Champagne and cheese make you thin but insufferable
by Kate Zimmerman for City Palate, Back Burner

Zut, alors. The French are at it again.

No sooner has the antagonism against George Bush begun to wane, and the attendant flurry of freedom fries gone cold in its congealed fat, but a fresh insult has been offered the American public. This time it’s American women that the so-called cheese-eating surrender monkeys are attacking. And strangely enough, those very same U.S. dames are lapping it up.

The whole Franco-American debacle of a couple of years ago, as you know, centred on U.S. President Bush’s insistence on breaking with the U.N. to invade Iraq on a flimsy pretext. This properly appalled French politicians, who made their disgust known as only they can do: through shrugging and sneering biathlons. Naturally, that got American backs up, as nobody is allowed to criticize them, much less people who would rather eat snails than pork rinds.

Things eventually calmed down, but then Mireille Guiliano, the New York-based CEO of Veuve Clicquot, clickety-clacked into the spotlight with her book, French Women Don’t Get Fat.

In it, this accomplished bourgeois madame told the horrifying tale of her student internship in Massachusetts. Sent overseas for a year by her doting parents, she proceeded to discover the wonders of American cuisine — namely, brownies and chocolate chip cookies. When she returned by boat to France 20 lbs. heavier, her father took one look at her and, in a moment of supreme tact, said “You look like a sack of potatoes.”

Wee Mireille was devastated. She began waddling around in giant shifts — which in France, apparently, is a sign that you’re bound for the nunnery. So her mother enlisted the help of a family doctor whom Guiliano calls “Dr. Miracle” to get the teenager back in the game. His plan worked. Guiliano shrunk down to her previous quail-like proportions and has apparently been following his doctrines ever since.

Now she is prepared to share. And while nothing she says in her book — a bestseller — is particularly earth-shattering, it is extremely well-written and winds up being rather inspiring.

I am ashamed to admit this, however. As the New York Times’s Julia Reed put it, this is the sort of book that you want to hurl across the room at the same time as you are memorizing all its advice. Guiliano’s rules are intended for the Frenchwoman wannabe — we may imagine the book is best-suited to the sort of enormous person one sees squeezed into an entire row of seats on any Disney ride, but she probably means you or me. She starts us off with a two-day de-tox using a peculiar-sounding leek soup made only of leeks and water. After that, the routine consists of paring down one’s portions; weighing food servings rather than guessing at their size in the dark with one’s eyes closed (my own technique); going for quality over quantity; making one’s own full-fat yogurt; not eating too much starch; revelling in fruits and vegetables; and taking the stairs rather than the elevator. French women evidently do not work out in gyms — except, perhaps, for a handful of pitiable cretins.

After adjusting our evil ways to the superior manner of the Gauls, Guiliano asserts, we Frenchified types will happily sate ourselves through smaller bits of a greater variety of foods. These will include morsels of cheese and up to two glasses of wine per day — preferably champagne, and even more preferably, Veuve Clicquot.

The North American reader’s desire to throw the book across the room, to which Julia Reed referred, comes from Guiliano’s lofty assumption that the French woman is superior to us in every way. Of course, the fact that she can tie a scarf and we can’t is a cliché at this point. But the French woman also has a joie de vivre that the rest of us can only dream of, Guiliano implies. As an aside, she notes that the Americans don’t even have a term for joie de vivre, which might be true in a literal sense but does ignore such perfectly good words as vitality, exuberance, zest and vivaciousness. (Or gonzo, come to that. Hunter S. Thompson, R.I.P. You are so not French.)

I read French Women Don’t Get Fat in hopes of an interview with Guiliano that never materialized. Among the questions I meant to ask was “Is there anything French women don’t do better than North American women?” I was hoping the answer wasn’t “Yes, operate a deep fryer.”

Here’s the thing, though. Guiliano may say smug, nauseatingly precious things like “French women make sure they have lots of petits riens, those little nothings of daily pleasure that are actually quite something to us.” But the French probably do have the right idea, food-wise. Their native diet appears to be healthy, well-balanced, and realistic in terms of allowing them to taste all life has to offer. And anything that suggests good champagne as a daily ritual ought to be strenuously recommended.

In other words, buy the book … or not. But certainly buy the bubbly.

Writing > Humour