Maybe it is the Food

There’s an old joke about an Englishman saying he didn’t understand what anyone found interesting about France except maybe the food.

Well, the newspaper Le Parisien just printed a study by The French National Center for the Study of Living Conditions (CREDOC) about French food or, more exactly just what food an average French family with two children consumes in the course of a year.

The total came to three tons.

CREDOC started such studies in 1994 and updates them periodically.

The newest one established by asking a selection of 2,978 people to note scrupulously what their family ate and how much of it for a period of one week not only revealed what the French consume these days but also how eating habits have changed in the last decade or so.

The change is particularly notable in the younger generation. The diet of someone  20-years old in France today, said Le Parisien, is more like that of a Chinese of similar age than that of a French 60-year old. 

To illustrate the article, the paper published a full-page photo of the required two-parents, two-children family sitting at a table surrounded by exactly the annual intake the survey had discovered. Lined up all around were all the wine and water bottles, the roasts and poultry, the baguettes, milk bottles, egg cartons, potato sacks, pasta packages and fruit crates.

Driving home how half a century or so can change times and habits the Le Parisien also published a photo from the weekly magazine Paris Match which had gone through the same exercise in 1951. 

The food presentation was about half as imposing and significantly different.

As one would expect, in a country whose distinctive image often is one of a Frenchman riding a bicycle, wearing a beret and carrying a lengthy, crunchy baguette, under his arm, CREDOC reported that  this famous form of French bread still tops the food favorite list, as it has for the last 50 years.

But on the dinner table, soda pop or soda water (270 liters annually) has replaced the traditional bottle of wine (117 yearly) and spaghetti Bolognese has replaced the old regulars, beef stew or pot roast. The latter two take too much time to prepare, especially for a working housewife.

With more and more women juggling jobs and homemaking, the refrigerator and microwave have replaced the stove as the pivot point of the kitchen. Half the families in France now make occasional or frequent use of frozen or prepared meals. Quiches and pizzas consumption has jumped 22 percent in just the last five years while purchases of ready made meals have gone up 50 percent.

Nevertheless, modern day emphasis on health and fitness and concern about signs that the nation’s new pattern of food consumption is leading toward the kind of problems Americans have with obesity has made its own changes on the French diet.

In general there is a tendency, prices permitting, to replace meat with fish; starches with vegetables and some items formerly popular such as horse meat or tripes have pretty much dropped off the food preference list. Even cheese, so associated with a French meal, has dropped in the CREDOC study to 10^th place on the list of most consumed products.

Newly trendy diet and health concerns have led the French health ministry to urged the country’s citizens constantly to eat five fruits and vegetables every day, a theme followed up by additional exhortations to exercise more and eat less that stream across the bottom of virtually every screened television ad for any kind of food product.

The message doesn’t always get through, however. CREDOC’s study lamented that only about 22 percent of French adults and 7 percent of French children are deemed to be following the ministry’s advice.

Sale of fresh fruit, so appetizing and abundant in French street markets and stores but constantly increasing in price, has dropped 16 percent in five years, its place unfortunately taken mostly by ready made cream desserts.

Still, Le Parisien reported happily, French families remain devoted to three squares a day (if you count a breakfast croisson and coffee as a square meal.)

Ninety percent of French workers eat breakfast before going to work and, at least in the provinces, 76 percent of them return home at noon for a two-hour lunch break.  The family dinner tradition remains inviolable.

Despite the fast-food invasion, if you’re coming to France looking for a good French meal, don’t despair. The importance of food preparation still ranks high in French culture and French restaurants are still there to defend the nation’s reputation.

That’s why French families often bypass those traditional family meals at home and adjourn to their favorite local restaurant.

It may not resemble those a tourist dreams of a place with unforgettable ambiance, multiple stars in the guidebooks, celebrity cooks in the kitchen and small, elegantly arranged portions on oversize plates.

But it’s where they can still get that beef stew and pot roast that only a restaurant chef has the time now to prepare. 

In France, as the Englishman suspected, it’s the food that counts.