Should We Feed Our Kids 'The French Way'?

When it comes to feeding kids, people have strong convictions. Unwavering beliefs that they cling to despite evidence to the contrary: that ‘fussy eating’ is willful malice on the part of a three-year-old; that sugar turns kids feral; or that we have to bribe, cajole and reward kids to eat vegetables. These are enduring parenting parables that go unquestioned; it’s just how it is.

Another of them appeared on my radar recently. The idea that French kids eat everything. That their petite palates are more refined and sophisticated than, really any other nationality, but specifically British or American kids. And of course, they’re never ‘fussy’. 

This idea isn’t a novel one, of course. But it may have reseeded in the cultural imagination lately, thanks to none other than data-parenting expert, Emily Oster. Oster recently released a podcast series titled Raising Parents, which covers different aspects of modern parenting. The project is in collaboration with The Free Press; a neoconservative, pro-Israel news organisation that postures as liberal. In the episode Are We Feeding Our Kids Wrong?, Oster apparently does a 180 on previously skeptical positions towards ultra-processed foods and childhood ‘ob*sity’, seemingly blaming the former for the latter. In it, Oster tacitly blames the anti-diet community for downplaying the impact of childhood ‘ob*sity’; a super weird flex considering she endorsed Virginia Sole-Smith’s book ‘Fat Talk’ which takes a critical view towards the childhood ob*sity ‘epidemic’. Oster herself has been critical of the AAP guidelines on weight management in kids. Perhaps even more bizarrely, she claims that there is more stigma directed towards kids who bully fat kids, than there is bullying towards fat kids themselves. Given that higher-weight children are 63% more likely to be bullied than their thin peers, this seems unlikely. But this is symptomatic of the whole episode; opinions presented as facts. At one point one of her guests suggests that an apple is more filling than a bag of potato chips, something that would be difficult to prove empirically, and even then is predicated on a biomedical understanding of satiety, divorced from the social world.

This magical thinking is also apparent in Oster’s (or at least the producer’s) decision to interview Pamela Druckerman, an American journalist living in Paris whose whole shtick seems to be American-Living-in-Paris. In 2012 Druckerman published a book about her experience of giving birth to, and raising her children, The French Way: Bringing up Bébé. The book has been translated into 31 languages and is known as French Children Don’t Throw Food in the UK. It felt weirdly apt that Oster brought Druckerman out of retirement for the show; the whole episode was giving 2012 energy (see also Sam Kass 🫠).