To wonder what non British folk feed their kids

[Mamabear04]

I heard a comment the other day about how British folk fill their kids up on cereal, pasta, bread etc. While I do feed my kids plenty fruit and veg, make home made meals, don't allow too much sugar or salt, the base of what I feed them is some kind of pasta or bread, for lunch at least, to fill them up (we eat more rice and potatoes at dinner time). The person who commented was French and now I'm thinking out of interest (and ideas!), what do other cultures feed their kids if not pasta and bread etc?

Start the morning Scottish (porridge with soft fruit and nuts),

Lunch is generally ‘Mediterranean’ (salad, veggies, hummus, olives, pickles, nice bread),

Dinner is often Persian - tonnes of rice, herbs, feta, yoghurt, salad, pickles, walnuts, (with a side curry thrown in for good measure, spices courtesy of SIL, or steak/chicken/ salmon ) or Italian - pasta, risotto, fish and salad, always cheese-n-crackers for after.

Snacks dried fruit and nuts, and I am a fiend for crisps.

I’m veggie but my crowd is either pescatarian or ‘mange-tout’ so it can be a bit of a weird fusion sometimes.

That's strange because my family don't eat dessert at all, and neither do any of my friends!
If kids are still hungry they can help themselves to something out of the fruit bowl but that's it!

The children and adults in the U.K. eat very different to most of the other countries , you just need to go to other places to see there are no such things as kids meals with nuggets or fish fingers etc .
This doesn’t mean they eat perfect but most countries at least European ones eat a lot more healthy.

Milkshake at breakfast is no worse than a milkshake at dinner out , or an apple juice in a school dinner. Whatever works I say (regarding DC to keep hydrated )

My family is from the ME, but we live in UK :) I'm a single parent, working FT, so I do try to batch cook/freeze stuff as much as possible. DC2 is in wraparound care so eats what she is given there. At home though, we tend to go for the follwing:

Breakfast: plain yogurt (I try to make it when I have the time), fresh fruit, nuts/seeds. OR porridge. OR cold meats/cheeses/eggs and rye bread (if I have time, I make bread)

Lunch: salads, raw veg, cold meats/cheeses, plain yogurt, flatbreads (if I have time, I make these), sometimes we will have leftovers from night before.

Supper: I'll cook curries, dhal, ME food, rice (brown), bulgar wheat. Serve it up with veg or salad (or both).

HOWEVER(!)....if I don't have time, or I'm knackered, or I don't have batch cooked foods...I will reach for the pre-prepped foods or take out.

We mix plain yogurt with water to make a drink! Our Arabic neighbours will call it Laban, we call it Doweh.

My DC eat a variety of different foods: ME, Asian, Indian, Persian, Italian, Greek....and the more Western foods too. They're fine with spicy things. DC2 won't eat certain fruits/veg raw, but will eat them cooked into things. We don't tend to do pudding - this is normally fresh fruit or plain yogurt (with fresh fruit!). We don't tend to do cakes or biscuits either - but we do like them!! I'm always interested in trying new things or new recipes, and I like to hear about traditional English recipes too.

When mine were at home they had muesli for breakfast, except for weekends when we would have bread rolls with cold meats and cheeses.
Lunch when they weren't at school would be currywurst, gyros, schnitzel or borscht.
Dinner would be a fish or meat dish with vegetables or rice.

Swedish/Aussie family here living in Sweden. For breakfast filmjölk which is fermented milk, a bit like skyr or kefir, with weetabix and blueberries (we pick once a year to freeze). Lunch was just cold chicken with a salad. Snack cherries from friend’s garden.

’Dinner’ (it’s common to have dinner for lunch and lighter food at night) crispbread with butter and banana slices (influenced as a swedish/australian mash by the Australian in the family). Sometimes with mackerel in tomato sauce or sliced egg and caviar. We do like pasta though, and eat it quite often.

Some great breakfast ideas on this thread!

Sounds like buttermilk.

I'm English but live in France with a French husband.

Typical day for our almost 3 year old:

Breakfast
Plain cereal with full fat milk
Plain yoghurt

Lunch at childminder's
Steamed veg of some kind
Carb like rice, pasta, quinoa etc...
30g of protein - fish, chicken, beef, ham
Plain yoghurt

Afternoon tea
Plain yoghurt
Fruit compote or fruit
1 biscuit

Dinner:
Carb - rice, potato, rice etc...
Steamed vegetable - today she had lentils and stole some spinach from my plate ( I'm the only one who doesn't eat lentils!)
No protein
Plain yoghurt
Sometimes a small portion (20g) of cheese
A bit of baguette

It is very usual to have a sugary biscuit for afternoon tea here in France, but most children will have just one. Culturally treat food is fine, but very much in moderation and in small quantities. Pain au chocolat or croissant tend to be a weekend treat ( we only have them on high days and holidays!).

There's a bit of a thing around protein here where the advice is to limit protein via a meat or fish serving to 10g per year of life per day, so she only has protein for lunch.

The main difference I can see compared to my friends from the UK is less snacking (most children will only eat the four meals above - certainly DD never eats outside of mealtimes), less protein ( I found it very strange here) and more focus on just eating meat/fish and vegetables rather than meals in sauce or processed foods.

I would say that swedes mostly eat a healthy diet. You don't have anywhere near the selection of processed foods in the supermarket and my UK visitors comment on how there's more selection of stuff they'd have to go to a healthfood shop in the UK for

But we do have our darkside, which I mentioned upthread. Lördagsgodis. Or Saturday sweets. We go nuts for candy on a Saturday. We have whole supermarket sized shops devoted to pick and mix. I know kids who have the healthiest diet all week but eat nothing but sweets on a Saturday.

When covid hit there was mass panic about whether or not pick and mix was safe. The chief epidemiologist had to put out a statement saying it was fine to calm everyone down.😁

It's similar. I used it to make soda bread when I can't find buttermilk.

When our sun was 2 and we were visiting a family in Paris who had a child the same age the food they gave him was more babyish than what generally gave him. Baby pasta with little pasta shapes and mulch consistency sauce. Yogurt for dessert with apple purée. There were grapes and banana slices, both of which were same as home food although grapes were not seedless

I should add, we weren’t eating with him because we were going out to the opera with them

I am french but came here when I was 17, so lived here longer than France and we don't visit often. When DS had opportunity to go to France with school, I jumped! Sold a kidney for basically 3 days and got all excited for him to finally eat "real" french food. Ha!

• Did you like the food? Was it awesome?

-Meh, it was all the stuff you already make (I make very basic mum food) in fact their Bolognese was gross, I ain't touching snail and their crepes were disgusting 🤦🏼‍♀️FML. So we all trying to diversify but really we all eating the same stuff.

DH does the majority of cooking and is gadget man. I did not snort initially at the all singing and dancing pasta maker he bought but we eat fresh pasta several times a week. DC love the different colours and flavours he mixed with pasta dough. We also make a lot of filled tortellini in different shapes with ricotta or goat cheese and spinach. Both DD and DS love fresh fish and seafood. We can get it fairly reasonably priced fresh from the fishmongers at the port. We grow loads of different types of tomatoes and courgettes so especially in the summer we make tomato or courgette type tarts with cheese. We don't really eat processed foods or ready made stuff but are not fanatical about it. PIL give sweets as occasional treats. But DC actually really like savoury snacks like different cheeses. When it is hot like in the moment we eat a lot of cold stuff like various salads with boiled potatoes, eggs, fish or cold cuts etc

Yeah I have a colleague (60yrs old) who is by no means a health freak, and she loves crisps. She says she can happily skip food all Friday if she can have her bag of crisps on Friday night..

It is a thing with many parents here to let their kids pick as many pick & mix as their age..

I live in Greece, and I’m still surprised to find that many parents to give their children milk for breakfast, then they have a snack at school like toast with ham and cheese, or turkey and cheese, because in Greece, that’s the standard, a piece of fruit and juice, the main meal is eaten at lunchtime usually here, but often the food has potatoes, rice or pasta. And most places will also serve bread.

people do buy bread, pies filled with cheese, spinach, chicken, sausage and also sweet things from the bakery, very often. You can buy some of these things in the supermarket as well, and you can buy things like cheese pie and just make it at home.

A lot of friends that I know give their children cereal and milk, yogurt, toast with ham and cheese as a snack and many also give milk before bedtime for the younger children.

Your friend was being unreasonable, and ignorant. There are 60 million of us, we’re not all feeding our children chips and cereal 🙄

My DS4 eats kedgeree, boeuf bourguignon, minestrone, poached salmon, curry and rice, lasagne, chilli con carne, roast dinners, fish pie.

I don’t know how many British families your friend has met, but it can’t be many 😂

Oh, and the other thing that is often served are beans, every type of bean you can think of, lentils, I don’t know the words in English for the others, but there are at least three bean dishes, and it’s just beans, and often you will have feta cheese on the side with some oregano. And as a snack you can also have things like feta, tomatoes, olives… There is a lot of snack food sold at the supermarkets, and yes, people buy it of course, but a lot of people go for cereal and cereal bars here. You don’t have the variety of things like different flavors of crisps like you do in the UK, I haven’t yet been able to find pretzels anywhere, and people eat in season, so right now you still have cherries, nectarines, peaches and apricots, in the fall you will have grapes, you get the idea.

I am American but I have four Mexican-born and raised grandparents and my father is a Mexican national so Mexican food is what I mostly ate growing up.

All four of my grandparents and my mother died before I turned 11, so my memories of them and their food are scant. However, I do have memories of them making their own corn and flour tortillas daily and eating lots of "Mexican" rice (tomato, corn, onions, carrots and peas in it) and pinto beans and eating lots of avocado and chiles of all kinds and in different ways.

My favorite dishes were the many different types of moles, chile colorado (what you may know as Texas beef chilli but made with beef chuck and not ground beef), various vegetable soups, lots of maize-heavy food like tamales and gorditas and our enchiladas are not what you know in England. They are stacked corn tortillas in a roasted red chile sauce (no tomato!) with very little cheese and topped with an egg. I distinctly remember my paternal grandmother making it for me when I was very young. I obviously have a huge appetite for spicy food.

My husband is English and I moved to England to marry him back in the mid-90's. England was a serious Mexican food desert back then and I had no choice but to learn to cook English/British food. It was hearty and decent cuisine. However, back then, Italian food was all the rage so I learned to make a lot of pasta dishes. I really did miss the spiciness of Mexican food but I made do with learning how to cook many delicious Indian dishes.

I've been living with my husband and kids in Texas for the past 15 years and it's funny that I don't cook Mexican food, at all. In fact, I don't even eat it when I go out. I'll always choose Indian, Thai or Cajun because I live at the Texas Gulf Coast.

@Fladdermus
Your line about the epidemiologist has me in stitches.

Some of these comments jeez! We don’t all feed our kids processed crap in Britain. A lot of ignorance on this thread.

We live in Denmark🇩🇰
Todays food for my 2 dds
Breakfast hot oatmeal with raisins on the side. They both dont like it in the oat meal.
Lunch rye bread with meat and fish Frikadeller. Veggies on the side
Dinner salmon noodles salad
In between they have had strawberries raspberries veggies skyr and nuts.