Le Big Mac has conquered La Belle France
Complacency, a weak economy and a taste for fast food are killing the French gastronomic tradition, says Michael Steinberger.
By Michael Steinberger
Published: 7:00AM BST 27 Jun 2009
Le Big Mac has conquered La Belle France
Not only are the French cooking less; they are spending less time at the table
La Belle France: charming bistros, glorious wines and cheeses, bountiful markets, streets filled with the smell of freshly baked bread – all emblems of the greatest food culture that the world has known. Sadly, though, that culture is now in eclipse. Twenty-five years ago, it took some effort to dine poorly in France; these days bad meals are depressingly common, and it can be tough to find even a decent baguette in some villages and towns.
Bistros, brasseries, and cafés are folding by the thousands each year. Small farms are disappearing at an equally alarming clip. Dozens of raw-milk cheeses have become extinct in the past quarter-century. Wine consumption in France has declined by an astonishing 50 per cent since the 1960s, and continues to plunge.
And there is an even more shocking statistic: France is now the second most profitable market in the world for McDonald's. La Belle France has been conquered by Le Big Mac.
What accounts for the decline in France's food tradition? Economic sclerosis is probably the biggest factor. For the better part of the last 30 years, France has suffered anaemic growth, high unemployment and stagnant living standards. This, coupled with a business environment distinctly hostile to business – punitive tax rates and crippling regulations – has wreaked havoc on France's culinary industry.
It is hardly controversial to suggest that there is a link between economic and culinary prosperity. In flush times, restaurants flourish and demand for high-quality foodstuffs soars.
The gastronomic awakening experienced in Spain, Britain and the US came on the back of robust economic growth. By contrast, the French economy sputtered, and French cuisine did likewise.
French cuisine has also suffered on account of changes in the household. In recent decades, millions of French women have joined the workforce. This has been a step forward for gender equality, but it has done French eating habits no good.
In France, discerning palates have always been cultivated around the family dinner table; indeed, almost to a person, all the great French chefs of the last half-century had their interest in cooking nurtured by mothers and grandmothers. But with two-income households increasingly prevalent, the French are cooking less than ever.
Women returning after a long day's work have neither the time nor the inclination to prepare a family meal; it is far easier to throw a frozen pizza in the microwave. Not only are the French cooking less; they are spending less time at the table. A study found that the average meal in France now lasts 38 minutes, down from 88 minutes 25 years ago.
Although the manifesto launching the International Slow Food Movement was signed in Paris in 1989, it wasn't until 2003 that a French chapter of Slow Food was even established, and as of 2008, there were just 1,800 French members, versus 26,000 in Italy and 17,000 in the United States.
The French, it seems, much prefer fast food to Slow Food. McDonald's now has more than 1,000 restaurants in France, serving more than a million customers a day. It is the country's largest private-sector employer. Indeed, McDonald's has been so successful in France that the man who spearheaded its strategy there, Parisian Denis Hennequin, today oversees all of Europe for the fast food chain, and is believed to be in line to head the whole company. A Frenchman in charge of McDonald's – chew on that for a moment.
These developments are doing French waistlines no good. Contrary to the title of the book, French women do get fat, and so do their husbands and children. Obesity rates in France are soaring. In 2005, it was reported that 40 per cent of all French were obese or overweight, a figure that had doubled in less than a decade. The data for children was especially alarming: among under-18s, the obesity rate was rising by more than 20 per cent a year. If these trends persist, France is on course to be as supersized as America by 2020.
While the French stuff themselves on McDonald's, some of the glories of French cuisine are withering away. Fifty years ago, all French cheeses were made from raw milk, or lait cru – the only kind worth eating, according to aficionados. Nowadays raw-milk varieties account for barely 10 per cent of the cheese produced in France.
In 2007, the most iconic of all French cheeses, Camembert, came under threat when Lactalis and Isigny Sainte-Mère, the two companies that turn out the majority of raw-milk Camembert, threatened to quit the appellation unless the rules were amended to permit them to use treated milk. To their credit, the authorities refused and the companies relented, but this was a small victory in a war that is being lost.
France still produces the world's finest wines, but large swathes of its wine industry are in crisis due to the plunge in domestic consumption combined with the emergence of robust competition from abroad.
Thousands of producers, mainly in Bordeaux, Beaujolais, and the Languedoc region, are essentially destitute. It is estimated that a third of the 10,000 winemakers in the Languedoc will be driven out of business in the next few years. A handful of vintners have committed suicide, while others have taken up arms.
An organisation of militant winemakers known as the Comité Régional d'Action Viticole, or CRAV, has been waging a campaign of violence to call attention to their plight – setting off bombs in supermarkets that carry foreign wines, hijacking trucks transporting foreign wines into France, and attacking facilities storing wines. They are, in essence, wine terrorists.
And what of haute cuisine, the ultimate expression of French gastronomic achievement? France still has plenty of great chefs – Alain Ducasse, Joël Robuchon, Pierre Gagnaire, Guy Savoy – but as the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik put it, the "muse of cooking" seems to have moved on. For the first time in the annals of modern cuisine, the world's most talked-about and influential chefs are not French; instead, that distinction now belongs to Spain's Ferran Adrià, Britain's Heston Blumenthal, and America's Thomas Keller. The French, meanwhile, seem content to rest on past glories.
In recent years, luminaries like Ducasse and Savoy have been pushing to have UNESCO formally declare French cuisine to be part of the world's cultural patrimony, an effort that has a distinctly valedictory ring. It suggests that the French have given up any pretence of intellectual leadership in the kitchen, that French cuisine has, in the words of the International Herald Tribune's Mary Blume, entered "a gelid commemorative phase".
So it is over for French cuisine? Certainly, a lot has been lost, and with the rest of the world eating so much better now (thanks in no small part to the influence of the French), France will never again be the world's undisputed culinary lodestar.
But amid all the gloomy portents, there are hopeful signs, too. In the face of France's persistent economic stagnation and the often deadening weight of its rich gastronomic tradition, a number of very gifted young chefs are serving exciting food at prices that people can afford and in the convivial settings that restaurant-goers now demand. This promising trend has even acquired a nickname – bistronomie.
There are scores of cheesemakers, vintners, and other artisans who remain as devoted to their métiers and as committed to quality as ever. Ultimately, though, the fate of French food rests in the hands of the public. Until now, it has been sadly apathetic in the face of the country's declining standards at the table. Only if that changes can French cuisine hope to have a future as bright as its past.
'Au Revoir to All That' by Michael Steinberger (Bloomsbury) is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25 postage and packing. Call 0844 871 1515 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk
