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  In the second race, the ENA loses by three lengths. The ENA does another study and concludes that the eight rowers were not motivated enough. Three of them are replaced by a Team Leader, a Team Liaison Manager and a Rowing Quality Control Manager. There are now only five rowers left, with five managers.

  In the third race, the ENA loses by twenty lengths, and decides that its whole rowing system needs a fundamental review. All the remaining rowers are replaced by auditors.

  In the last race, the ENA boat does not even move. The auditors declare that rowing is not a worthwhile activity and should be stopped immediately. The ENA graduates don’t care – they are given fat bonuses and sent to improve efficiency somewhere else.

  Fortunately, after a few years of trying to reform things, these ENA types seem to settle down to a life of endless meetings and even more endless lunches, and leave the lower ranks to get on with running the business.

  Grown-up Schoolboys

  It’s not only graduates of the elite schools who like to put the ‘Education’ section at the top of their CV.

  The reason so many young people leave France is that they can’t get a job unless they have a certificate – diplôme – proving they can do it.

  At the magazine I worked for in Paris, only one of six English-language journalists had a degree in journalism. This was because we Anglos were outside the French system. It was well known in the company that no French candidates for a magazine job would even get an interview if they didn’t have the name of a journalism school on their CV.

  New recruits to all departments were announced in a note bleue – a memo printed on blue paper. One note bleue, announcing the arrival of a thirty-eight-year-old marketing director, began with the words ‘Olivier Whatsisnom has a diploma in international marketing from the Ecole de . . .’ I could hardly believe it – at thirty-eight, his business-school degree was still more important than the actual business he’d done since.

  In the eyes of a French human-resources officer, even if someone has set up their own company, made a small fortune and sold out to a multinational, their experience will not count for as much as a two-year course at a business school.

  10 With typical Anglo-Saxon ingratitude, this was when I decided to start writing books poking fun at the French.

  11 When I explain this to French people, they think it is very funny that we English outsourced our national stadium to our arch sporting rivals, the Australians. I have trouble convincing them that it is not an English joke.

  12 For the Stade de France, the deadline was imposed by someone else – FIFA. It wasn’t self-imposed.

  13 In fact, only around 8 per cent of the French workforce belong to a union, but the unions are very good at latching on to any industrial dispute and taking it over. And naturally, when there is a strike, the media call up the union spokesperson, not the factory workers who have a grievance, so the unions feel a lot more powerful than they really are.

  14 Coincidentally, the trains and buses bringing strikers to the demonstrations are never held up by strikes.

  It is a well-known fact that on the French section of the front line,

  the Battle of the Somme was stopped for lunch.

  THE

  3RD

  COMMANDMENT

  Tu Mangeras

  THOU SHALT EAT

  THOU SHALT EAT

  IF THE BIBLE HAD BEEN WRITTEN BY A FRENCHMAN, THERE would have been a lot more recipes in it. And this would have been the first commandment.

  You can’t live in France if you’re not interested in food. The French do not respect people who deny themselves any pleasure at all, and, despite what they might try to tell the world, they take food even more seriously than sex. So someone who is not able to groan orgasmically at the mere mention of pigs’ entrails is roughly equivalent to an impotent monk. And vegetarians are regarded with extreme suspicion, like a guest at a jacuzzi orgy who stays dry and fully clothed, with his back to all the action and his ears plugged.

  The French do, of course, have a lot to get excited about. Ever since the first Neolithic tribes became sedentary in France, people have been spending their time dreaming up ways of preparing, cooking and preserving everything that the land, sea and air had to offer. Those TV documentaries that re-create the lives of Stone-Age peoples probably don’t apply to the French at all. Instead of grunting as they chewed through shapeless, blackened hunks of mammoth, the Stone-Age Frenchmen would have spent hours discussing what sauce to use, how long to cook the meat, and on what sized flame.

  It’s no coincidence that the best Neolithic cave paintings in Europe are in central France. All those sketches of woolly mammoths were serving suggestions.

  They would probably have got a lot more nourishment out of the mammoth, too. Whereas the Stone-Age Brits would have eaten the meatiest bits and fed the rest to their domesticated wolves, the French would have consumed all the organs, including the lungs and the brain, and every bit of the limbs, right down to the jelly inside the hooves (or whatever kind of feet mammoths have). They would then have made sauces out of any leftovers, to give a bit more flavour to the half-edible bits of the next animal they killed.

  Hardly surprising that they didn’t have time to build Stonehenge.

  Life Is a Finger Buffet

  The French have retained some of their Stone-Age culinary traditions, and often display what looks like a total lack of hygiene. Food is manhandled, cheeses are sold when their rinds are mouldy, meat and eggs are eaten half-cooked or raw. Early-morning deliveries of food to restaurants are often left outside on the pavement, where, as everyone knows, dogs commonly leave unhygienic deposits.

  In short, the French believe that bacteria have the right to live and breed, preferably in people’s stomachs.

  Bread seems to be the biggest vector of germs. You can watch a boulangère squeeze a baguette, enjoying the crunch it makes, accept payment with the same hand, rummage around in her cash drawer, and then transfer all the bacteria in her coin collection to the next baguette – yours.

  It is common to see waiters or cooks carrying an armful of unwrapped baguettes through the streets, or pulling an open trolley of bread. When the loaves get to the restaurant, they are often cut into slices by the waiters, who also handle money. The baskets of bread will be served at one table, fondled by the customers there, taken back to the breadboard, and leftover chunks of baguette will be used to fill up other baskets. So the piece of bread with which you soak up the vinaigrette on your plate might well have been squeezed by a boulangère, rubbed under a waiter’s armpit, fingered by a previous diner, and maybe even dropped on the café floor, before you pop it into your mouth. Yummy.

  Even more appetizing – in cafés, you occasionally get a glass that smells of secondhand beer, probably because after it was last used it was just quickly swilled out with the upward-squirting glass rinser behind the bar. You have to hope that the previous drinker didn’t have gum disease.

  And yet all this doesn’t seem to do anyone any harm. There are hardly any outbreaks of salmonella or E. coli poisoning in France15 and food allergies are almost unheard of.

  An English expat in France once told me what happened when she’d eaten a snack with traces of peanuts in it. She’d started to swell up and get short of breath, and was afraid she was going to die. When the ambulancemen arrived, she told them ‘Je suis allergique aux cac-ahuètes’ – I am allergic to peanuts – and they burst out laughing. In their defence, the sentence does sound absurd in French. It would be like telling English ambulancemen that ‘My ketchup was radioactive.’

  In the end, she was only saved because her mother, anticipating trouble, had found a technical name for nut allergy in a medical encyclopedia and written it down.16 The French can’t resist scientific names, which make everything sound more official, and the English girl’s password earned her a life-saving injection.

  Every year, the country is swept by epidemics of gastroenteritis, but the French seem to regard
these as rites of passage. The body gets sick, poops out the virus, and is stronger. A bit of disease is good for the digestion.

  This is why on French beaches you see more adults than children with little fishing nets. The grown-ups are collecting shrimps from the rock pools, even on beaches in the centre of large resorts where the seawater might not be exactly clean enough to pickle your olives in. They will also pull mussels off the rocks, and anything that looks like an oyster will be taken back to the kitchen in a bucket and slurped down raw.

  A resultant bout of food poisoning, which would scare most people off seafood for life, will be regarded as a bit of bad luck. A French friend of mine who spent a week vomiting after a mussel-gathering trip in Normandy was astonishingly philosophical about her experience: ‘The sewage outflow was round the other side of the headland, so we thought they’d be OK,’ she said. ‘My grandparents have been eating those mussels for years, and they never get sick.’ Sewage as vaccine. Not everyone’s cup of tea, even in France.

  The French Get Fresh

  British and American supermarkets have made a lot of progress since grapes used to come individually wrapped in cling film and the only homegrown fruit you saw were a few embarrassed-looking, over-polished apples. These days, farmers’ markets are reminding us Anglo-Saxons that food often comes from the ground rather than factories. But French markets don’t need to call themselves ‘farmers’ markets’. Even the most urban Parisian market looks as if it has one foot out in the countryside.

  This is because the French still love eating fresh, seasonal produce. Like anywhere else in Europe, you can buy artificially ripened Spanish strawberries in the heart of winter, but come summer, the market stalls explode with Gariguette strawberries – long, pinkish-red, extra-juicy fruit with a flavour you just don’t get from the winter version.

  A French summer holiday, especially in the southwest, has a bright-orange tinge to it – the colour of the flesh of Charentais melons. At many markets there will be stalls selling nothing else. To test whether they’re ripe you don’t squeeze them – you sniff their bottoms, doggy-style. Ripe ones smell of sweet melon (logical, really). And if they’re fully ripe, their flesh will be deep, dark orange and taste almost as if it were already laced with port.

  A few weeks later, the figs start to arrive. The gooey red insides of a green fig, ripe to the point of eruption, are like naturally occurring jam – juicier and sweeter than any fruit you will find in the northern hemisphere at that time of year.

  It’s the same for the purple Muscat grapes that are dusty-looking and a million times softer than the crisp, shiny, almost transparent torpedoes that are usually sold in English supermarkets. Squeezing them into your mouth is like drinking virgin wine.

  The first days of autumn bring a muddy, smoky-smelling invasion of fresh fungus to every vegetable stall in France. Some are from the Chernobyl zone, but plenty of them have been delivered straight from French forests, just begging to be cleaned, fried in butter and enfolded in an omelette, providing one of the most erotic experiences you can have with an egg since a soft-porn film I once saw called something like Things to Do with a Yolk. But the mushroom-omelette experience is, if anything, even more pleasurable because it’s only possible for the few weeks when the best mushrooms are in town.

  Not only is this food all seasonal, but it has often travelled just a short distance, so it’s extremely fresh. In many regions of the country, when you go to a restaurant, you can get a meal whose ingredients, apart from the citrus fruits, coffee and sugar, all come from within fifty kilometres of where you’re sitting.

  The île de Ré, near La Rochelle, is my favourite place for this. The nineteen-mile-long island produces masses of seafood, all kinds of vegetables, its own wine, beer, meat, butter, cheese and more. Half a dozen fresh local oysters and a glass of the island’s white wine is one of the best snacks you could ever wish for, and will cost less than the price of a railway sandwich.

  To put it simply, we Anglo-Saxons may have lots of celebrity chefs, but the French have celebrity food. I know which I prefer.

  French Women Do Get Fat

  A glance at the bodies on an average French beach will disprove the theory that French women don’t get fat. The same goes for men and children. There are plenty of people in France who have fallen victim to the attractions of the junk-food, no-exercise diet.

  But over all, the French do get less fat than others. Mais pourquoi?

  Here is a typical week’s worth of midday meals served at a certain Parisian establishment. Read it and try to guess who was eating this food.

  MONDAY

  Beetroot salad with croutons, lamb couscous with semolina and

  boiled vegetables, sweetened yoghurt, seasonal fruit.

  TUESDAY

  Grated carrot salad with lemon-juice dressing, roast pork with

  mustard sauce, peas, Gruyère cheese, fromage blanc

  with fruit in syrup.

  WEDNESDAY

  Lettuce and avocado, fried steak with flageolet beans,

  Saint-Nectaire cheese, fruit cocktail.

  THURSDAY

  Potato salad with tarragon, turkey curry with green beans,

  Pyrenean cheese, seasonal fruit.

  FRIDAY

  Carrot, cabbage and sweetcorn salad, cod in hollandaise sauce,

  rice with vegetables, Camembert, chocolate cream.

  So who was eating these lunches? The regulars at a menu fixe restaurant? The workers in one of Paris’s museums? The staff of Air France?

  No, it’s a typical week’s worth of canteen menus in the schools of Paris’s 4th arrondissement.

  On only one day, a Thursday late in the month, were French fries on the menu. On only two days was there no fresh salad as a starter, and that was because it was replaced once by a soup and once by an onion tart. On 17 eleven days, the dessert was a seasonal fruit.

  The French don’t need a celebrity chef to tell their schools how to feed kids. And they are strong believers in educating the taste buds of the young generation. Not just to ensure future customers for French farmers, but also to try and make sure that the kids don’t turn into three-hamburgers-a-day food yobs.

  Make no mistake, French kids love to go to fast-food places, and dream of having French fries with every meal. But schools are places where you’re supposed to learn les bonnes manières, and that includes the ‘right’ diet. The menus aren’t monastic – there are lots of sugary desserts – but they are obligatory (except for religious variants), and educate the palate just as compulsory long division shapes the mind. There are probably more herbs, spices and types of cheese in a month’s school menus than some American children eat in a lifetime.

  French adults carry on this meal-eating habit gained in youth. Office workers rarely gobble a sandwich at their desk. The majority of office workers I’ve dealt with will go and have a sit-down meal at lunchtime, either at their canteen or a café or restaurant. You might think that this would encourage gluttony, but in France restaurants are not judged purely on the quantity of food per portion. And even if French people do take two hours for lunch (which is, honestly, not often the case on workdays), they will spend half the time talking rather than eating. Coffee alone will take twenty minutes.

  Of course, lots of people don’t have time for a full sit-down meal. If a company doesn’t have a canteen, it is usually obliged to give lunch vouchers – tickets restaurant – and these will often be exchanged at the nearest boulangerie. Even here, amidst the chocolate cakes and buttery tarts, healthy eating is high on the menu. A cheese or ham sandwich will probably be aux crudités – with lettuce and tomato – and will have one slice of cheese rather than the four that are stuffed into an American sandwich. Boulangeries frequently do punnets of salad, too. The average lunch voucher will buy a sandwich, a cake and a drink. And half the customers will take mineral water as the drink.

  So yes, like all the developed nations, the French are getting fatter. But they are doing
so less quickly, because most of them just aren’t interested in eating processed garbage instead of balanced meals. Simple, really.

  Lie Back and Think of France

  This is not to say that the French don’t go in for stomach-blastingly big meals. A family Sunday lunch can easily last from one o’clock till four. And if you’re invited to dinner in some parts of France – Auvergne, say, where the food is rich and fatty, based on pork and creamy cheeses – you’ll have to be rolled home afterwards in a wheelbarrow.

  I was once invited to the launch of a cookbook by a Parisian chef. He sat ten of us down to the biggest lunch I’ve ever eaten. Some of the dishes we ate have been erased from my memory (though probably not from my liver) but I do remember a thick steak of seared tuna, a slice of grilled foie gras, a pan-fried magret de canard (fillet of duck), truffle risotto, a dessert involving fresh raspberries, slices of dark chocolate and real gold leaf, a billiard-table-sized cheese trolley and lots of aperitify nibbles and coffee cakes. All this plus at least three sorts of wine and a tongue-burning digestif. I didn’t try everything because I don’t eat meat, but even so I had to go and lie down for what was left of the daylight to digest it all. And I – like most of the other guests, I expect – skipped dinner and the following day’s breakfast and lunch to recover.

  The French have a word for this Epicureanism that can’t be translated into English – gourmandise. Some dictionaries have it as ‘gluttony’, but that’s wrong, because gluttony is a negative thing, whereas gourmandise is a healthily sensual desire for the taste and texture of food. A gourmandise is another word for a treat, and the word can also be applied to sexual appetite.

  The French sometimes overindulge their gourmandise and get a bout of severe indigestion, but if they do, they call it a crise de foie, a ‘liver crisis’. It’s not their fault, they haven’t really eaten too much, it’s just that their liver is having a bit of a nervous breakdown.