French food: so good that the wise heads at Unesco declared it part of the world’s intangible cultural heritage, so celebrated that the love of it defined a nation.
“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,” as the original foodie, the gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, put it in 1825. And he was somebody who undoubtedly knew his lentilles vertes du puy et caviar from his langoustines à la nage and his poulette du perche from his poitrine de grive.
For years, France’s eating habits – and not just in restaurants – have been a model: portion control; lots of basics (eggs, butter, bread, potatoes); little processed or fast foods; plenty of fish, fruit, vegetable oils and (of course) full-fat dairy; structured, convivial, family-centred meals. French women, after all, do not get fat.
So why, last week, did a new report suggest that 30 million people – nearly half the country’s population – could be obese by 2030? And how come, on a sunny lunchtime in early autumn, there is a queue outside McDonald’s – one of 1,440 in France, the chain’s second-biggest global market – on the Boulevard des Italiens in central Paris?
“I can’t believe you’re asking this,” said Stephane Loiseau, a 29-year-old account manager tapping his order – “un CBO” (chicken, bacon, onion) with fries – into the touchscreen. “It’s such a cliché. They’re cheap, they’re fast, they use pretty OK ingredients. Why should the French be any different from the rest of the world?”
Natalie Girardot, a sales assistant at a nearby jeweller’s store, was equally dismissive. “You know they use all-French ingredients?” she said, pointing at her tray. “Look: Charolais beef, fourme d’Ambert cheese on the top. Plus a proper vinaigrette. France loves McDonald’s. It always has done.”
That’s not strictly true. Twenty years ago next year, a pipe-smoking, mustachioed sheep farmer called José Bové famously dismantled a half-built McDonald’s at Millau in southern France with a group of fellow smallholders and ex-hippies, launching a national crusade against la malbouffe – junk food.
But now France loves burgers: a survey published earlier this year by consultancy Gira Conseil showed the country’s 66 million people consumed 1.46 billion of them in 2017 – nearly 10% more than the previous year. Perhaps more remarkably, burgers now feature on the menus of 85% of French restaurants. Not that you’d call them malbouffe. At L’Artisan du Burger on rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, burgers with ingredients including rocket, lime zest, reblochon cheese, compote of red onions and a smoked spice sauce cost €12 (more if you want them in a squid-ink bun topped with nigella or black cumin seeds).
“They’re part of our national cuisine now,” said Sara Vérier, a bank worker and frequent restaurant-goer. “Almost every place – even some really quite smart ones – does at least one. You get nice French touches: a wedge of foie gras, roquefort. Sometimes even truffles.”
Bernard Boutboul, Gira Conseil’s managing director, describes the burger’s seemingly unstoppable rise in France as “a euphoria, a craze” that has now started to verge on “hysteria”, with posh burgers outselling French bistro classics such as duck breast and boeuf bourguignon in many restaurants.
Yet the vast majority of burgers consumed in France – 70% – are far from fast food. They are eaten sitting at a table, with (often) a glass of wine, in a “proper” restaurant. Which does not mean the home of haute cuisine has not fallen for fast food: it has. French eating habits are changing.
Increasing time pressure (no more two-hour lunches; the average French worker now takes a 31-minute break at midday, according to one survey) and the emergence of home-delivery services such as Deliveroo and UberEats have seen the country’s fast-food sector expand exponentially.
France’s 32,000 fast-food outlets booked sales of about €51bn last year – 6% more than in 2016, 13% up on four years ago, and almost three times the figure in 2005. What’s more, they now represent 60% of the entire French restaurant business.
Fast food “doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t eat well,” said Josiane Bouvier, a geography teacher, emerging from Nous, an organic takeaway on rue du Châteaudun, with an unFrench-sounding “hotbox” of grilled chicken, mint yoghurt sauce, seasonal salad and wholegrain rice. “I think many French people who go even to fast-food places are very conscious of the quality of ingredients, and whether dishes are really made on the premises,” she said. “But that’s if you can afford nine, 10 or 12 euros for lunch out.”
And there’s the thing. Good food is no longer cheap in France – in restaurants or at home. The country’s food processing and distribution firms are big and powerful. French eating habits, the national food agency Anses says, are no longer a model: now it involves more and more highly processed foods, too much salt, and not enough fibre.
For all its particular relationship to food, France is far from immune to la malbouffe. MPs reported last week that as many as 30 million French people, mainly in lower-income households, will be obese or overweight by 2030 unless big food firms slash salt, sugar, fat and other additives and children are educated to eat more healthily.
“French families spend less money and less time on their food than ever before,” said one MP, Loïc Prud’homme. “We need to take back control of our plates.”
Another, Michèle Crouzet, who has campaigned for less salt in food, was blunter. The French “are not dying of too much food,” she said, “but little by little, the food we eat is killing us.”
