French Children Developing a Taste for Education

When the French decide to teach children about food, you can be sure the course will present more than the basic food groups.

“Awakening of the senses is important to appreciation of life itself,” said Culture Minister Jack Lang, speaking at a recent ceremony marking the end of a 10-week program of culinary education offered in French public schools.

The voluntary program, created by Jacques Puisais, eminent wine connoisseur and head of the French Taste Institute, is designed to teach the ABCs of gastronomy.

For 90 minutes each week, children ages 10 to 12 learned such things as where the tongue registers a sweet taste (on the tip) or a salty one (one the side). They learned the difference between the way cheese tastes with and without an accompanying slice of apple.

By next year, some 12,000 children from 800 schools will have tasted, touched and sniffed their way through the course.

“A food vocabulary should be part of education,” Puisais said. “Eating should be fun, experimenting with food combinations. But children should learn to criticize intelligently as well.”

Puisais said the age group selected was ideal for the course; they are neither as easily distracted as younger children nor preoccupied with problems of adolescence.

Lang, who also serves as France’s education minister, observed: “Body, soul and senses, they’re all part of the learning process. Food appreciation is part of the enjoyment of life and can be learned along with reading, writing and arithmetic.”

“It’s important to educate our children,” said two-star chef Michel Trama of l’Aubergade in the southwestern French town of Agen. “Parents don’t have time anymore, and kids grow up thinking fish looks like a square covered in bread crumbs--frozen foods.”

To the French, educating children is like training troops to continue what Lang says is part of a larger battle to preserve French gastronomic excellence and individuality.

He noted that France won a recent fight with European Community regulators over allowing unpasteurized milk to be used in making in some of the nation’s most beloved cheeses, Camembert and Brie.

And, he said, he is fighting alongside the National Center of Culinary Arts to improve meals in schools, hospitals and airplanes.

Lang presented prizes to children from schools throughout France who drew pictures of food to enter in the “Vive le Gout!” (long live taste!) competition.

The paintings featured ham, country bread, fresh fruit--posed artistically on a tree--in line with this year’s theme of seasonal food.

There was an absence of artistically rendered double-decker hamburgers or other fast food, not even such typical French snacks as chocolate on French bread.

“We don’t like hamburgers all that much,” said 11-year-old Jeanne Bourneuf, one of about 150 budding gourmets crowded around a reception buffet table loaded with fabulous dishes.

“I liked the foie gras and the lentil salad, but especially the desserts,” she said, adding, “Sweet things remind me of holidays.”

But 12-year-old Line Oudot learned a lesson that went beyond appreciation of food. “You should not waste when children in some countries are starving,” she said.