Picture the scene: a French country garden in the early evening sunshine in July. Drowsy honey bees dawdle among the lavender plants. A handful of families, all with young children, have gathered for an early evening drink and I, having recently moved to the area, am lucky enough to be among them. Still getting to grips with the language and the local customs, I’m clutching a bottle of wine and have the tentative bearing of the outsider seeking to integrate. This, I think, absorbing the vision of the good life surrounding me, is why I moved here. I’m so ready to embark on a healthy new lifestyle, constructed around bon vivant principles of ample sunshine, outdoor dining and, above all, high-quality food.
Imagine my surprise, then, when our dashing host steps past me, arms piled high with boxes of supermarket frozen pizzas, and begins hurriedly unsheathing them, leaving a pile of plastic and tomato-smeared polystyrene drifting in the breeze while he steps indoors to sling the evening meal hastily in the oven.
French people eat about 10kg of pizza per head per year — just behind the Americans and well ahead of the Italians. This unexpected fact was one of a number of gastronomic surprises I was to discover in my first few years in my adopted home. In the small provincial town where I live, such is the local appetite for the ultimate convenience food that in the past few years vending machines that can bake and serve a thin-crust margherita in three minutes flat have been popping up all over town like mushrooms after the rain.
I live in the southwest of France, the region that a few decades ago gave rise to the legend of the French paradox, born from the puzzling contradiction between local diets heavy in dietary cholesterol and saturated fat, washed down with red wine and cigarettes, and the population’s relatively low rates of cardiovascular disease. This is the country of cassoulet, foie gras and confit du canard. Go to a local bistro in search of something light, such as a salad, and you will find it served generously draped in gizzards slow-cooked in duck fat.
Almost from the moment the French paradox was identified in a 1990s study in the Lancet by the researchers Serge Renaud and Michel de Lorgeril, it has been dogged with controversy. Researchers have long argued over what factors explain it and whether or not it really exists. For some the whole notion seemed suspect. Given the immense pride the French take in their cuisine, perhaps it was a theory liberally seasoned with cultural chauvinism?
Now a new study seems to debunk it once and for all. A report from the French public health body Santé Publique bears worrying news about the state of the nation’s heart health and waistlines. Only 11 per cent of French people have “ideal” cardiovascular health. Embarrassingly for the French, this is less than the 14 per cent of British who have “excellent” heart health.
The alarming new statistics fly in the face of deeply held beliefs about the superiority of the French way of life. Many French people I have met here don’t try to hide their assumption that the UK, where I grew up, is a nation subsisting on a mono diet of fast food — and suffering as a result from a crisis of obesity and poor health.
These stereotypes work both ways. In Britain the impact of the book French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano, and its central argument that a Gallic lifestyle effortlessly combines pleasure and virtue, resulting in slim waistlines and long lives, has contributed to enduring clichés about French and British health that stubbornly persist on both sides of the Channel.
One of my first clues that these stereotypes didn’t hold up to scrutiny came when I encountered the “French taco”. A fast food phenomenon that combines the Mexican taco with French fries and melted cheese, it has in recent few years become something of a phenomenon across metropolitan France. Then there’s the fact that I’ve spent more time in McDonald’s since living in France than I had in the previous two decades. By the time I read recently that the French frozen chip market has grown 25 per cent in recent years, I was no longer surprised.
Over the years the social structure that imposed a sense of ritual and occasion around meal times has eroded, increasingly replaced by convenience culture. Like their neighbours over the Channel, French families are overstretched and time-poor. Cooking from scratch is on the decline, and fast and frozen food companies, such as the popular national chain Picard, are stepping in to fill the gap. In the meantime, the wellness and green juice culture promoted on social media, which has been a huge factor behind improving habits in the UK, has been slow to catch on here — perhaps because its unpalatably puritan tone of discipline and self-denial seems terribly unFrench.
Couple that with the fact that smoking rates remain high (on my first visit to a GP here my new doctor returned from her afternoon break reeking of cigarettes) and it looks like complacent ideas about the natural superiority of the French way of life are overdue an update.