The French eat more fruits and vegetables than Americans and have lower rates of childhood obesity. This ethnographic study compares various aspects of meal environment in sixteen households in LA, California and Paris, France, and offers insights on the relationship between local practices and preferences and children's consumption of fruits and vegetables. Our analysis of video-recorded naturalist data reveals that the consumption of fruits and vegetables is linked to the cultural organization of dinner--what, when and how food is served--and to local beliefs about children's eating practices. We also found that the French model for dinnertime prioritizes the eating of fruits and vegetables more than the American model does. We propose that local eating models should be taken into account in research on childhood obesity and in prevention programs.

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Corpus et pathologies du langage ÉQOL : Une nouvelle base de données québécoise du lexique scolaire du primaire comportant une échelle d'acquisition de l'orthographe lexicale ÉQOL : A new academic database of the Quebec primary school lexicon with an acquisition scale for lexical orthography

Dans cette étude, le dîner familial est envisagé comme le cadre privilégié de la transmission de pratiques sociales et alimentaires de parents à enfants. En France, en particulier, il s’agit d’un espace d’appropriation de valeurs matérielles et immatérielles par les enfants (Fischler & Masson, 2008). De par sa durée et sa nature commensale, le dîner s’organise en étapes distinctes (entrée, plat, fromage, fruit ou dessert) auxquelles l’ensemble de la tablée participe de manière synchrone. Si l’entrée, première de ces étapes, et « entrée » dans le repas, permet l’ajustement des rythmes, elle est aussi l’occasion de pratiques alimentaires variées autour de la consommation de légumes. Après l’exposé de notre cadre d’analyse et la présentation de notre corpus, nous analysons, à l’appui de l’étude détaillée d’extraits choisis, les phénomènes de ritualisation et de régulation qui structurent la transmission et l’appropriation de pratiques alimentaires spécialisées par les enfants.

Multiparty interactions are crucial situations to study how children can participate in collaborative talk and broaden their experience of various interactional practices. Family dinners are particularly relevant to analyze how children and adults play different participatory roles and how parents implicitly socialize their children to complex interactional competences. We present a study of dinner talk in upper-middle-class Parisian families. We conducted quantitative analyses of the interactions using systematic coding according to three features: who participates as speaker, addressee or non-addressed identifiable listener for each utterance; who children and adults refer to in their conversational contributions; whether talk is about the here and now of the dinner or not. Results from our coding are complemented with detailed analyses of chosen extracts so as to provide a fuller picture of the identified features of dinner talk.