So yes, like all the developed nations, the French are getting fatter. But they are doing so less quickly, because most of them just aren’t interested in eating processed garbage instead of balanced meals. Simple, really.
Lie Back and Think of France
This is not to say that the French don’t go in for stomach-blastingly big meals. A family Sunday lunch can easily last from one o’clock till four. And if you’re invited to dinner in some parts of France – Auvergne, say, where the food is rich and fatty, based on pork and creamy cheeses – you’ll have to be rolled home afterwards in a wheelbarrow.
I was once invited to the launch of a cookbook by a Parisian chef. He sat ten of us down to the biggest lunch I’ve ever eaten. Some of the dishes we ate have been erased from my memory (though probably not from my liver) but I do remember a thick steak of seared tuna, a slice of grilled foie gras, a pan-fried magret de canard (fillet of duck), truffle risotto, a dessert involving fresh raspberries, slices of dark chocolate and real gold leaf, a billiard-table-sized cheese trolley and lots of aperitify nibbles and coffee cakes. All this plus at least three sorts of wine and a tongue-burning digestif. I didn’t try everything because I don’t eat meat, but even so I had to go and lie down for what was left of the daylight to digest it all. And I – like most of the other guests, I expect – skipped dinner and the following day’s breakfast and lunch to recover.
The French have a word for this Epicureanism that can’t be translated into English – gourmandise. Some dictionaries have it as ‘gluttony’, but that’s wrong, because gluttony is a negative thing, whereas gourmandise is a healthily sensual desire for the taste and texture of food. A gourmandise is another word for a treat, and the word can also be applied to sexual appetite.
The French sometimes overindulge their gourmandise and get a bout of severe indigestion, but if they do, they call it a crise de foie, a ‘liver crisis’. It’s not their fault, they haven’t really eaten too much, it’s just that their liver is having a bit of a nervous breakdown.
Half-boiled Notions
The very opposite of this gastronomic ideal is, in the minds of the French, English food. They will swear that the Brits spend their lives chewing mournfully on boiled beef, overcooked swede and plastic cheese, all washed down with lashings of warm, flat beer.
Just after I first arrived in France, I invited a French couple to a ‘typically English’ dinner. As an aperitif, I served weak tea with the tiniest smudge of milk. It looked like a sample of the River Thames. The main course was half-boiled, unpeeled potatoes garnished with a spoonful of raspberry jam. I told them that a joint of lamb had been bubbling in salt water all day, and was just a few minutes away from being properly boiled through.
They sipped politely at the tea, and the woman even tried a bit of potato, though her boyfriend was already looking at me as if to say, OK, I surrender, let’s go to the restaurant now. The thing was, they weren’t completely sure it was a joke, and were trying to find a polite way of asking. I eventually owned up to prevent the woman from having to eat a second hunk of dirty, uncooked spud, and said now I was going to serve the real English food – a vegetable curry.
Which they loved, by the way. The French will eat anything with flavour.
There are lots of British foods that the French adore – cakes, biscuits, Earl Grey, Stilton, fried bacon rashers, and even our thin, triangular sandwiches. I used to work near a Monoprix supermarket in Paris, and was astonished to see that their sandwiches were imported daily from an industrial estate in the Midlands.
However, one thing the French complain about a lot is the quality of food in trendy British restaurants. I agree with them. I’ve been to too many places in the UK that have obviously spent millions on décor, recruited their staff from modelling agencies and hired the poet laureate to write their menus, but fill their designer plates with microwaved trash.
In France, you can usually be sure that even the trendiest eatery will have invested more in the food than it has in the light fittings.
The French have a similar double-edged relationship with American food. It’s all junk, they will say – sugar-filled, genetically modified, mass-produced, over-packaged and tasteless. They even use the English term le fast-food to distinguish it from anything French (although the dictionaries suggest that they ought to be saying la restauration rapide). Despite this, half of France’s teenagers flock to eat le fast-food after school, and whole families chow down on cheap hamburgers as a treat in the middle of their Saturday shopping expedition.
The French may eat a lot of healthy food, but they enjoy the odd fatty, ketchupy binge as much as anyone. And secretly most French people have the occasional fantasy about being American. A quick, guilty chomp on a hamburger makes them feel as though they’re driving along Route 66, rapping on a New York street corner or having sex with the cast of Friends.
A Better Class of Alcoholic
The French have a reputation as a nation
