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?

When we lived in the US the children had a breakfast burrito before school.
Small tortilla with eggs, chopped sausage or bacon and cheese (prepare ahead and warmed in the microwave) Or Egg and a slice of toast, or a yogurt, or big oatmeal raisin soft biscuit, or porridge. We had cereal but it wasn't the popular choice.
Lunch at school was packed lunch. Quite often leftovers eaten cold, like pieces of chicken, sweetcorn, Fruit juice, a biscuit. Sometimes a sandwich with peanut butter, or a corndog, and sometimes a granola bar.
Evening meal varied with the season. Roast meat and veg, or Salad and a pork chop of small piece of steak. Fast food was a big treat. Fridays was make your own pizza night.

I think this is a nursery thing though rather than an English thing. School dinners also always include a pudding but most people I know don’t have that at home.

My (uk based) primary aged dc have
B Fruit juice. toast/cereal/brioche/ strained yoghurt( eg plain Greek or Skyr). Plus fruit. Pancakes or eggs at weekends.
snack of fruit or veg
L school dinners or packed lunch of sandwich or ryvita, veg sticks, fruit, cheese. Weekends usually similar to packed lunches tbh, it’s quick and easy and I know they’ll eat it.
Snack of biscuits/crackers/ popcorn
D home cooked meal. This week pork steak and veg/ steak, mash, creamed spinach/veg biryani/ grilled chicken and Greek salad/ Thai green curry with rice/ sausages with a variety of salads (green/mixed bean/grated carrot/tomato/courgette)/ lasagne. Yoghurt is usually the pudding on offer unless we have guests but they also do sometimes have ice lollies. I will use a paste for the green curry and obviously sausages are processed but otherwise evening meals are pretty good in terms of the ingredients used.

As a child at school in France I had
B bowl of hot chocolate with tartines or bread to dip in. Usually with butter and jam or nutella
L school dinner of salad, slice of baguette, meat, carb and veg, yoghurt or fruit compote, piece of cheese
Snack of biscuits or more tartines or baguette. Sometimes a pain au chocolat or pain au raisin
D meat/fish and veg (small meal),green salad, cheese, diluted red wine.

In my late teens/ as an adult in France my lunches became more filled baguette or croque monsieur than the proper lunches I’d had at school.

I'm a private tutor in the child's home, and all but one of my clients are first generation immigrants. I'm often there around dinner time, and see and smell some amazing things!
With my African and Asian families I see a lot of rice and a lot of chicken. My Eastern European families, I see a lot of fish particularly.

I've lived in several countires and I can tell you that most east/south-east asian cultures base their whole diet around rice. (and possibly noodles)
In fact there is a saying in Indonesian - not yet eaten rice= not yet eaten (it's snappier in the right language!)
breakfast is left over rice from yesterday fried up with a few veggies and an egg. Or just with soy sauce and a fried piece of tofu.

Same would be true of my Korean friends, every meal is based around rice or noodles.

In The Netherlands, 2 meals a day are bread. Brown bread, and heavier than UK but not like German bread which is much darker and denser.
Bought in packets from supermarket, not bakery.

In Kazkhstan and Russia there are a lot of meals based around soup.
But they use a lot of different grains they make porridge out of oats, buck wheat semolina and others and same with cooked meals, you might get rice of potatoes or you might get buck wheat. Tend to be meat and carb heavy.

There were certainly a lot of ready meals in LeClerc when I was last in there - more than in Asda. Some of them looked nice!

25 years ago when I studied there it was much harder to buy bars of chocolate though than it was in the UK, just the odd Mars bar in a Tabac, and they were much more expensive. I haven't been enough recently to France to discover if that has changed.

Exactly, most countries base their meals around carby staples as it's cheap and satisfying.

(Half of) my family is Persian - rice rice rice. We buy huge sacks of the stuff! Not every meal - but most traditional meals start with basmati rice…

And most people you know in the UK do that? I think you are in a fantasyland serious minority in that case. I am as middle-class as they come and have a very wide circle and don't know a single other person who has any interest in actually making their family food from scratch, with zero to minimal additives, other than myself.

We are in Germany. DS is 6 and today he had

• eggs and bacon for breakfast...left untouched
• sushi for lunch
• three chicken dinosaurs and some ice cream

Yeah...it's the summer holidays. During term time, he usually has

• breakfast of either eggs or granola with Skyr or a pretzel...or nothing
• snack box for school with some cheese, salami, fruit, cucumber and a small sandwich (gets eaten if he didn't have lunch and if he's at after school club for longer, so serves as morning and afternoon snack)
• school lunch, which consists of potato/pasta/rice with meat/fish and sauce...and usually fruit or yoghurt for dessert...hit and miss
• dinner being pizza or pasta or just some chicken nuggets or a sandwich

Eeek, so old fashioned Brit type food

🤷‍♀️
DS also eats hummus with cucumber for dinner...it's his new thing. He loves pasta and pesto and salmon with noodles and soy sauce.

If we went down the traditional German route, he'd have bread with cold sliced meat for dinner. He'd probably eat that, too. Potatoes are also a big thing here, although we don't tend to have them at home.

School dinners have not been inspired by Jamie Oliver here and hence include things such as hash browns with apple sauce or Kaiserschmarrn with cherry sauce as the main course. We do also have a salad bat, just to balance that out. 😉

Bar...not a bat...that would be weird...

We live in Germany - it's basically wall to wall bread, pasta and potatoes

Here's the nursery menu for the last week:

Macaroni with tomato sauce and cheese
Potato gratin and corn on the cob
Alphabet soup with bread
Fleischkase (a kind of meatloaf) with noodles (probably some kind of pasta dumpling) and gravy
Fish fillet with ratatouille and creamy polenta

Most German toddlers eat bread or cereal for breakfast, a hot meal at lunch and then bread with ham or cheese for dinner.

Sounds delicious! I have a (genuine) question tho:

Sounds like it's a veggie diet..? Do you feel full after a dinner like the one above, even though you'd not be getting that much protein from the lentils?