French food rules from Karen LeBillon

Struggling with your kids’ eating habits? Need some guidance on how to change? We’ve got the perfect guide on how to turnaround your family eating from tantrums to taste testing.

We stumbled upon Karen LeBillon’s great blog about getting your kids to eat different food. Karen is a Canadian who spent some years in France. She published a book entitled French Kids Eat Everything, and has gone on to author several other titles. At PlanBuyCook we love her food rules as they are a sensible guide to better eating for all of us.

Best to try and set these good habits as early as possible. However, even if your kids are a bit older, it is still worth the switch.

Without further ado, here are Karen’s French Food Rules:

1. Parents: you are in charge of food education.
2. Avoid emotional eating: no food rewards or bribes.
3. Parents schedule meals and menus. Kids eat what adults eat: no short order cooking.
4. Eat family meals together, and no distractions.
5. Eat your veggies. Key: think variety.
6. You don’t have to like it but you do have to taste it: say this at every meal.
7. Minimise snacking: it is ok to feel hungry between meals.
8. Slow food is happy food, as in eating slowly.
9. Eat mostly real food. Treats on special occasions are ok.
10. Remember, eating is joyful. Relax!

Karen says no snacking on rule #7, however, the French eat their main meal at lunch, whereas other countries don’t necessarily do this. We recommend minimising snacks, and even better, make them fruit or vegetables.