The French savour every delicious bite – but they too are losing the obesity battle
THE endless battle of the national bulge got a shot in the arm this week with the welcome arrival of the sugar tax. Anything which spurs big business to cut the calories in their over-sweet products is welcome, as far as I’m concerned. But will it go far enough? I’m not sure that a few extra pennies on the price of a can of Coke is going to put Professor Donal O’Shea out of business any time soon.
The problem with the obesity crisis is that you can’t just point the finger in one direction: there are too many culprits. The ready availability of fast food, busy families who don’t have time to cook, spiralling portion sizes, main streets filled with cafés and fast-food outlets where once there were drapers and grocers .... the list is endless. And then there’s our attitude to food; in a country where once it was scarce, it’s hard not to view abundance as a wonderful thing. But, of course, it isn’t.
I was in France at the weekend and couldn’t help but wonder at the vastly different approach they take to culinary matters. The sheer reverence with which they treat what they eat can verge on the comical.
In one restaurant, at the table next to us, sat a group of four comfortably dressed sixty-somethings enjoying a meal out together. For starters they had a single spear of local asparagus and when their plates arrived, it took several minutes before any of them even picked up their forks. When they eventually decided to start, each bit off a delicate morsel and then returned the cutlery to the table, chewing slowly and continuing to chat.
It took this elegant quartet roughly the same amount of time to demolish that single spear of asparagus as it did for me to fly to France. We did our best to slow our own meal down so as not to look like total savages beside them, but no amount of spinning things out could make one tiny green vegetable last an hour.
Our friendly waiter, who was from Burgundy but had worked all around the world, explained to us that the French have a particular approach to a night out that is different to other nationalities. “They come for the conversation and the food, to savour each bite. They’re not here for a big night out or to have great fun, like the Irish or English.”
In other words, dinner is the main event, not just a midpoint of a night that might start out in the local over a G&T and finish up with a rake of pints afterwards, with possibly a bag of chips on the way home thrown in for good measure.
I’d say it’s safe to assume that no French person has ever done this, ever. Or only when visiting Temple Bar, and then only just to fit in with the locals.
Of course, the French have their own issues with fat – they remain far thinner than the Irish but, just like us, their waistlines are expanding year by year.
That respect for food, so engrained in their national culture, is under threat in an increasingly globalised world – as it is everywhere. When we returned to our hotel after dinner, I flicked on CNN where there was a report on Pizza Hut opening its first restaurant in Ethiopia, where the economy is booming and the demand for Western fast food is growing.
The only question, the reporter said, would be if ordinary Ethiopians could afford such high prices for these calorie-laden slices of molten cheese and tomato. That’s progress, apparently.