After a decade of French and France bashing, the pendulum
seems to be swinging in the other direction with a range of new books extolling
the magic of the French art de vivre. After Pamela
Druckerman’s coquettish “I’m not even sure I like it here” but nonetheless
rose-tinted view of life in France (read, Paris), it’s refreshing to read Karen
Bakker Le Billon’s earnest attempt to understand the French way of educating bébé
at the table. While Druckerman bears and rears her children in Paris and in a
French cultural context from conception, Le Billon moves with her French
husband and two small children, ages two and six at the time, from the ultra-permissive,
child-centered food culture of North America (Vancouver, to be exact) to the
authoritarian and comparatively rigid environment of Brittany.
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Relaxed Table with Cheese
© 2011 Isabelle Vianu
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The Le Billon grandparents are horrified by the
manners and eating habits of their Franco-Canadian grandchildren. From their French
family’s perspective the children eat constantly, at inappropriate times and
places, and with so sense of etiquette - n'importe quoi, n'importe quand et n'importe
comment. Le Billon is not happy with her daughters’ poor eating habits
and limited culinary range, but feels powerless to change them until she
realizes that behavior tolerated at home is unacceptable in France and could pose
a significant impediment to her children’s social acceptance.
With the rational mind and experimental rigor of her
academic background, she sets out to identify aspects of French food culture
that will help her educate her own children on healthy eating and good manners.
What makes the book interesting is that Le Billon is not herself in love with
the French way of life and she is not a foodie by a long shot. She is no
instant convert to eating a wide variety of foods and spending hours
languishing at the table either. Le Billon is not afraid to voice her
discomfort with the rigidity of French culture with regards to expectations of
child behavior. She often finds French attitudes towards children and food
downright mean.
In the beginning Le Billon views children making
their own food choices as empowering and the rigid rules around eating times
unnecessarily strict. In American culture, choosing your own food is indicative
of the overarching importance placed on individual liberty. In fact, much is
made in North American culture of catering to children’s specific food tastes. This
month’s Food
& Wine issue (May 2012) has an article on Katie Workman, the “Family-Food
Whisperer” who creates meals that appeal to adults and children alike, as long
as you’re willing to make both the ‘adult’ and ‘child’ versions of meatballs
and green beans (and here I thought meatballs and green beans were already
child friendly!).
French culture, in contrast, values communal sharing
of food as a means of strengthening bonds and increasing cohesiveness. The
cultural significance of common cuisine made headlines last summer in France
when extreme right political groups organized a series of apéritifs saucisson-vin rouge,
wine and pork sausage events designed to enflame anti-immigrant, and
specifically anti-Muslim, sentiment. Their message was clearly ‘to be French is
to eat French’.
While Le Billon wishes that her daughters could
adopt the manners and varied palates of their French peers she herself is a
reluctant cook with a somewhat fearful and anxious attitude towards food. She
sees mealtime as a chore and a time drain. However, over the course of the year
she comes to appreciate not only the health benefits of specific mealtimes, a
varied diet and no snacking, but also the interpersonal benefits of relaxed
time together as a family. Meal times transition from battleground to an
opportunity to spend time together, to connect, to be joyful and to relax. The
book is overly long in my opinion, but the reader does identify with the
slowness of her process in coming to terms - and eventual acceptance – of a way
of eating that runs through French culture. Restraint, connection and pleasure
are all to be found around the table.
Where this book distinguishes itself from others in the
genre is that it does not conclude in France with a rosy cinematic fade out of
the annual family day-long garden feast and a ‘happy end’ to the food wars.
After their year in Brittany, the Le Billon family returns to Vancouver, intent
on maintaining the French culinary art de vivre, or lifestyle. The
return, as my family knows all too well, was rocky. They had spent a year consciously
exploring another view entirely of food and its place in their lives culminating,
literally, with the 10 commandments of eating well, only to find that it is
very difficult and a whole lot less pleasurable to walk the walk in the land of
ten minute school lunches.
Le Billon is now back in Vancouver where she is
trying to change the school lunch culture and introduce more healthful eating. She’s
in good company. There are several excellent TED talks on the topic. For ‘Lunch
Lady’ Ann Cooper, school lunch is a social justice issue. Chef Jamie Oliver is also
deeply involved in improving school lunches. Meanwhile, back in France all is
not rosy either. According to an article in the inaugural issue of the food
review Alimentation Générale,
cost-cutting measures have led to the closure of school cafeterias that once
cooked meals on site to out-sourcing of school lunches to industrial food
giants such as Sodexo in up to 50% of French schools. This is horrifying to
many French parents not only because of the reduction in freshness and taste, but
also because of the ties that children have to the tatas de cantine, the school
cooks, or ‘lunch ladies’. The food preparation may be off-site, but in general French
pupils still sit down together to a full meal of entrée, plat, fromage and dessert
(although some renegades are pushing for a ‘cheese or dessert’ course), and the
lunch break, including playtime, is two hours. Below is an example of an “industrial,
processed” lunch menu offered by the food company Avenance for schools in the
town of Breuillet in the Greater Paris Region. In deference to the Catholic tradition, fish is often served on Friday.
Vendredi/Friday
Tarte au Fromage/Cheese
Quiche
Lieu/
Pollack (fish, a member of the cod family)
Sauce Normande/Normandy
Sauce (a white sauce made of fish stock, flavored with wine, and enriched with
cream and egg yolks. Dishes called ‘Normande’ usually include butter, cream
and/or apples.)
Epinards à la crème/Spinach
in cream sauce
Fondu président/Soft
white cheese
Fruit de saison/Seasonal
fruit
Goûter/Snack
Pain
et chocolat/Bread and chocolate (as mentioned in Le Billon’s book, baguette with
squares of chocolate)
Jus
d'orange/Orange juice
Compare this to the lunch menu for a local San Diego
elementary school. In addition to having the option to bring your own lunch, the
American elementary school lunch also offers a choice every day, except for the
weekly Round Table Pizza lunch. Note that yogurt and graham crackers are
offered daily as an additional main course option, and that nachos with cheese sauce and taco meat is a meal. Depending on the day the
time allotted to lunch and recess ranges from 20 minutes to a ‘generous’ 45
minutes. The high school lunch break is 22 minutes.
Le Billon, Karen (2012) French Kids eat Everything: How our family moved to France, cured picky eating, banned snacking, and discovered 10 simple rules for raising happy, healthy eaters. William Morrow, Harper Collins Publishers: New York.
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