French Kids Eat Everything Karen Billon (romance novel chinese novels txt) 📖

desire to start a family “slow food” experiment. While still recovering, he extracted a promise from me: when he got better (and, thankfully, he got better quickly), we’d tackle slow food, together. So, in mid-May, we embarked on the next phase of The Plan: our own, in-house Slow Food Experiment. Or, as we rechristened it, our Slower Food Experiment: I still wasn’t quite sure that I could commit to slow food, but I agreed that I could try going somewhat more slowly.

Slow food also meant, I decided, getting away from the explicit emphasis on enforcing rules. French food culture was primarily about enjoying things (enabled by a well-honed set of routines). We needed to create a new ambiance at the dinner table in which the children would simply absorb the rules. With a little hesitation, I removed all of the accumulated pieces of paper on our fridge: the lists of rules, tips, The Plan, and the dog-eared pages of our food diary. The fridge looked clean and tidy now that the clutter was gone. It inspired us, in fact, to do a general house cleaning. We threw the windows open, scrubbed off the accumulated winter mold, aired out cupboards, and tidied things away. Even the car got a makeover, with new covers on the seats and new mats on the floor.

With a clean house and lovely weather outside (almost as gloriously sunny as it had been the summer before), I started to relax. May is a month with many holidays in France, and these are often cleverly scheduled on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that people can slot in a day off work on Monday or Friday and have a four-day long weekend. Most of our friends went away for little family trips. Everyone around us, it seemed, was slowing down. Why not join them?

To commemorate the launch of our Slower Food Experiment, Philippe and I agreed to select two mottos. Philippe’s choice was Manger Bien et Juste (Eat Well and Right), a saying by the French playwright Molière. My choice was (as is usual with us) a little less elegant: Slow Food Is Good Food. But the two mottos paired up nicely. Philippe wrote them down in his lovely cursive script (which is still drilled into French children at an early age), and our pieces of paper (decorated by the girls) snuggled side by side on the fridge.

Next, inspired by my brother-in-law (who is an aficionado of French music), I put together some dinner music: our Slow/Happy Mix, as we christened it. Until now, I had never really paid attention to French music. I was vaguely familiar with household names like Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf, and traditional French chansons; some of these made it onto the playlist, along with some parlé-chanté (the French “spoken-sung” singing style made famous by singers like Serge Gainsbourg). But, with a bit of exploration, a new world opened up to me: whimsical, wonderful music by Yann Tiersen (composer for one of my favorite movies of all time, Amélie), dreamy Francis Cabrel, Manu Chao (fun post-punk folk-pop), and sassy yet serene acoustic French singers like Rose, Camille, Zaz, and Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of Serge).

I got into the habit of putting on our Slow/Happy playlist while I was cooking, and everyone would slowly unwind. Unexpectedly, listening to music was a perfect distraction while the kids were waiting for dinner. Soon, the girls were asking for la musique when they got home from school and would dance in and out of the kitchen as I cooked. Even Philippe got in on the act. “La musique adoucit les moeurs” (music soothes the savage breast), he would say, grinning, swaying into the kitchen and swinging me around.

Our Slow/Happy songs generally put everyone in a positive frame of mind for our “mindful dinners.” Interestingly, I couldn’t find anything in French libraries about mindful eating. When I asked in libraries or bookstores about manger en pleine conscience (the best translation that Philippe and I could think of), the response was usually a blank look and a classic Gallic shrug (although one person eventually directed me to books about vegetarianism, wrongly assuming that I was talking about ethical eating). Like so many other French food rules, the habit of eating mindfully was so deeply engrained, and so widely practiced, that no one had even invented a term to describe it. So there was no French “Mindful Eating Guide” I could turn to.

Instead I resorted to reading American, vaguely Buddhist-influenced books, such as Susan Albers’s Eating Mindfully (which a friend had mailed from home after hearing about our experiment). In here, I found some of the ideas I’d already stumbled upon myself (like the importance of how and why we eat, as well as what we eat). But these books were not really that helpful, as they focused mostly on adults with eating disorders or people struggling with weight issues. I also read books by French doctors (like Jean-Michel and Myriam Cohen’s Bien manger en famille) and psychologists (like Natalie Rigal’s Winning the Food Fight).

Unexpectedly, though, I came across something that really interested me in The Simple Living Guide (authored by Janet Luhrs, former editor of Simple Living newsletter), which my godmother had given to me as a “bon voyage” present when we started our year in France. The Guide talks quite a bit about “sensual eating,” which I would have dismissed as self-indulgent foodie rhetoric before moving to France. But now I was more open-minded. In fact, I read, underlined, and reread the following passage:

“Cooking can be an act of love and delight, or it can be yet another exercise in racing through life on automatic pilot—never stopping for a moment to notice, feel, or taste. Cooking performed as an act of love brings us renewed energy and vigor.”

This, I realized, was amazingly similar to the “taste training” in French schools that I had learned about from Sophie’s teacher. But I hadn’t thought about the fact that this approach could apply to