Swapping Food with the French

The French don’t make eye contact, so to keep myself from inadvertently offending or flirting with my fellow Metro passengers on my daily commute, I’ve found that it’s useful to keep my nose in a book. My reading of choice lately has been David Kamp’s The United States of Arugula: The Sun-Dried, Cold-Pressed, Dark-Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution. The punny title and silly cover art—which portrays such foodie personalities as Emeril Lagasse, Jacques Pépin, and Ruth Reichl as figures in a would-be Renaissance painting—belie an astonishingly comprehensive, well-researched, and well-written interior. My sister, who knows that I consider reading about food to be the next best thing to eating, gave me the book before I left for France. Neither she nor I knew that the tome, purportedly a history of American food, takes place largely in France.
Kamp delves into the lives of the heroes, as they may be termed, of the American food revolution. Kamp investigates the personal development of the people who brought about a change in the way Americans eat, from the “Big Three”—cookbook author and American cuisine proponent James Beard, New York Times food editor and restaurant critic Craig Claiborne, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking co-author and television host Julia Child—to the counterculture hippies of the seventies like Moosewood Restaurant’s Mollie Katzen and the megawatt celebrity chefs of the past twenty years.
What he finds, perhaps surprisingly, is that a lot of this development happened in France. Child was famously a terrible cook before she moved to Paris with her husband and discovered its marchés and bistros. Claiborne felt, in his words, “the most extraordinary feeling of coming home” when he first drove up the Champs-Élysées, and proceeded to whittle away his bank account on sauce bearnaise and puff pastry. Even Tim and Nina Zagat of the eponymous and ubiquitous guidebook “cultivated a taste for dining out when they lived in Paris in the late sixties,” according to Kamp. The narrative—the naive American comes to France and learns what food is all about—repeats itself ad nauseam.
Alice Waters studied in Paris and Brittany before founding Chez Panisse, the watershed local food restaurant that took Berkeley to the center of the national food stage in the 1970s. Waters is quoted in The United States of Arugula as saying that the French “just cared about food—they cared about the buying of it and the cooking of it, no matter whether they ate at home or went to a restaurant. They bought the best bread and went to the farmers’ market two times a day, ’cause they didn’t want the produce that had come in in the morning for the dinner.”
If I were still in America, I’d probably respond to Waters’s soliloquy without a shred of skepticism. The French have been so lionized in American popular culture for the attention that they give to their food that few dare to suggest that the stereotype might be false. But if, as Kamp argues, the French have heavily affected American culinary culture in the past century or so, the flow hasn’t been one-way. America has influenced the way the French eat just as much as France has influenced our culinary habits, and the availability of nutritionally questionable, easily obtainable, heavily processed food in France today might startle Alice Waters.
A mere Metro ride, conveniently enough, tells a story about French eating habits that contradicts the cliché. For the past week, Metro station walls have been plastered with advertisements for Pizza Hut’s horrifying, flying saucer-like new “Double Cheezy Crust” pizza, whose ring shape allows for a stuffed crust on both ends of each slice. (There are about 130 Pizza Huts in France, along with 1,085 McDonald’s, 52 KFCs, and 35 Starbucks’.) As you wait for the train to arrive, you’ll find that Paris has done New York one better when it comes to the availability of junk food: almost every Metro platform is home to a vending machine stocked with Bounty Bars, packages of Hit Mini sandwich cookies, and bottles of Pepsi. And, once you get on the train, you’re likely to see at least one passenger nibbling on fries or a sandwich. You can take the Metro to an open-air market, if you know where to find one, or to one of the many bistros that still serve up French classics. But today’s Parisians are more likely to visit a vending machine twice a day than one of those.
Though it’s easy to deplore the Americanization of French food habits as an unambiguous tragedy, the transformation hasn’t been all bad. While I would rather strangle myself with a Double Cheezy Crust pizza than eat one, I do appreciate being able to grab a quick panini in between classes at one of the many sandwich shops near school. I positively applaud some American-style imports, such as the natural food store, stocked with soy milk and seitan, a block away from where I live. But the flipside of Kamp’s American food revolution is a homogenization of food habits everywhere: a United Nations less of arugula, and more of candy bars, hamburgers, and soft drinks. If a young Julia Child or an Alice Waters came to France today, would she receive a life-changing culinary education—or would she just find more of what she already knew at home?