French Kids Eat Everything

hundred attentive kids watching, would you make a fuss over your food?
Teachers, too, played an active role in educating the children about food, explained Madame as we walked along the corridors to the exit. They had three key goals. The first was to protect children’s health and support their academic performance by feeding them nutritious food. The second goal was to educate children: to cultivate their palates, teach them basic rules of food hygiene and nutrition, and open their minds to food as culture, art, and national heritage. And the third goal was to discipline their eating habits, setting up healthy routines for when, where, how, what, and why kids ate what they did.
At this point, I almost said something. Madame’s approach seemed incredibly rigid, and I didn’t think it was going to work with Sophie. But Madame was in full swing, and I decided to stay quiet.
Proudly, Madame quoted, from memory, the French National Ministry of Education: “School is a privileged place in which children are educated about good taste, nutrition, and food culture. Good taste must be taught and learned, and can only be acquired over time.”
The exact approach to serving food, she explained, was governed by rules set out by the Ministry. Vegetables had to be served at every meal: raw one day, cooked the next. Fried food could be served no more than once per week. Real fish had to be served at least once per week. Fruit was served for dessert every second meal, at a minimum; sugary desserts were allowed—but only once per week. The rules even specified the quantities of nutrients expected to be in the average meal (if you’re curious, these include 11 grams of high-quality protein, 220 milligrams of calcium, and 2.8 milligrams of iron for adolescents).
Meal planning was overseen by a nutritionist and a committee of parent volunteers. Parents were intensely interested in what their children were eating. That last part didn’t surprise me: I had already heard parents greeting their children as they exited the classroom. Instead of the usual “What did you do in school today?” they all asked, “So how did you like your lunch?”
This reflected, I later learned, French parents’ general lack of concern (at least to my North American eyes) with accelerating young children’s intellectual development. No flashcards, no toddler violin classes, no Baby Einstein. In fact, French parents are puzzled by the intensity with which American parents try to stimulate intellectual precociousness in their offspring. (Flash cards? Really? You must be joking!) The French are deeply committed to formal schooling (which was more advanced than at home, as far as I could tell). But most parents believe that teaching reading and writing is a task best left to professional teachers. Instead, French parents focus on what they think young kids can and should learn: how to savor and enjoy food. All food. A typical question one French parent will ask another is: “So, what does she like to eat”? The other parent will proudly respond: “Elle mange un peu de tout.” (She eats a little bit of everything.)
Entire books on this topic are written for new parents, with tempting titles like The Birth of Taste: How to Give Children the Gift of Enjoying Food. In fact, French parents love to recount anecdotes about kids’ first foods (much the same way North American parents share stories about first words). During our visits to village families with young children, we would almost invariably discuss what the children had been eating. Parents would share their children’s food conquests in a kind of one-upmanship that North Americans usually reserve for sporting or academic achievements. Our friend Yves, for example, was incredibly proud that his nine-month-old daughter Nicole would eat Roquefort cheese (yes, the stinky green-blue moldy kind) and would excitedly offer little blobs to her in front of any and all visitors. I had to admit that Nicole did look exceedingly happy while gumming her cheese (“It’s the salt,” whispered my husband in an effort to console me).
So I knew first-hand that French parents thought variety was important. What Madame was saying made sense. But I hadn’t known until now that the school played such an active role in educating children about food in the classroom. According to Madame, food education actually occurred through formal lessons. She gestured to a diagram on the wall that looked like a food pyramid. Edging closer, I noticed something curious. Instead of the regular food groups, there were nine recommendations, like rungs in a ladder. The food groups were there (fruits and vegetables; milk products; grains and legumes; and meat, fish, and eggs), but there were also recommendations, Madame explained, about limiting fats, sugar, and salt. The bottom row—the base of the pyramid—was devoted to drinking water. Was this a food group according to the French? I wondered.
But before I had time to ask, Madame had moved on to talk about her personal favorite: the lessons organized during “La Semaine du Goût” (Tasting Week), held every October in schools across France. Throughout the week, celebrity chefs (from top restaurants like the Ritz) visited classrooms charming young children as they cooked and tasted foods together. The online videos of their performances sometimes became national news stories. More humbly, local cooks, bakers, butchers, cheese makers, and assorted food lovers of all types visited classrooms and campuses, offering teachable moments like “Authentic Fruit Juice Workshops.” Over 5,000 of these lessons had been organized across France the previous year. (Simultaneously, restaurants all over France offer special “Tasting Week” menus at affordable prices.) In spite of myself, I felt a skeptical look come to my face; I doubted that any gourmet chef, no matter how good, could convince Sophie to eat things she didn’t want to eat.
But teaching kids about food didn’t stop there, Madame continued. Great care was taken in teaching children how to eat well and wisely, and in “awakening their taste-buds,” as she poetically put it. The school followed the teaching method developed by