The French Food Question

Adjusting to French life also involves adjusting to French cuisine, which has not posed too much of a problem.

The best chefs in the world are French, and their famed meals draw food critics and food tourists from just about every country on the planet. Yet it is, of course, the staples of the French diet that remain the most fascinating and consistently delicious – the bread, the cheese and the wine.

Now, having recently been a student, and also having worked in Austria, I am no stranger to wine. However, the French approach is certainly different and refreshing. Wide varieties of the alcohol are available at low cost in every supermarket, and there is even a meal in itself dedicated to drinking wine – the apero – which is a big deal, not just a preamble for dinner.

Despite reports in recent years that the rate of French wine consumption has dropped significantly, my own experience seems to reject those claims. Perhaps it is the sign of a small, but significant enough, surge in the economy, but the French are drinking in force.

Moreover, with 2.8 billion litres of wine consumed each year according to the Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV), the French still drink the most vino per head anywhere in the world. Despite the declining figure, the French still remain a nation dedicated to the drink and the number of occasional drinkers is rising according to statistics.

From the apero to a post-dinner accompaniment, wine is certainly shared and savoured at all major meals and it would be out of place if there were not at least one glass had with dinner.

With this post-dinner course comes the cheese. Another stereotype of the French condition, cheese is omnipresent, and a recent study found cheese consumption in the country to be a staggering 57 pounds per person per year, significantly more than other European countries and the US, where consumption is a mere 34 pounds a year.

In my experience, this is because the cheese course is taken as a serious post dinner treat, with a wide variety of fresh cheeses served up, boasting different tastes and textures in which to indulge. With so many artisan cheeses, fromageries and even walls and walls of supermarket fridges dedicated to the endless assortments, you cannot fairly say you don’t like cheese until you have searched through the comprehensive French catalogue of fromage.

Eating cheese? Of course, you need a baguette for that. Another long time staple of the French, 98% of people still buy bread every day, from over 26,000 boulangeries. Although research indicates a move awayfrom the baguette, my diet has already significantly changed to accommodate for this French essential, and I find myself buying one almost daily to accompany whatever meal I have that evening.

My landlord recently said “If I don’t have a baguette with dinner, I don’t know what to do. I feel sick. I would rather go without the meal altogether than have a meal with a baguette.” A few days later, my roommate and I were eating breakfast, and he laughed at my cereal, whilst he munched on a tartine that he dipped in his morning coffee, which he said was traditional in France. Well, as much as I have adopted the baguette (which is very cheap everywhere!), I will stick to only dunking digestives in my tea for now.

France has been at the centre of health debates for generations now. People here are liberal with their wine, they don’t count the calories from countless numbers of baguettes that seem to be consumed with just about every meal, and the supermarkets are bursting with so many cheeses, I am not sure I could sample them all in a whole lifetime. Yet, despite this, French people have one of the lowest obesity rates in the whole of Europe and the general health of the French population seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of European neighbours.

Growing up in the UK, there has been a certain phobia that has developed around appropriate consumption of food in recent years and our preoccupation has led us to be obsessed with a plethora of terms like transfat, saturates and monounsaturates, to name a few.

These things are seemingly forgotten in France amongst generous helpings of French cakes, salted caramel (can I have this with everything?) and of course bread and cheese. So is this the French Paradox?

Wikipedia says: "The average French person consumed 108 grams per day of fat from animal sources in 2002 while the average American consumed only 72. The French eat four times as much butter, 60% more cheese and nearly three times as much pork. Although the French consume only slightly more fat overall (171g/day v 157g/day), they consume much more saturated fat because Americans consume a far larger proportion of fat in the form of vegetable oil, with most of that being soybean oil. However, according to data from the British Heart Foundation in 1999, rate of death from coronary heart disease among males aged 35–74 years was 115 per 100,000 people in the US, but only 83 per 100,000 in France."

I am not sure how the French have managed to balance all these problems, but their Laissez-tomber attitude has certainly helped create countless culinary delights, and worrying about it doesn’t seem to have even factored into the equation.

Guess I best go grab a baguette for the cheese in my fridge before I obsess too much then.