There’s an etiquette to eating in France, which includes when you shouldn’t eat.
“Mum, the family I’m staying with doesn’t snack,” my adolescent daughter told me, aghast. “I mean, there’s no snacks in the house,” she repeated for emphasis. “I’m starving”.
She was calling me, funnily enough, from Aix in Provence, several days into her three- week sojourn in late Spring on a student exchange programme in this beautiful region. The host’s delightful daughter had come to stay with us before I’d sent my teen to France to experience a different French lycée, home life and daily habits in a place I was more than passingly familiar with.
“Well, you know I think no snacking’s actually a good thing,” I told my daughter, admiring the French proclivity for eating only at meals. I didn’t mind an after-school munch on fruit or home-made stuff – but filling up on processed fare was another thing and all but impossible to curb outside the house. A common bone of contention in our household was the “I’m not hungry” lament at dinner, due entirely to a snack-full stomach.
Of course it helped that the house of her lovely exchange friend was in the middle of gorgeous nowhere in Aix in Provence, not like our apartment, a few minutes away from a supermarket.
“The fact that there’s no snacking,” I told my daughter, “means you’ll be really hungry for dinner, which is no bad thing.”
“But mum, they eat way less than we do at meals, I mean the portions are smaller. I’m still hungry afterwards.”
That’s interesting I thought, cue for a chat about culinary differences and adaptation. Then some practical advice:
“Just make sure you eat a good lunch.”
“Yeah, I try to. At the school break a whole group of us usually go to Monoprix, this hypermarket near our lycée in the centre of Aix. I’m the only one who buys a big lunch box with a nice salad, some biscuits and bread sticks.
“What do all the other girls get?
“They just buy some grated carrots.”
“Seriously, that’s their lunch”?
“Yup. I’m not joking.”
“Why do you think that is – that they don’t eat more?”
“I think they’re all kind of worried about their weight. They’re all pretty thin. I don’t know how they function on so little. I can’t.”
When I heard those last words I was relieved. Food + social pressure = body image = self-esteem was one influence I didn’t want to rub off on her. Education was the name of the game in this perilous domain. I’d been quasi-religious about not mentioning body weight or size to my daughters, always emphasizing nutritious eating for good health.
Our conversation brought back the very words I’d authored in my novel, X in Provence.
“The female standard around here was trim and slim. Being overweight, even slightly, was dissed.”
It was a facet of the French female body paradigm whose existence I never expected to be confirmed by my teenage daughter.