French Kids Eat Everything

faces and shapes, by turns grotesque or coquettish. Tiny little figurines floated in soups or perched on pastries in a Where’s Waldo style. Claire figured this out quickly: scanning each page, she would search until she found a little bonhomme, pointing her pudgy finger with pride. The pages that attracted her most avid attention were, naturally, in the sections on goûters and desserts.
“Which one is your favorite?” I asked. Sophie finally settled on palets choco-raisins: lacy dark chocolate wafers daubed with dried apricots, slivers of almonds, raisins, and hazelnut chunks. Given her aversion to all nuts and seeds, this surprised me. Claire surprised me too, by picking an old French favorite: gâteau au yaourt (yogurt cake), a sort of sponge cake with a slight tangy flavor. The recipes actually looked easy: I knew my mother-in-law could whip this cake up in under ten minutes.
I promised the girls that we’d make their chosen desserts later that afternoon. In the meantime, I extracted a promise from Philippe to take them over to play with Marie. I needed some time to think.
After they had gone, I sat down with a cup of strong coffee and went through the books one by one. Some of these were cookbooks, which I put to one side. I was more interested in the books about children’s food. Virginie and Hugo had also lent me a few books written by doctors, nutritionists, psychologists, and sociologists. As I leafed through them, one term kept appearing that intrigued me: aliment. This was a new word for me. I headed to the dictionary in hopes of finding some enlightenment.
Aliment, it turns out, doesn’t translate directly into English. Both aliment and nourriture are translated as “food,” but these two words do not have the same meaning in French. Nourriture is the easy one to define, as it corresponds to the English meaning for food: something you ingest. But aliment is more complicated.
Searching for an explanation, I came across a quote from one of the best-known French nutritionists of the twentieth century, Jean Trémolières. He argued that an aliment is more than just a nutritious foodstuff. It is also something that can satisfy both emotional and physical appetites; it nourishes both physically and psychologically. In fact, a better translation of “aliment” would probably be “a nourishment.”
Somewhere in my head, a light bulb went on. Aliments are more than just food. Aliments are cultural definitions of things we find nourishing and appetizing. Something that is an aliment in one country may not be in another. (Think frog’s legs.)
This reminded me of a comment made at dinner the night before, one that I hadn’t understood at the time. In the midst of our discussion, Virginie had remarked: “When you go into a supermarket in the United States, there is hardly any food!” At the time, I thought it was a ridiculous comment. Now it started to make more sense. There was not a lot, in most American supermarkets, that most French people would consider (traditionally at least) an aliment. This was a bit like the Puritans who nearly starved their first winter in the New World because they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) recognize the edible things all around them. For Virginie, the processed and preprepared foods that filled up the aisles in a North American grocery store weren’t real food because, although they were edible, they weren’t nourishing.
The realization slowly dawned on me. Learning how to eat like the French was not just about my kids eating vegetables. It was about changing how we nourished ourselves, and about changing our psychological and emotional relationship to both cooking and eating. This was a bit of a shock. I had thought I would be fighting to change my children’s eating habits. Now, I realized, I’d also have to fight my own ingrained eating and cooking habits.
This was going to be challenging, because I simply didn’t enjoy spending time in the kitchen. Years of scrambling to prepare dinner after getting home from work meant that I had a harried, stressed feeling whenever I thought about cooking. This was a drastic change from life before kids, when I actually had liked to cook (although I admit that my total cooking repertoire was well under a dozen dishes). Somehow, the stress and chaos of having kids had worn me down, and I fed them a much more limited diet, and cooked much less, than my preparenting self would have believed possible. The thought of learning new dishes and organizing myself to change our family’s approach to food seemed daunting. My doubts began to resurface. I started to pile the books in a corner and decided to get on with my day. Everyone, I hoped, would forget about my rash suggestion to teach my kids to “eat French.”
It was not to be. The phone rang before I even finished my pile. It was Philippe’s mother.
“How did your dinner go last night?” she asked. I didn’t know what to say, but as it turns out I needn’t have worried. Without waiting for a reply, Janine carried on. “I just talked to Philippe, and he told me that you had some fascinating conversations about food. He asked me whether I had some cookbooks that I could drop off. I’ve got a great one that I used when he was a baby.” (Note to self: Remind husband not to confide in mother-in-law before consulting with wife.)
“Great!” I said, forcing myself to sound enthusiastic. “I’d love to see them.”
When I hung up the phone, I was feeling anxious and cornered. Family pressure had been mounting since we arrived. Philippe’s parents were not happy at the way their grandchildren ate. Our most recent restaurant outing with my in-laws had been a disaster. We arrived at 7:30 P.M. (early for the French) in order to get a table with a view at the only seaside restaurant in the village. Both tired and hungry, the girls whined and bickered, provoking glowering looks from my in-laws, the adults at the