Food is one of life’s many pleasures, there is an elaborate (of course) intellectual superstructure to its proper preparation and enjoyment, and French children are introduced to the intricacies of good eating from an early age. And as they grow to adulthood, they find themselves in a country where one is expected to eat well, and where there are many opportunities to do so.
Sadly, Maciej doesn’t grok permalinks, so to read the whole post from which the above is excerpted, set your browser on Find and look for “03.16.03”
Anyway, at the height of the “freedom fries” nonsense, everyone’s favorite multilingual Francophile perl hacker took a look at how food is presented and prepared to school-age kids.
The two menus he presents couldn’t be more different: it’s the difference between haute cuisine and fast food, between linen napkins and paper.
I think kids would eat better, if they saw the right behavior modelled for them. But when food is seen as a necessity, with speed and volume more important than texture, flavor, or anything approaching subtlely, what can we expect?
And reading the stuff about how the lunchrooms of this country are supplied with off-quality, over-produced food products gives me the horrors. I see the food at my elementary school: fried, overseasoned, and prepared at some commissary for reheating: it’s more about shelf-life and how well it can travel than how good it will be for the kid eating it.