mission. Parents take for granted that, while kids will prefer certain tastes to others, the flavour of each vegetable is inherently rich and interesting. Parents see it as their job to bring the child round to appreciating this. They believe that just as they must teach the child how to sleep, how to wait, and how to say
bonjour
, they must teach her how to eat.

No one suggests that introducing all these foods will be easy. The French government’s free handbook on feeding kids says all babies are different. ‘Some are happy to discover new foods. Others are less excited, and diversification takes a little bit longer.’ But the handbook urges parents to be dogged about introducing a child to new foods, and not to give up even after he’s rejected a food three or more times.

French parents advance slowly. ‘Ask your child to taste just one bite, then move on to the next course,’ the handbook
suggests
. The author adds that parents should never offer a different food to replace the rejected one. And they should react neutrally if the child won’t eat something. ‘If you don’t react too much to his refusal, your child will truly abandon this behaviour,’ the authors predict. ‘Don’t panic. You can keep giving him milk to be sure he’s getting enough food.’

This long-term view of cultivating a child’s palate is echoed in Laurence Pernoud’s legendary parenting book
J’élève mon enfant
(
I Raise My Child
). Her section on feeding solids to babies is called ‘How little by little a child learns to eat everything’.

‘He refuses to eat artichokes?’ Pernoud writes. ‘Here again, you have to wait. When, a few days later, you try again, try putting a little bit of artichoke into a lot of purée’ (of potatoes, say).

The government food guide says parents should offer the same ingredients cooked many different ways. ‘Try steaming, baking, in parchment, grilled, plain, with sauce or seasoned,’ the handbook’s authors say. ‘Your child will discover different colours, different textures and different aromas.’

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?”’