My girl is four weeks old today!!! I am so very much in love with her. Here are a few pictures from the last couple of weeks.
She continues to be a very calm quiet baby. She doesn’t cry much. She sleeps an awful lot. When she is awake she tends to be very focused and alert.
She smiles easily. She has cooed at me a couple of times.
A perfect princess.
I do think it can be done to some extent, at least in terms of variety of foods, but the big key is me changing how I eat and cook. And that’s what is so very hard. But then again if I look back on what I ate even a few years ago, I am doing much better in terms of vegetables etc.
The real clincher, though is how we organize our time. We eat the way we eat because of larger cultural patterns. For the French the biggest meal is lunch in the middle of the day. We save our biggest meal for dinner because that’s when we have time for cooking it. To make lunch the most important meal of the day would not fit within our family culture because Dom isn’t here for lunch. Dinner is our main meal because it’s when he’s home. It actually stinks because he comes home too late for the kids to really be hungry. They want a meal at 4 or 4:30. So yeah, until American employers give workers super long lunch breaks, it ain’t happening. So you’re right. We’d have to move to France.
I keep wondering if very poor children also tend to be picky, or if it’s an outgrowth of our abundance. I want to read French Children… but I suspect I’d just get mad at it because I can’t live in France and have kids without food-related problems. I do wonder sometimes if my children will die of scurvy, but I remember that was picky as a kid and now eat many vegetables.
I cordially dislike the interior and exterior anxiety, criticism, and self-criticism about making the right, the PERFECT, food choices, even as I participate. There’s a bit in a Nigella Lawson book about our problem with treating food either as poison, which will make us fat and sick, or medicine, which will make us slim and healthy. As thought health itself were the ultimate goal. Are we in Erewhon or something? If we and our children are well-fed and content, can’t we worry about something else?
Sorry, that wandered a lot.
Kyra,
This is tangential, but one of the interesting points in French Children is that there is a national standard for meals served in French schools so that all children eat the same way, poor kids don’t eat different than rich kids and so in French culture food is a great equalizer.
Back to your actual point, I think giving kids more choices makes them pickier. According to Le Billon, French kids do have strong likes and dislikes but the attitude of parents is that a dislike is merely a sign that the child hasn’t tried the food enough times. They have a much greater persistence when it comes to encouraging children to keep trying a food they have historically disliked. But at the same time they don’t make a battle of it. If a child doesn’t like a food they shrug and move on.
I agree about the emphasis on right food choices, as if food choices were moral ones instead of being matters of taste. I read an article recently that opined that foodism has become a new secular religion. Whether it’s eating locally, eating vegetarian or vegan or raw food, whether it’s gluten free or paleo diet, Americans seem to be subject to faddish eating and to making up elaborate rituals and taboos over what to eat and not eat.
The attitude of French parents re: trying new foods is largely what I do with David. It’s very interesting to observe over time – he has gone from liking pasta with sausage and kale, to disliking the sausage, to disliking the sausage AND kale, to liking it all again.
Littles are weird creatures, sometimes.
Absolutely. It’s a religion substitute. The ins and outs are like inquires about whether you’re a New Nationalist Reformed Covenantal Second Synod Lutheran or a New Nationalist Reformed Non-Conformist Second Synod Lutheran. Not to pick on the Lutherans- they just popped into my mind.
GeekLady, I keep putting new foods and things they’ve refused on the table and I get unreasonably depressed as their likes and dislikes fluctuate, especially since we’re more in the season of ‘Dislike Everything not made of starch’.
Has anyone else seen this? : http://www.youtube.com/embed/k9QbC41oQRo?feature=player_embedded It’s very funny. A ‘One Day More’ parody about food.
Kyra, I’m having great success at the moment with onigiri filled with salted salmon. Sometimes novelty excites them.
Moving to France is clearly the only option. Or Japan. There was an interesting article on Japanese school lunch recently linked off of JustBento, that tried to compare the Japanese school lunch to the American school lunch. They talked about lots of different factors that enabled the (theoretically) better lunches in Japan, but they hit the nail on the head in the first page and never realized it: kids will eat what they’re used to. It’s largely a cultural thing… and to be entirely just, America has never had a large or unified food culture. Especially not one in the fashion of France or Japan, from which haute cuisine can develop!
American-style suburban cookery has only recently moved past the canned/frozen food, Miracle Whip laden style that has prevailed since about WW2. Nuts, my mother in law was a home economics teacher for over 30 years, and she considers heating up a can of corn (or worse, overcooking a bag of frozen broccoli) to be a sufficient vegetable for a meal. While she’s hispanic, her cooking is almost entirely in that 50’s suburban Americana style. When I frenched and lightly cooked green beans for Thanksgiving dinner, and she looked at me like I’d grown a second head.
…I’ve been meaning to blog about this. There are several different effect that impact how kids here eat. Maybe I can whip it out today if I stick a movie on for David.
What you want is marketed as sushi rice, and JustHungry has some pretty good instructions on preparing it. She also has good instructions on forming the onigiri.
http://www.justhungry.com/how-cook-perfect-rice-in-frying-pan-fast-and-foolproof
http://www.justhungry.com/2007/01/onigiri_omusubi_revisited_an_e.html
Having tried both the bare hand and the plastic wrap methods, I find the bare hand method easier, as long as the rice isn’t too scalding.
For filling, I use about the salted salmon recipe on JustBento – after it’s salted, I wrap it in foil and bake it. When it’s cooked, I chunk it up with a fork and use about a tablespoon to fill the onigiri. This stuff is delicious, it’s like Japanese bacon.
http://justbento.com/handbook/johbisai/how-make-salted-salmon-shiozake
You know, I was actually thinking about onigiri, but I’ve never made it. do Ineed exceptionally short-grain rice, or can I use normal Japanese-type rice?