Food Diary: the French Way to Eat
In addition to all the bugs going around, Americans have caught an acute case of Francophilia.
It might sound like a dirty word, considering all the pro-war yellow ribbon magnets on our highways, but Americans — we women, mostly — are seriously enamored of the French way of eating. The way the French eat, enjoy and don’t get fat.
This appeals to those of us who’d like to eat and not get fat, and to those of us who’d like to eat and get unfat. In a word, everyone.
The so-called French Paradox has been written about, but that’s about health, about the heart-protecting powers of red wine, garlic and olive oil. The coronary health of the French people is enviable, but it’s their effortless thinness we’re after.
Now, like an ice cream truck rounding our block when we desperately need it, comes Mireille Guiliano’s “French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure.” The book, which was published in January, has been a best seller at both Barnes & Noble and Amazon. It’s captivated everyone I know.
We’ve all heard the advice, and yet we’re happy to pay for another book telling us what we already know. Three complete meals a day. No snacking. No processed or packaged foods. The only acceptable beverages are water, black coffee, wine and more water (no juices, hard liquor or, quel horror, soda). Eat fresh fruits and vegetables in season. Follow these simple rules — plus a brisk walk daily — and bread, cheese and chocolate can be yours.
It sounds like a way to have your cake and eat it, too. And you can, says Guiliano, president and CEO of the Cliquot house of Champagne. But you can’t have the cake every day. Nor in the American-sized portion we’re accustomed to. And you have to walk twice as long tomorrow as you normally would have.
Still, it seems like a small sacrifice to be slim and chic, sitting in a cafe looking mysterious and self-satisfied, wearing expensive lingerie under your clothes and a Hermes scarf over them, reading obscure poetry as Mediterranean men gaze your way. …
It’s not just diet advice we’re buying; we want to star in the whole “American in Paris” fantasy.
This eating plan can be done, even in unglamorous Buffalo. You’ll feel smug as you load your grocery cart with nothing but leeks, but that’s OK. We need to feel free to be food snobs.
Not all of Guiliano’s exhortations are easy to follow. For one, her near-orgasmic love of outdoor greenmarkets is like a poke in the eye to a snowbound Western New Yorker. And her brand of exercise does not require one to wear spandex or pay for a gym membership, but instead involves always taking the stairs and doing one’s own housework. (The time saved by hiring a cleaning person will only be spent “brooding about work and family, stewing in our juices,” anyway.) And, of course, walking.
The good news is that this “exercise” can be done in sexy skirts and heels as you head to the 19th century home of your married lover or to a rally protesting cuts in socialized medicine.
At least that’s what Debra Ollivier says in “Entre Nous: A Woman’s Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl.” Ollivier’s book is a holistic guide to, well, finding your inner French girl. Since the French girl is passionate about food, she writes lustily about her decade in France among the best food, wine and home cooks in the world. But if you can’t be happy with simply “eating French,” Ollivier will show you how to read French, think French, dress French and be French.
This is a French Revolution I can get behind.