Anglo-Saxons, especially middle-class ones, often have a romantic view of continental Europe. Since we members of this fan club often perpetuate stereotypes and clichés, we should be willing to be playfully caricatured ourselves. We can be put into sub-groups depending on which country is the object of the most devotion.
Gastronomes lean towards Italy or France, depending on whether they most admire the haute cuisine of Michelin-starred restaurants or la cucina povera of ordinary Italian households. The high-minded tend towards the Teutonic, home of reassuringly abstruse geniuses like Goethe, Kant, Mahler and Wagner. A preference for Spain or Portugal can reflect a proud rejection of pretension, as these wonderful countries were for a long time seen as somewhat backward, more famed for their sun, sea and sangria than for their culture–which is ridiculous when you think that Iberia gave us the likes of Pessoa, Saramago, Goya, Picasso and Cervantes. Greece is the ideal place for those who seek escape to a sweet retreat, like Leonard Cohen, who got away from it all on Hydra. And the Netherlands is (or perhaps was) an imagined paradise for social liberals, who thought the country was as laid back as it is flat.
Reality is not quite as straightforward as these sweeping generalisations suggest, but it is true that for better and for worse, we tend to see what we want to see in foreign places. Xenophobes see ignorance and inferiority, while xenophiles think that somewhere else lies a land that does all that we do wrong right.
France, where I have been housesitting for the last month, lends itself to romanticisation more than most, especially when it comes to its food culture. You don’t have to look far to see evidence that the French have retained a proper appreciation for food that Britain and America have both long lost.
In my time here I have seen artisan bakers in every village big enough to sustain one and in some that look like they couldn’t. I have read of local schools being fed by a passionate chef who uses his €3 per head a day budget to buy fresh local produce, 30% of which is organic. I’ve shopped at a large, bustling market that has been held every Wednesday since 1315, in a town that only has 5,000 inhabitants. I’ve been served in epiceries by staff who ask you when you plan to eat your avocado before picking out the one at the optimal ripeness. I’ve bought cheese direct from the cheesemaker, wine from the winemaker and a jar of ratatouille from the ratatouille cooker. And I have even enjoyed the biggest foodie-traveller cliche of them all: a random restaurant stop that turned out to be one of the best lunches I’ve had in a long while. “Vive la différence!”, the food-loving Brit wants to cry.
But to stop there would be to turn your eye away from many other inconvenient truths. There are more McDonalds restaurants in France than in any country except the US. I have also seen many pizza vending machines, a rare sights in the UK, if there are any at all. In 2017 it was found that the French got 36 per cent of their calories from ultra-processed foods, a figure that would surely be higher today. I’ve read that “In France, frozen products accounted for 24 per cent of all pastries and other sweet baked goods in 2021.” This compares to 21 percent in the UK, which is supposed to be the European king of faux-fresh baking. Many French restaurants boast of their “fait maison” status, meaning that the food is prepared onsite, but many don’t and I’ve seen a lot popular eateries offering menus of “tapas” like croquetas and frites that have clearly gone straight from the freezer into the deep-fat fryer. The small, independent shops are lovely but Carrefour hypermarkets abound and the company is the 4th largest retail company in Europe.
The superior French food culture may not be a complete myth. Evidence that it is doing something right is that France has the lowest obesity rates in Europe by a clear margin. Still, a selective focus on its strengths can blind us to its evident weaknesses.
Indeed, I suspect this is as true for the French and it is for envious outsiders. Like the Italians, the French have a very high opinion of their culinary heritage. This can lead to a certain complacency: if you assume you have always done food well, you may not notice all the ways in which you are no longer are, especially if the declines have been gradual.
Look again at that lovely market. Very little fruit and veg is organic, or has any other indication of how it was produced, but a lot is labelled as “French”. If you have a bucolic vision of French farming, that will be enough to reassure you that everything is wholesome and grown naturally. But, of course, most of this will have been farmed industrially, sprayed with chemicals and so on. I’m not saying that makes it bad, but it does make it different from how buyers imagine.
Or take meat. If I am going to order meat, I want to be confident of its provenance and the welfare of the animals. But when I ask (or rather my better half, who speaks better French does), I rarely even get an answer. At one local restaurant, with its amuse-bouches and short, fait maison menu, they openly admitted they had no idea where their meat came from. Again, I can imagine that most customers just assume the cows had been happily grazing or the pigs rooting. In any good British restaurant, sourcing is vital and you’ll get the life story of everything on your plate, if you ask, and sometimes if you don’t.
The third sign of complacency is more benign. It is still true that if you walk into a random French brasserie, boulangerie or boucherie, you are more likely than not to eat well. The same may not be true back in Britain, but if you know where to go, what you’ll get will equal or top the French offerings. Most strikingly, I have eaten many (too many perhaps) good viennoiseries here but none are equal to the best pastries Bristol has to offer – although admittedly they are at least half the price. Similarly, the French may eat less industrial cheddar, but the best British cheeses are the equal of any. For example, Hampshire Cheeses’s Tunworth has been described as “The best Camembert in the World” by Raymond Blanc. If you like Brie-de-Meaux, nothing from Meaux can top the Baron Bigod from Suffolk.
Food cultures change, often slowly, but always surely. France’s virtues indicate a depth of tradition that has resisted the pressures of globalisation and industrialisation, but not completely. In many ways the country is resting on its laurels, and a slow decline is happening almost imperceptibly. In Britain, on the other hand, it is largely because people have taken an honest look at how bad our food had got that so many have been striving to do better. So while in France, artisans are happy to keep doing what they’ve always done, British bakers, cheesemakers, charcutières, pizzaioli and the like have obsessively studied how to achieve excellence and are often outperforming their more established continental peers.
This is hopeful not just for Britain, but for France. Gallic pride means that the country will only accept foreigners beating them in international wine and cheese competitions for so long. We’ve not just copied their game, we’ve upped it. And that, surely, will push them to try to prove their superiority once again.