Potato I have

The Morning News has a roundtable discussion, a follow-up to Mireille Guiliano’s extremely popular French Women Don’t Get Fat (a kind of diet book), with four French women food bloggers. I also link their blogs, which are good reading in their own right; now I need to find a recipe for Gibassier de Lourmarin, and make hamentaschens with my daughter. And, decide if I dare grow my Omea aggregator by another four feeds.

There’s something funny about the “French paradox” being rendered as a diet book, but not having read it I’ll not comment on that.

(via kottke’s remainders)

I found an older article in Salon from 2000 that summarizes the “French paradox” this way:

They eat all the butter, cream, foie gras, pastry and cheese that their hearts desire, and yet their rates of obesity and heart disease are much lower than ours. The French eat three times as much saturated animal fat as Americans do, and only a third as many die of heart attacks.

Various attempts have been made to link this to wine, olive oil, fois gras, and garlic and onions. But after having watched French eating habits for seven years now, I have to side with Claude Fischler, a French nutritional sociologist (still from the Salon article):

The French eat comme il faut, “the way it should be done.” They may eat whatever they want, but they eat by strict rules: no snacking, no seconds, no skipping meals, no bolting down food, no heading straight for dessert before first filling up on vegetables, salad and meat. They savor their food and eat smaller portions than Americans do.
[…]
Fischler and [University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul] Rozin say that the biggest predictor of health may not be the content of someone’s diet, but how stressed out they are about food, and how relaxed they are about eating. In other words, the more pleasurable it is to eat, the healthier it is for you.

The relationship to food is certainly different: it’s another ‘Living in France’ post someday, but a few brief observations: for most of my time here, there has not been snack machine in the office; eating anything at the desk is extremely rare; a not-uncommon question after someone has returned from vacation is “did you eat well?” I do enjoy food a lot more, especially fat and meat, which I mostly avoided in my last 5-10 years in the States, and wine, which is inexpensive enough to drink every day, and chocolate, which has little resemblance to what usually passed as chocolate back home.

There is a funny, more British perspective in the Guardian (Nov 2004):

In France, 76 per cent eat meals they have prepared at home; the favourite place to eat both lunch and dinner is in the home, with 75 per cent eating at the family table. In the UK, by contrast, we like to eat our meals (a) standing up, (b) in front of Coronation Street , (c) at a desk while catching up on emails or (d) by the side of the M40.

The Guardian article also mentioned some obesity numbers:

Despite a diet stuffed with cream, butter, cheese and meat, just 10 per cent of French adults are obese, compared with our 22 per cent, and America’s colossal 33 per cent. The French live longer too, and have lower death rates from coronary heart disease - in spite of those artery-clogging feasts of cholesterol and saturated fat. This curious observation, dubbed ‘the French paradox’, has baffled scientists for more than a decade. And it leaves us diet-obsessed Brits smarting.

Back to the roundtable, at least one person said some nice things about American food: Clotilde Dusoulier (a fellow, though seemingly erstwhile, software engineer!) closes the article

I can only speak for myself, but I happen to have a personal affection for many aspects of American food and food traditions. I like the fact that food is often celebrated in a purely joyful, almost childish way: simple food, simple tastes, and a certain unselfconscious and unpretentious way to enjoy food for what it is. But more importantly for me, a lot of these traditions (hot dogs at the ballpark, pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, a big tub of popcorn at the movies, grilled burgers and corn on the cob barbecued in the back of the garden, with fresh beer from a keg and a platter of slice-and-bake chocolate-chip cookies) are an important part of my own personal imaginary America, the one I’ve built after years of watching movies and reading books that were set in the U.S. It doesn’t really exist anywhere (California matched for a few aspects only), it’s a mix of different times and places, but my way of cooking and eating, and my food culture in general, are definitely influenced by some of these things.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 at 23:38 and is filed under food, living in france. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.