Estelle Levy shows cookies in her bakery in Paris. France, the country that gave us the words restaurant, bistro and cuisine, is changing how it eats.PARIS – The country that gave us the words restaurant, bistro and cuisine is changing how it eats.
For the first time in France, fast food overtook traditional restaurant receipts as the economic crisis deepened, and the share of people who pack a lunch for work is rising faster by the year. Meanwhile, lurid reports of the increasing number of traditional restaurants resorting to frozen pre-packaged meals to hold down their prices have shaken France’s sense of culinary identity.
French lawmakers have swung into action to protect their cuisine, which the government officially considers a matter of national pride — even to the point of persuading UNESCO in 2010 to put French cuisine on its World Heritage List.
“I don’t want chefs replaced by microwaves,” said Daniel Fasquelle, a lawmaker in the French Assembly who voted recently for a measure that would require restaurants to print “fait maison” — or homemade — on menus next to dishes that were created from scratch.
Fasquelle said the legislation, which was approved in the lower house and goes to the Senate in the fall, is weaker than what he and other culinary warriors want but represents a step in the right direction. Fasquelle is part of a movement seeking to limit what can be called a “restaurant” to places where more than half the food is made in-house. The idea is to protect “true cuisine” and force the fakers — who would have to find a more appropriate word, such as “caterer” — to fess up.