Valérie Bignon, the director of corporate communications for Nestlé France, is a long, lean line of a woman, well suited to the impeccably tailored black jacket and pencil skirt she was wearing the day we met at her bright, airy office in Paris. To understand the role of Jenny Craig in France and how it was adapted for the French consumer, Bignon explained, you must first understand the merits of French culinary tradition. This statement is usually, I have learned in France, a gateway to a conversation about all that is wrong with the American culinary tradition.
“The solution to America’s weight problem lies in what I call the French food model, a model that is very social, as opposed to the individualist approach of the Americans,” Bignon began. “If I were the minister of health in America, and I was in charge of the battle against obesity, the most powerful, brilliant thing I could do would be to communicate this message: let’s not worry too much about what’s on the table. I’d say let’s concern ourselves with sitting at the table together and preparing a meal.”
Eating a full meal together at the table — a first, light dish, then a cooked meat or fish with starch and a vegetable, followed by cheese or yogurt and possibly fruit — provides enough sustenance, she suggested, to stave off that bête noire of American eating habits, snacking. She explained how the presence of others also ensures the social reinforcement of healthy dining habits, like helping yourself to only so much, and it builds the habit of discipline and moderation, as diners wait for all to be seated and served before beginning the meal.
“You know what I find totally crazy?” Bignon asked, momentarily sidetracked. “Le Self. You know this system? It’s American. You take a plate, there’s a line, you take some salad. . . .” She was referring to what we call self-serve, an option so neutral to me that Bignon might as well have been decrying the rise of the photocopy machine. “In school cafeterias, there used to be a gentleman who made the meal and a madame who served it, and everyone ate together at the table, as they do at home,” she said. “But Americans hit on this system that is fast, it’s cheap, you take what you want — and now it’s everywhere in France!” she said. “I am anti-Self. It’s bad for rapport, and it’s bad for health — it’s too individualistic.”
Her comment provided an appropriate moment to return to Jenny Craig. In France, as in the United States, Jenny Craig provides dishes in individual portions. Consumers are instructed to supplement those meals with dairy products and fresh fruits and vegetables. Nonetheless, the idea that these microwaveable dishes built for one could fit into traditional French meals, which are built on the foundation of communal dining — with each person, including small children, eating the same thing — seemed counterintuitive. In France, the French social anthropologist Claude Fischler theorizes, a meal is considered a kind of communion, an intimate sharing of experience. In the States, he argues, it represents a contract, a negotiation over aversions, allergies and dietary needs.