Au Revoir to All That

by Michael Steinberger

  In 2004, Mireille Guiliano, the French-born head of Champagne Veuve Clicquot’s American operations, published a book called French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure. According to Guiliano, French women were able to remain so fashionably lean because they ate high-quality, seasonal products, didn’t snack between meals, and took pleasure in food, which supposedly allowed them to reach a feeling of satisfaction and satiation with smaller portions. Guiliano’s homespun wisdom, with its promise of pain-free weight control and its oh-so-French tone (“Life is too short to drink bad wine and eat bad food”), proved irresistible to calorie-obsessed American women. French Women Don’t Get Fat quickly climbed to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Worldwide, more than three million copies were sold.

  There was just one problem with Guiliano’s self-help tome: The title was untrue. French women did get fat, and so did their husbands and children. Indeed, the book was released just as France was beginning to grapple with a national epidemic of love handles and spare tires. By 2005, more than 40 percent of all French were considered overweight or obese, a figure that had doubled in less than a decade and which was rising by more than 10 percent annually. If the trend persisted, France was expected to have, on a per capita basis, a population as supersized as America’s by the year 2020. The data for children was particularly alarming: Among the under-eighteen-year-olds, the obesity rate was swelling by nearly 20 percent per year. France, experts agreed, was in the grips of a public health crisis. Of course, crisis for some spelled opportunity for others. “The market in France is growing and we believe it has an excellent future,” Michael Mullen, the European product manager for Weight Watchers, told the International Herald Tribune in 2005.

  Not surprisingly, much of the blame for France’s increasing flab was pinned on fast food, and five years after José Bové treated his bulldozer to a Happy Meal, the French media continued to lavish praise on those who stood against McDonald’s and its ilk. In 2004, a school chef in the city of Marseille named Dominique Valadier briefly became the toast of the nation for his effort to discourage students from going to the nearby McDonald’s for lunch. Valadier served all manner of classic French dishes—there was also wine for the teachers—and proudly told visiting journalists that because of the quality of his food, most of the teenagers were now choosing to dine chez l’école, rather than going off-campus to eat.

  But Valadier was just one man employed by one school. Moreover, it was in homes, rather than schools, that French food culture was under its most sustained assault. There were various reasons for this. The most obvious and significant one was that millions of French women were now working and had neither the time nor the inclination to prepare a family meal each night; it was easier to throw a frozen pizza in the microwave. While this was arguably a step forward for French womanhood, it was emphatically not one for French waistlines, nor French cuisine. In the eighty years that Michelin had been rating restaurants, nearly every three-star recipient had had his interest in gastronomy nurtured as a child, in the family kitchen. It was true for Chapel, Bocuse, Ducasse—for virtually all of them. With the decline in home cooking, there was legitimate reason to fear that haute cuisine’s umbilical cord was being cut.

  To be sure, it was not as if the French had all eaten likes kings and queens in the past. Well into the twentieth century, many French lived hardscrabble existences and had very circumscribed diets, and even with the economic boom that the country experienced after the Second World War, there was never a particularly deep reservoir of gourmandism. Joël Robuchon made this point in an interview with Jean-Robert Pitte for Gault Millau in 1989. “Only a small number of French possess refined palates,” he said. “The French believe they have innate knowledge in the gastronomic domain … nothing is further from the truth.” The ignorance even extended to his clientele. “If 20 or even 10 percent of the customers in my dining room had truly refined taste, I would be happy.” Michel Guérard, quoted in the same article, seconded Robuchon’s claim. “The French imagine themselves to have amazing palates, whereas they can very often be found lacking,” he said. “If we tried to determine what proportion of the French population were connoisseurs, I would say less than 15 percent. The rest eat, but do not know how to tell if a mackerel is cooked well or badly.”

  Nevertheless, France had given rise to the most artful and sensual cuisine in the world, had spawned generations of brilliant chefs and impassioned and discerning diners, and had taught much of the rest of the planet how to cook and how to eat, and this heritage was now endangered. In more and more French households, supper consisted of slapdash meals consumed in haste, often with the television blaring. By the mid-2000s, hundreds of bistros, brasseries, and cafés were going out of business each year, scores of starred restaurants were struggling, and the high-quality ingredients that had long been the backbone of French cuisine—the impeccable meats, poultry, fruits, and vegetables—were increasingly difficult to find because fewer and fewer people were producing them.

  The French public seemed largely indifferent to these developments. One measure of that indifference: The Slow Food movement barely had a following in France. Slow Food was, as the name suggested, dedicated to combating the depredations of fast food. The goal was to encourage people to take their time at meals, to take pride in what they cooked and pleasure in what they ate, and to support local cuisines and artisans, and although the organization had its roots in Italy, these principles also lay at the heart of French food culture. And indeed, the manifesto that launched the International Slow Food Movement was signed in Paris in 1989. Yet, it wasn’t until 2003 that a French chapter of Slow Food was established, and by 2008, there were just 1,800 members, versus 26,000 in Italy and 17,000 in the United States (and the American chapter was formed only three years prior to France’s). Whether this lack of interest was because the French didn’t believe that their culinary tradition was threatened or couldn’t be bothered to come to its rescue was an open question. Either way, it was mystifying to many people. Rob Kaufelt, the owner of Murray’s, a popular New York cheese shop, wasn’t even inclined to view the issue through the prism of France’s rich gastronomic history; to him, it was baffling that any advanced Western nation would fail to embrace Slow Food. “Why a modern European, First World country wouldn’t have a serious Slow Food movement, tied in with environmental concerns, is a very strange thing,” was how he diplomatically put it.

  Overseeing all of Europe, Denis Hennequin was a busy man. After several hastily rescheduled appointments, he and I were finally able to meet on a September afternoon in 2007. The interview took place on the lower floor of a McDonald’s in the sixteenth arrondissement. The lunchtime rush had ended, and the remaining customers formed a tableau that surely warmed Hennequin’s heart: There was a young African woman nursing her infant, a Caucasian man seated at a counter and working at his computer, and two high-school-age boys of North African descent eating hamburgers and quietly laughing. Had I not known his identity, I would never have taken Hennequin for a McDonald’s executive. For one thing, he was whippet-thin, with a lean, angular face to go with his balding pate; if he ate the food he was peddling, it didn’t show. Then there was his hipster attire: He was dressed in a three-piece beige linen suit, with a white button-down shirt and no tie, and he also carried a knapsack in lieu of a briefcase—an ensemble that didn’t exactly call to mind a Middle American CEO. (Further burnishing his bohemian credentials, Hennequin rode a Harley, and he and his wife and three children performed as a rock-and-roll band—a French version of the Partridge Family.) Likewise, his speech was largely free of corporate jargon—there was no talk of synergies and economies of scale and vertical integration—and he had none of the swagger of a typical executive. Instead, Hennequin had a cool, understand confidence, a demeanor that had undoubtedly served him well in the more than two decades he had spent helping McDonald’s win over the deeply conflicted hearts, minds, and alimentary canals of his compatriots
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  We took a seat in a booth. He asked an assistant to bring him a cup of coffee. Unbowed by my macaron comeuppance and still determined to do what the French manifestly could not—resist McDonald’s—I opted for a bottle of Evian. Exercising a boss’s prerogatives, he also instructed the assistant to have the music turned down. Finally settled in, Hennequin told me that there had been considerable anxiety when McDonald’s had relaunched in France in the early 1980s, brought on by France’s culinary tradition and the lukewarm reception the company had received when it had first opened there. “We felt very insecure in this market,” he said. “French cuisine has a very strong identity. But the French are full of paradoxes. There is this reputation for slow food, for early retirement, for the thirty-five-hour workweek. On the other hand, France is one of the highest in Europe for productivity and efficiency and for the quality of the workforce. If it wasn’t for the exception française, it looked like a very good market. The question for us at the start was whether there was room for an American restaurant offering American products with speed, convenience, quality, and cleanliness. Obviously there was.”

  The company had succeeded in France, he continued, in part by emphasizing the American angle and downplaying the speed factor. This was a bit surprising to hear in 2007, with memories of freedom fries still fresh. But back in the 1980s, Hennequin explained, fast food had been a much harder thing to sell the French than Americana. “We never positioned ourselves as fast food in France,” he said. “From Day One, we positioned ourselves as an alternative for families and people who wanted a fun experience, as opposed to just a fast experience. The foundation was a fun family experience. This was a very new concept in France—something exotic.” Indeed it was; traditional French restaurants were many things, but kid-friendly was not one of them. America had a certain exotic appeal, as well. “The U.S. and France have always had a difficult relationship, but it’s made of love and hate,” he said. “The movies, the music—the jazz and rock; we are defensive of our own culture, but very open to American culture.” Surprisingly, too, Hennequin claimed that McDonald’s status as a symbol of globalization had also worked in its favor, at least with younger French. “Kids here have a fascination with global culture,” he said. “They don’t have a problem with globalization; it’s attractive to them.”

  This seemed an opportune moment to mention the enemy, and I’d hardly begun to formulate my question when Hennequin nodded, broke into a knowing smile, and said, “José Bové.” The two had never met; for Hennequin, it was a matter of principle. “If he hadn’t gone so far,” he said, “I would have spoken with him, but he destroyed a restaurant and went to jail.” Nonetheless, he claimed that Bové had actually ended up doing McDonald’s a big favor. The incident in Millau, and the outpouring of support for Bové, had caused Hennequin and his colleagues to realize that they needed to do a better job of communicating. As he put it, “We had French employees, French suppliers, French franchisees; we had this secret story that shouldn’t have been a secret—that we were a French-operated company selling an American product.” In the aftermath of the Bové imbroglio, the company played up its French connections, and the public responded. “We came out of this crisis stronger,” Hennequin said. “French consumers heard our message and said, ‘It’s my McDonald’s.’ Bové helped us at the end of the day.”

  But there were limits to how far McDonald’s would go to ingratiate itself to the natives. Although its restaurants in France sold beer, wine would never be offered; doing so would suggest that it was in competition with traditional French restaurants, and that was not the case. “We’ve never tried to run the bistros and cafés out of business, we’ve never tried to copy their products,” he said. But they were going out of business, and France’s culinary tradition was clearly imperiled. The French weren’t cooking anymore, and instead of pot-au-feu, children were now being reared on fast food. Wasn’t McDonald’s at least partly responsible for this, and as a Frenchman, did he ever feel even just a little traitorous? “It’s not because of McDonald’s that people aren’t cooking at home,” he brusquely replied. “It’s because they decided to stop cooking—they are not interested, or are working, or don’t want to get their kitchens dirty. That’s not my fault. But when you think about it, steak frites was the number-one-selling menu item for kids in French restaurants. You could say we’re just giving it to them a different way.”

  The American company was doing something else for French youths: It was providing jobs—lots of jobs—in a country that was having a conspicuously difficult time creating them. By 2007, McDonald’s had nearly fifty thousand people on its payrolls in France, making it the country’s largest private sector employer, and the average age of its employees was twenty-five. French kids liked eating at McDonald’s, and they liked being on the other side of the counter, too. In 2006, McDonald’s was ranked the eighth-best company to work for in France. In a nation beset with persistently high unemployment and frequent labor unrest, these were not figures to be sniffed at.

  And the importance of McDonald’s went beyond just the number of jobs it was creating; it was also where those opportunities were being generated. The chain had many restaurants in predominately immigrant neighborhoods, where the unemployment rates among youths were often as high as 50 percent. These areas seethed with frustration, which frequently expressed itself in random acts of vandalism and, occasionally, in more sustained violence. In October 2005, the suburbs around Paris and a number of other French cities exploded in riots. Thousands of cars were torched and many local businesses suffered broken windows and worse. However, McDonald’s outlets were generally spared. “We were very protected,” Hennequin told me. “The kids would say, ‘Hey, my sister works there.’ We’ve rarely been hit.” McDonald’s, in his view, was helping to assimilate a large and rapidly growing immigrant population that generally felt marginalized in French society, and it was promoting diversity and solidarity in a country that badly needed more of both. “We are a strong enabler for integration,” Hennequin said. “We mix people of different origins, different levels of income.”

  Eric Gravier made a similar point when he and I spoke. “We help integrate kids who would never find any activity normally,” he said. “We teach them to wake up in the morning, wash their hands, smile at customers, respect their colleagues—it’s unbelievable what we do for some of them. In a lot of these neighborhoods, there aren’t many options; McDonald’s is one of them.” He said the company went to lengths to ensure that its restaurants were staffed by people of diverse backgrounds. Often, this meant that employees were sent to restaurants in neighborhoods outside their own in order to ensure a racial or ethnic balance behind the counter—a form of coerced integration, perhaps, but valuable in a country stratified along racial and ethnic lines. “We have to mix,” said Gravier. “Sometimes we get kids living fifteen minutes or a half hour away from stores, because it gives a mixture; we are careful about preserving multi-origins.” In keeping with this policy, the company had resisted demands in some neighborhoods to tweak its menu to accommodate local customs. “They’ve asked for halal beef in some places, but we’ve refused,” he said. “We don’t want to be seen as connected to one group or another; we want to be connected to everyone.” He proudly said that French politicians were no longer inclined to demonize McDonald’s and were instead coming to recognize the company’s social contributions: “They are starting to see us an important actor in terms of diversity; we could become an interesting model for them to look at.”

  But that didn’t change the fact that McDonald’s was peddling cheeseburgers in the land of Carême, Point, and Escoffier. Surely, those responsible for upholding France’s culinary tradition took a dim view of the fast-food chain? Not necessarily. During a dinner at Alain Ducasse’s three-star restaurant at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, I fell into a discussion about McDonald’s with Denis Courtiade, the restaurant’s maître d’, and he could hardly contain his enthusiasm. He said
he treated his three children to McDonald’s every few months and that it was heaven for all involved. “They can run around and break things and have fun; they can’t do that in a bistro,” Courtiade said. He also marveled at the fast-food chain’s transparency—the effort it made to communicate with customers about product sourcing and nutritional values. “It’s brilliant how open they are,” he gushed. “They tell you everything. I brought the brochure in for the hotel manager because I wanted him to see it.”

  His sentiments were echoed by Jean-François Piège, who had served as chef de cuisine for Ducasse at the Plaza Athénée and was now head chef at the two-star Les Ambassadeurs in the Hôtel de Crillon (and thought to be a lock for a third star). Piège didn’t regard McDo’s success as a sign of the cretinization of younger French palates. Quite the opposite: He believed it showed good taste. “Other than the croque monsieur, we don’t have a tradition of hot sandwiches here,” Piège explained to me. “McDonald’s gives you a hot sandwich, with flavorful meat; if the choice is between that and a ham and cheese sandwich out of the refrigerator, people are going to choose the hot sandwich. Also, McDonald’s is very economical. Why has McDonald’s succeeded here? Because it allows a certain person to eat well.”

  His mentor and former boss, Ducasse, wasn’t quite as generous in his praise when we talked about McDonald’s, but neither was he especially worried about its popularity. “You eat simply, cheaply there—it is attractive for the young,” he told me. “The young don’t have the time for long lunches. They can’t sit there drinking Cognacs and Armagnacs after lunch. They are busy; they have meetings. McDonald’s offers speed and a good price; if the café owners offer good sandwiches at a good price, with good bread, good butter, good ham, the young will come. Food has to evolve with changes in society.” For Ducasse, McDonald’s was a challenge to be met, and he was rising to meet it: In 2002, he started a sandwich shop-cum-bakery in Paris called Be Boulangépicier (roughly translated as “bakerygrocery”), and he had just opened a second outlet in Paris and one in Tokyo, as well. The tagline for the shops was pratique, rapide et savoureux: Easy, fast, and tasty.