Learning this secret was not the reason we moved to France. I am not a foodie, and Philippe is one of the rare French men I’ve met who has relatively little interest in food (which helps explain why he could entertain the thought of marrying a foreigner). I had little desire to improve my cooking skills; if anything, the thought of having to cook French food filled me with a vague sense of dread.
But living in France awakened my interest in how French parents cook for, eat with, and educate their children about food. I began to ask questions, and also to voice my objections. My kids won’t eat that way! It’s too expensive! I don’t have the time! Luckily, the French love talking about food. In many French households, the most common topic of conversation around the breakfast table is what will be eaten for lunch. And at lunchtime, almost without fail, someone will bring up the topic of what should be eaten for dinner. Discussing food—how as well as what we eat—is the national hobby of the French. So when I asked questions, people were only too willing to talk.
From my many conversations with parents and teachers, doctors and scientists (and from the research I did to back up what I was hearing) I learned that feeding children well doesn’t need to be conflict-ridden or complicated. I learned simple tricks for teaching children to enjoy eating a wide variety of foods, and I also learned that nutrition and healthy eating habits, while important, don’t need to be the main focus. Rather, enjoying your food is the focus, and healthy eating habits are a happy by-product.
This view (food is fun!) helped inspire our family to reinvent the way we eat. Over the course of our year in France, we discovered ten Kids’ Food Rules. Applying these rules challenged some of my most deeply held beliefs about children, food, and parenting. This was sometimes uncomfortable, but our quest to reinvent our family’s food culture was also an experience that brought us closer together. I was inspired by seeing the French families all around us who fostered a healthy love of food—and a love of healthy food—in their children. I hope that our story will inspire you to do the same.
Alors, on y va!
2
Baby Steps and Beet Puree
We Move to France and Encounter Unidentified Edible Objects
Au nom du père
(In the name of the Father )
Parent touches the child’s forehead
Et de la mère
(And the Mother )
… the nose…
Et de l’enfant
(And the Child)
… the left eyebrow…
Tout ce qui est bon
(Everything tasty)
… the right eyebrow…
S’fourr là-dedans!
(Gets stuffed inside!)
… and pops the food in the child’s mouth.
—French nursery rhyme
Living in France is not like visiting France, my husband warned me before we moved. I couldn’t understand what he meant. We’d spent enough time there, I thought, that I truly felt at home. It was true that we had never lived in France. But when we were studying in England, we spent every spare moment we could there. Most of our friends were other international students who soon left England and scattered around the world. We did the same; a year after we were married, we moved to Vancouver, a city that neither of us knew. Despite the birth of our two daughters, we never really settled in, and I daydreamed about moving to France someday to be closer to Philippe’s family. We’d find work somehow, I told myself. Our daughters would learn French and spend more time with their grandparents and cousins. I wanted out of the rat race, and rural France seemed like the perfect place to retreat.
As our children grew, so did my nostalgia for all things French. A brown donkey named Gribouille was partly to blame. At about the same time we returned to North America, our English friend Andy left New York to travel across the French countryside with Gribouille for a companion, and wrote a contemplative book about his journey. Later, I realized that his book wasn’t really about living in France, as he didn’t stop long enough to settle in. But at the time, his account of “finding tranquility in a chaotic world,” as Andy put it, seemed compelling. Where better to find tranquility than in the French countryside?
Finally, when Sophie had just turned four and Claire was a toddler, we decided—or rather I decided—that we’d make the move to France, to the small village where Philippe grew up: Pléneuf Val-André (population: 3,900), on the northwest coast of Brittany. Philippe didn’t share my enthusiasm; he preferred living in a big city, with the mountains and ocean at our doorstep. As much as he missed his family and loved his large circle of intensely loyal French friends, he didn’t want to move back home. Even his parents were ambivalent.
“What will you do here?” asked Jo, my father-in-law. “The village is so small.”
I tried to tell them that this was exactly what I was looking for. A big-city girl, I craved a cozy village life for my kids. I found it hard to understand why Philippe had left. In the end, we compromised: we’d try it for a year. Both of our employers (universities that often granted temporary leaves of absence) agreed that we could telecommute for one year. I was ecstatic.
We arrived in mid-July, at the height of Brittany’s short summer season. Our new home was an old stone house overlooking the bay, only a few minutes’ walk from where we had been married in a small chapel dedicated to local fishermen (we took our vows under a handmade replica of a schooner, proudly suspended from the plaster ceiling).
Although it had only five rooms (three of which were bedrooms), the house felt delightfully clutter-free and uncomplicated. We had traveled to France with only two suitcases; everything else was in storage back in Vancouver. Arriving with so little suited Philippe, who still had mixed feelings. But I couldn’t share his ambivalence. Clichés
