Editor's blog January 2007

Disappearing France?

My favourite chocolaterie has double fronted windows bursting with truffles, handmade creams, wisps of caramel, edible figurines, nougats, macaroons and great slabs of home made chocolate. One of those magical places - straight out of “Chocolat” - that made France seem so exotically foreign the first time we visited.

But it is closing down. I wish Monsieur V - the chocolatier who looks a bit like a mad professor - a happy retirement and he looks stunned. He’s not retiring, he says, he’s going to work in a factory. He can no longer make ends meet. “No, it’s not the supermarkets. They’ve been around for years. It’s our French way of life - it’s changing.”

The kitchen table is no longer central to family life, he sighs. People spend Sundays pursuing leisure activities rather than carrying carefully wrapped delicacies to the family table. They no longer sit and eat and talk and savour. The young walk past his shop all day long - snacking!
“People tell me they can no longer buy my chocolates because they’ll get fat. Nonsense. My chocolates have always been made from sugar, cream and butter but didn’t make people fat in the past. No-one got fat when they took the time to eat properly. (Indeed, this is exactly what scientists studying the famous “French Exception” - the fact that the French could apparently eat a full-fat diet without growing obese - concluded. It wasn’t what they ate but how they ate: slowly, at table, with pleasure and conversation. Even when eating a McDonalds the French take on average twelve minutes longer than their Anglo Saxon cousins.)

But of course it’s not just about obesity. Eating together, at table, is central to real family life, as it is to conversation, to manners, to slowing down and taking the time to enjoy life, to appreciating the efforts of others. It is the cornerstone, in other words, of that elusive “quality of life” that drew so many of us to France in the first place.

To say that grabbing a sandwich on the run and eating ready meals in front of the telly is the route to family break-down, delinquent children and obesity might be pushing it, but there’s a whiff of truth in the theory.

As M. V points out: “The irony is that in your country and America you have come full circle and small shops and proper food are back in fashion. By the time this happens in France it will be too late for me.”

UK Readers

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