Suzanne Harrington: The differences in food culture between France and Americanised Ireland
Pic: iStock
On my last day in France, having eaten so much carbs and sugar that I’ve gained what visitors to France sometimes call a Bread Stone, I am desperate for salad.
So I order the only vegetarian one on the menu, anticipating its freshness, colour, crispness.
It’s crispy alright, but not in the way I was expecting - it comes with deep-fried filo parcels drizzled in honey, on top of salad leaves drowning in oily dressing. Accompanied by crusty chunks of pain rustique. Delicious. I snarf the lot. It lodges like quick-drying cement.
A few years ago, a book by a French woman titled French Women Don’t Get Fat was briefly en vogue.
I’d like to propose a follow-up – Irish Women In France Do.
Apart from the deep-fried salads, it’s the freshly baked stuff served with everything that does it.
The bread. The patisserie. The viennoiserie. The pillowy mid-afternoon beignets. The petit déjeuner that is always a basket of fresh bread and croissants, accompanied by Nutella, Bonne Maman, butter, and teeny-weeny cups of coffee.
Who eats Nutella for breakfast? The French, that’s who. And the Irish, when they’re there.
It's all about portion control, explains a non-French friend, who long ago relocated to rural France from the English suburbs.
Having come from a place where frying slices of packet white bread is regarded as acceptable, desirable even, especially when part of the English national dish known as the All Day Breakfast, he identifies as a gastronomic refugee; someone for whom the very sight of a tinned baked bean is triggering.
He has swapped forever the sausage roll for saucisson, the fried slice for le crouton.
But aesthetics aside, what’s the difference between the last two? Both are white bread fried in oil. Quantity, he says.
The French have it all without having it all – they have a morsel, a soupçon, a mouthful, so that nothing is off the menu, not even Nutella.
You just don’t have the whole jar – you have a teaspoon, which is why the French aren’t as fat as the rest of us.
Instead, they stuff the tourists full of sugar, gluten, and lipids, then light up another cigarette and watch as we weigh down the plane home with our newly acquired Bread Stones.
Meanwhile, a photo pings into the family WhatsApp, of a giant hunk of Oreo cheesecake.
It’s from a famous cheesecake restaurant in Philadelphia, where my son is currently giving himself diabetes.
This single portion of cheesecake is 1,500 calories, he says. It’s the size of his head. It’s insane, he types happily.
He has never encountered food overabundance like this - not even in the triple-chocolate-covered stoner bakeries of Amsterdam.
How do people eat like this, he wonders. More curiously, why?
Between France and America lies Ireland - geographically, that is. Gastronomically, we lean far closer to the US in our all-you-can-eatness, along with our tolerance of ultra-processed foods.
Perhaps instead of embracing Frankenfoods and American fast food chains, we should instead embrace the French intolerance of them. Nutella aside, we’d be a lot better off.
