This, you think, is the very essence of France, until you read those little signs that tell you the tomatoes (which are really pretty tasteless) come from Moroccan hothouses, the grapes from South Africa, kiwis from Chile and the haricots verts from Kenya. You can’t even be sure where that boar bit the dust.
The congenial quaintness of the street market, in fact, draws directly on globalization. What Emile Zola once called “the belly of Paris,” the rich, ripe, smelly center of the wholesale food business, long since moved out of downtown to a cargo hub near Orly airport. Quite literally, that is now where a lot of French cooking begins–and, increasingly, where the era of great French cuisine as something truly unique and exclusive to France is slowly coming to an end.
For generations, the French have prided themselves on their distinctiveness. Nothing has stood for France’s sense of exceptionalism more famously than its cooking. Gallic talent, taste and techniques have been exported all over the world. And therein lies part of the problem. From the Napa Valley to the Thames and Tokyo, non-French cooks have cracked the codes of the best French cuisine. Meanwhile, what was mediocre elsewhere–albeit cheap and popular–has been imported. (Believe it or not, one restaurant associated with a famous Paris chef serves steak tartare with a sauce that’s indistinguishable from the stuff on a Big Mac.) The result: many tourists–as well as the French themselves–no longer see what’s so special about French cooking.
The decline goes well beyond recent surveys that show growing complaints about mediocre quality and high prices–no small concern in a country were tourisme gastronomique earned 18 billion euro in 2002, a quarter of all tourist revenues. More and more restaurateurs say that government tax and economic policies are limiting their profits, and thereby hurting their capacity to invest and hire more staff. They have become ensnarled in the red tape for which France is infamous–not to mention edicts from Brussels that affect everything from sales taxes to the bacteria in the Brie. Many warn that expanding the European Union to the east will hurt small French farmers, who remain the backbone of traditional cuisine–and, hence, French identity. These are large questions and, unfortunately for the French, there are few reassuring answers.
By rights, France should have no trouble preserving its reputation for brilliance. The foundations are there, including what may be the best-educated consumers in the world. The Paris municipal administration sponsors cooking workshops for kids from the ages of 7 to 9, and even the prestigious caterer Lenotre, for a price, offers after-school courses in fine dining. On annual Semaines du Gout, schools’ cafeteria chefs are invited to experiment with menus, departing from the usual jambon puree to include local specialties.
Not coincidentally, it was the French who taught the world that water has many very different, very marketable tastes. At the annual agricultural fair in Paris this spring, visitors not only enjoyed sipping wines, but olive oils–one a little nutty, another quite fruity, some of them, one is tempted to say, just a little impudent. Even table salt has its distinctions, with fleur de sel, the thin layer collected on the surface of salt basins in the Bordeaux region, now much appreciated. “France is one of those countries where people can leave the table full and still be talking about food,” jokes chef Yannick Alleno, 35, who brought a new star to the restaurant of the Hotel Meurice this year. His favorite specialty: sea bass sewn with golden threads.
The famed Pierre Gagnaire collaborates with a chemist, Herve This, to create stunning new effects for his eponymous restaurant off the Champs Elysees. They were able to produce a cubic meter of meringue from a single egg white, and Gagnaire claims they’ve also solved an ancient conundrum of the kitchen: “Flavors get lost in the air when you heat food, and this is especially annoying when you cook with great red wine,” he says. “Herve and I realized that when you mix a little bit of vegetable oil with the wine, you can then recapture some of its aromas by collecting the tiny particles of oil.” Who knew?
But the real paradox of French cooking–in France, at least–is that artistic success often spells business disaster. Gagnaire’s first venture went bankrupt in 1996, just as he was winning high praise from critics and the public. Andre Daguin, who’s now head of the industry’s professional association, remembers feeling he was in trouble “the moment I was awarded a second Michelin star.” Soon afterward, he took off his toque for good. “I wasn’t making any money in the restaurant anymore.” Starred chefs often end up drowning in red ink as they try to maintain the high standards that made their names. But Daguin also blames what he calls an aberrant–and, from a restaurateur’s vantage point, punitive–tax system, compounded by poorly thought-out social legislation. “We’re in a country where the more praise you get,” he says, “the less money you make.”
Consider the value-added taxes that were “harmonized” all over Europe during the 1990s. They benefit fast-food chains, since the tax on takeaway is only 5.5 percent, while they penalize sit-down restaurants, whether humble bistros or haute cuisine, which pay 19.6 percent. When President Jacques Chirac ran for re-election in 2002, he promised to reduce the tax, but such is the nature of the new Europe that all 25 countries will have to approve the measure for it to take effect–in 2006. The government is instituting other complicated tax breaks and stopgap measures in the meantime to try to calm the restive restaurateurs and in hopes of creating employment. But Daguin is deeply skeptical. “If the French were under the same fiscal regime as the United States, we’d be able to create twice as many jobs,” he says.
Strict labor laws restricting hiring, firing and temp work also figure in the equation. “Our business is a succession of high-stress times and quiet times,” says Denis Meliet, a former rugby player and a passionate restaurateur from Toulouse. When it comes to employment, “the problem in France is that we have no flexibility whatsoever. When we’re busy it would be good if, like in England, we could hire a couple of extra employees to help out.” But the law makes that difficult. One late 1990s study by a French economist found that employment in the hotel and restaurant business in France had increased by 51 percent since the 1950s, compared to 350 percent in the United States.
Even when government regulations appear specially formulated to support the culture of cuisine, they often go astray. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, for instance, is supposed to benefit small farmers, keep them on the land–and thus, you’d think, nurture the terroir that gives French cooking its soul, and France much of its national identity. But activist Brigitte Allain of the Confederation Paysanne, a farmer herself, says the CAP, in fact, does just the reverse–favors quantity over quality. “In this system,” she says, “farmers are merely providers of staples whose sole requirement [in order to receive generous EU subsidies] is to deliver the goods according to the rules.” Quality, or variety of tastes, don’t figure in those rules. “If our cuisine has prestige,” says Allain, “it’s because we have chefs who are interested in good products. And we have good products because we still have a type of agriculture that we call peasant agriculture alongside the factory farms. Notice I say ‘still,’ because this agriculture may not last that long.”
As France’s great chefs worry about staying in the avant-garde, with their gold threads and miraculous meringues, many small farmers and restaurateurs seem to be fighting a rearguard action just to survive. Chantal Jacovetti, who raises escargots, sees even her sales of snails being squeezed by imports. “I wish customers would actually ask the origin of what they have on their plate,” she says. She worries that soon, almost all of Europe’s tomatoes will come from overseas, or from the flimsy greenhouses of southern Spain, which cover so much of the Almeria landscape, it’s called the “plastic desert.” Poland’s cows, meanwhile, may generate tidal waves of milk. “We talk about terroir all the time, but terroir means diversity and richness,” says Jacovett. “We’ve lost some of that over the last 30 years.”
The problems afflicting French cuisine are emblematic of those that plague the economy as a whole. Like French cuisine, the French economy still holds the occasional surprise: last week the government announced that economic growth for 2004 should be higher than expected. But the basic problems of bureaucracy, taxes and social reluctance to change remain a burden for everyone. “At all levels–political, social, cultural or biological–cooking is at the forefront of the great choices that we have to make as a society,” says Raymond Blanc, born in the Jura region of France and chef of the two-star hotel-restaurant Manoir aux Quat’Saisons.
Blanc believes France is still ahead of the rest of the world in the richness of its cuisine, but for how long? “It’s as if France stopped caring about its regions and what gives them diversity,” he says. France’s problem isn’t the lack of creativity, but rather a political environment that stymies initiative. If you’re choked by bureaucracy and taxes, as so much of France is, “there’s not much you can do,” he adds. “I can open a business in England in five days. In France it would take three months.”
The Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, by the way, is in Oxford, citadel of France’s ancient rival, Britain. And, when it comes to cooking, a future one as well. Dommage.
