"French Food Goes Down" by Mark Bittman

[DonRocks]

"French Food Goes Down" by Mark Bittman

Unfortunately, he's right.

I could tell countless stories, from the vats of olives at a Marseille farmers market (with empty cardboard boxes discarded out back that say "Produit de Morocco") to centralized, wholesale boulangeries that truck in pre-baked baguettes to the local "mom-n-pop" boulangerie.

But my mother-in-law, a born-and-bred Nií§oise, was warning me of this over ten years ago.

"Les jeunes -" she said in her native French. "The young people - when you go into town now, you see them eating while they walk." That was a decade ago, and those young people are now having children of their own, and propagating their culinary habits forward. Industrial food arrived in France quite awhile ago, and continues to metastasize throughout the country.

The contra-forces against the industrialization of food in France are few and weak, and they are losing a losing battle.

You've probably heard people say, "You're no longer guaranteed of a good meal in France," and that is, sadly, correct.

I've had dinner with Alain Ducasse and thought he was a very nice man; however, I also look at him as the first really high-end chef ever to branch into more than one restaurant (the second one also got three Michelin stars). You could make an argument for Robuchon, and Veyrat followed very quickly in Ducasse's footsteps, but from the fine-dining end of things - in other words, in terms of top-down pressure against mediocrity - this was the beginning of the end of credibility.

[Poivrot Farci]

It is silly to assume the false premise that anyone would ever be guaranteed a hopelessly broad "good meal" in France at any point in history, based on a few trips.  There has always been crap and cheats there and very few would deny it. The more recent amounts of it seem to have emigrated from the business end of the western Atlantic.

Mr Bittman's cherry picked tourist's exceptions make up the cursory $2.99 panic buffet headlines I greedily chow down on the Huffington Post. He might consider going even an hour beyond the capital's city limits and judge the gustatory merits of rural and elsewhere France alongside his narrow sample of restaurants to see how much French food can still get it up. Maybe he should drive the length of Averyron and then any US county of 250,000 to compare field notes of markets, restaurants, sundries and wares available to any derring-do diner on and off the highway.  In this day of age it is reasonable to do some research to find a better product and while industrialized convenience food has chipped away at the stalwart goods & shops of Waverly Root's yesteryear, the finer stuff is available to anyone who gives a damn, spends more than a week there and takes the effort to find it.  And yes, the frozen food there still isn't bad at all.

[DonRocks]

It is silly to assume the false premise that anyone would ever be guaranteed a hopelessly broad "good meal" in France at any point in history, based on a few trips.  There has always been crap and cheats there and very few would deny it. The more recent amounts of it seem to have emigrated from the business end of the western Atlantic.

Mr Bittman's cherry picked tourist's exceptions make up the cursory $2.99 panic buffet headlines I greedily chow down on the Huffington Post. He might consider going even an hour beyond the capital's city limits and judge the gustatory merits of rural and elsewhere France alongside his narrow sample of restaurants to see how much French food can still get it up. Maybe he should drive the length of Averyron and then any US county of 250,000 to compare field notes of markets, restaurants, sundries and wares available to any derring-do diner on and off the highway.  In this day of age it is reasonable to do some research to find a better product and while industrialized convenience food has chipped away at the stalwart goods & shops of Waverly Root's yesteryear, the finer stuff is available to anyone who gives a damn, spends more than a week there and takes the effort to find it.  And yes, the frozen food there still isn't bad at all.

And, if you're driving through rural France at night? Good luck finding anything to eat.

Julien is right. The good stuff *is* there for those who know how to look for it, and it's absolutely not all high-end. It's cheeses, markets, charcuterie, wine stores (some of which you can walk in with an empty bottle of Evian, and fill it straight from a barrel, paying by the liter), etc.