Now that I’ve got your attention…
During my hiatus from the blogosphere over the past few months my family has had all sorts of memorable meals. From my son’s Bar Mitzvah in June to gatherings at our home with overseas visitors and a trip to both Paris and Croatia, it seems our lives have been all about food.
Throughout it all, I’ve been struck by something that until now, I’ve taken for granted: my kids, it turns out, are extremely open-minded, adventurous eaters.
I’ve always known that they eat…well…everything. Sushi, raw quail eggs on Udon soup, prawn ravioli with saffron sauce, steak tartare, runny, smelly French cheeses and even live sea urchins that they’ve personally scooped from the ocean floor while fishing with their dad. This past winter Alex, who’s nine, chose ‘gator at a soul food joint in Harlem and loved it.
It’s something that’s so embedded in our routine that I’ve never really thought twice about it. That is, until Alex ordered the the tête de veau at a fancy lunch date in Paris last month with an epicurean friend.
Tête de Veau
In case you’re wondering, tête de veau is an entire veal’s head: brain, tongue, cheeks and all.
Not only did Alex order the tête de veau, but he was beside himself with excitement at the prospect of trying it. And when it was served he devoured it, announcing that his favorite part was the brain. (I turned down his offer to try some myself.)
I was baffled. How the heck had my kids had become such fearless foodies? With Bringing Up Bébé fresh on my mind, along with this blog post by Mari Passananti about successfully applying a dose of French-style discipline to her son’s eating routine to help him become a “good little meal eater,” I began to wonder what, exactly, Jacques and I had done to encourage our kids to be good, open-minded and adventurous little meal eaters themselves while shrugging off typical American kids’ fare like mac ‘n cheese and never falling into the habit of constant snacking — which was one of Mari’s concerns. Because I’m not aware of having made any particular effort.
Alex devouring it
Bringing Up Bébé devotes an entire chapter to how French children are taught to respect the nearly religious structure of mealtime and to appreciate a wide variety of foods. In describing her purposeful “French experiment,” Mari talks about how structure à la francaise led her son to have a more balanced diet and more stable moods and turned mealtimes into pleasurable events for her family.
But in my own household the only intentional efforts have been Jacques’ constant drilling of table manners. (A whole other, not-so-happy story.) Which leaves me to conclude that my kids’ attitude toward food comes simply from imitating ours.
Shaped largely by Jacques’ Franco-Italian upbringing and my own experience living in France for 12 years, this mindset can be roughly summed up as:
1. Being in the long-engrained habit of eating three balanced meals a day with little if any snacking. Note that this is not out of discipline, but simply because old habits die hard.
2. Truly loving good food of all sorts, with good meaning fresh, whole, not processed.
3. Enjoying cooking.
4. Seasoning the food we cook with only a very short but yummy list of ingredients, used in various combinations: olive oil, lemon juice, fresh garlic, salt, pepper, Dijon mustard, spices and fresh herbs.
5. Seasoning our salad with just olive oil and vinegar or lemon juice, or the same plus some Dijon mustard (a French vinaigrette).
While our seasoning choices are also mainly due to personal preference and laziness — again, old habits die hard — I often wonder if they might affect our kids’ tastes. Ready-made seasonings, marinades, salad dressings, etc. often have a lot of dried garlic and onion powder and even a lot of sugar: tastes that tend to be addictive and make other tastes seem bland.
6. Enjoying mealtime and the bonding experience of sitting down to eat as a family, which we do every day.
7. Having guests over often to share meals, and enjoying this, too.
8. Honestly believing that there’s no reason why kids should prefer things like peanut butter, sugary cereal or Lunchables, which we both think are….well, just gross. (And because of this, never having offered these things to our kids in the first place.)
9. Not offering “special case” menus for the kids. What we serve is what they get! If that means one night they won’t eat the rice, or the chicken, but will have other parts of the meal, that’s okay. They’ll live. So will we.
10. Not eating fast food or junk food, or keeping junk food in the house. (Unless Ben & Jerry’s counts!) Again: Gross!
11. Ditto with soft drinks. Ditto: gross. (I suspect these, too, tend to be addictive and make other things taste bland.)
12. Drinking only water at meals. (And of course some wine for the adults.)
13. Not having food- or eating-related anxieties.
This last point is, I think, the most important. We Americans tend to have all sorts of hang-ups and conflicts about eating, constantly worrying whether our food is low-cal, low-fat, low-sugar, low-salt, low-cholestoral or lactose free. We crave junk food but feel guilty about it. We feel guilty, period. We have allergies and intolerances that frankly, much of the rest of the world has never even heard of, but that make us generally apprehensive.
I’m sure kids pick up on all these tense vibes, developing anxieties and conflicts of their own early on.
Last but not least, a major part of our family’s mindset is:
14. Enjoying dessert. 
Not every day, but at least a couple of times a week. And I don’t mean low-fat, sugar-free frozen yogurt. The way we look at it, just like with main courses, it’s better to enjoy the real McCoy (think: butter! cream! sugar! chocolate!) in reasonable quantities than to feel dissatisfied by substitutes which are probably not healthy in the first place and leave you craving more.
I hope this can serve up some food for thought.
Bon appetit!
