Nutritionists and obstetricians would probably insist that it begins much earlier, but I am talking not so much of the food necessary for good health but the food necessary for a good life. Certainly, they sometimes overlap, and for a child they are inextricably linked. The moment a baby is put to the breast, he or she learns that eating is one of the foremost pleasures of life; seeking that pleasure is also how he or she stays alive and keeps growing.Latter-day puritans might think about copying the infant model. In the 1980s there was a comparative study of the eating habits of some workers in the southwest of France and a group of, to use a serviceable but tellingly passé term, health nuts in California. The French ate enormous amounts of red meat and butter and even drank brandy with their breakfasts. But they enjoyed it. The San Franciscans ate few saturated fats, no meat, and a lot of alfalfa sprouts, and worried constantly about whether they were eating correctly, whether they had absorbed the right balance of vitamins and nutrients.
