We are mostly fat and very often drunk

WE ALL know that when it comes to cultural superiority, France has cornered the market. If any of us remain unconvinced, look no further than books which tell us French Women Don’t Get Fat and French Children Don’t Throw Food.

In a place that does Nutella for breakfast, when the rest of us are fretting about juice cleanses, you’d wonder how this can be. How can France eat so much pain au chocolate and drink so much wine, yet not produce a nation of fat drunks? How do they get away with it? Could it be that they don’t have a binge-purge culture? That they don’t emulate the Americans? Or are they really just better than us?

There is no English language equivalent for savoir-vivre. The French might know how to live — they tend to spend as much time talking about, shopping for, and preparing dinner, as actually eating it — but this seems to be across the board, rather than the preserve of a minority of pretentious foodies.

France tends not to tolerate any of that barbaric sandwich-at-your-desk stuff which the rest of us accept as normal; nor do they go to the pub for a quick eight pints after work. In that respect, we Irish and English are quite straightforward in our culture of food and drink, in that we are mostly fat and very often drunk.

Obviously it’s a massive cliché that the French are more culturally evolved than the rest of us — but massive clichés tend to be rooted in some kind of truth. The idea first became apparent when, aged around 12, I observed someone’s exchange student calmly eating an apple with a knife and fork.

In Vietnam, the baguette remains a culinary staple; the Vietnamese have long rid themselves of their former colonisers, but they kept the best bits — French bread. Not that it’s just about food. France is civilised about sex and religion as well. As in, neither are anybody else’s business but your own.

Personally, although I like France and the French very much (it’s impossible not to), I am not a devoted Francophile. But if you visit somewhere regularly — basically because it’s next door, yet different enough from Ireland and England to be foreign — then you can’t but help develop an interest in the place. I want to know more, so I get hold of a copy of How The French Think, by Oxford politics professor Sudhir Hazareesingh.

An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People, says the cover, but it seems that the book and I are incredibly dense, so I flick through the illustrations instead — there’s a cartoon from 1814 showing how the French regarded the English as a nation of alcoholics and manic depressives.

Clearly the cartoonist had never visited Ireland.

Then I read how Descartes was so determined to show that animals were not sentient beings that he cut open his wife’s poodle. Some 350-odd years later, not much has changed in a culture that eats its cows raw.

Maybe there’s room for another book — French Vegans Don’t Exist.