Free French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Le Billon

her foreign daughter-in-law (or so I could convince myself on my good days).
    â€œAnd besides,” he said to me one night, “if the food is delicious, why do you need to have a choice?” This was a good question, and I didn’t have a good answer. The best response I could come up with was that choosing made me happy. But the French don’t see it that way. And, thinking about it, I could see their point. The cantine didn’t allow choice, but as a result, kids ended up with a highly varied diet. So French parents didn’t mind the fact that the kids didn’t have choices about food—they didn’t think they were ready to handle it.
    But the different views on choice held by Americans and French run deeper than this. A simple example of this is their response to the following question (used by scientists in the largest-ever comparative survey of French and American eating habits):
    â€œ You have the choice between two ice cream parlors. The first offers fifty different flavors. The second offers ten. Which one would you choose? ”
    Thousands of people in France and the United States responded to this question. The answers were complete opposites. Nearly 70 percent of French people chose the store with only ten flavors. But 60 percent of Americans preferred the store with fifty flavors.
    As a very unscientific test, I asked this question of all of my in-laws. Unsurprisingly, they answered just like an average French person. When I asked why they’d answer this way, their response was straightforward: “If someone is only making ten flavors, they’ll put more care and attention into making those the very best quality. If they’re making fifty, the quality will probably be lower.”
    Aha! I thought. For Americans, having lots of choices is synonymous with quality; it makes us happy. But for the French, choice doesn’t mean better quality—in fact, just the opposite. Too much choice is (potentially) a symptom of lower quality, which certainly wouldn’t make the French—who have such high standards for everything—very happy.
    This new perspective on choice seemed to make sense. And that’s exactly what I told Sophie. “They’re only making one thing because they want it to be absolutely delicious. And it is!” I’d say firmly but cheerfully, as she balked every morning in front of the menu posted on the school door.
    In addition to encouraging her to adapt, I also plotted to help her resist. But it wasn’t very successful. Secret snacks in Sophie’s pocket promptly resulted in a warning. So we found other strategies. We checked out the menus in advance and discussed them, so that Sophie at least wouldn’t be surprised by their appearance. And we started giving her bigger breakfasts to tide her over until lunchtime. We also asked one of the sympathetic servers to keep an eye out for Sophie. Initially suspicious, she soon warmed to her special duty (slipping Sophie extra pieces of bread if a meal looked like it was too much to handle). And we told Sophie to try to find a “buddy” to walk into the cantine with, to make lunchtime more bearable.
    That is how Marie and her family entered our lives. Sophie and Marie started playing together in the playground after school, and I eventually worked up the courage to introduce myself to her dad, Eric. Our first few conversations were formal and polite, but upon learning that we lived just up the road, he immediately (and unusually, for a Frenchman) invited us over to their house, which turned out to be a small farm (the sort that is the envy of English tourists), with a sandy courtyard surrounded by long, low stone buildings covered with vines. Chickens, ducks, geese, and children roamed in the fields. The vegetable garden stretched down to a pond, around which Marie would ride her pony, Fastoche, after school.
    In his day job, Eric was a carpenter. But his real calling