If you are lucky enough to have eaten well in France

alex hoskins | 30 décembre 2010 | 13 h 44 min

To friends and fellow food-lovers, from here and the world over

Having been added to UNESCO’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage” protection list, French cuisine is widely regarded as being at the apex of gastronomic grace and style. What’s more, we feel part of it here: this is a heritage we can order, eat and drink; we can steal time from busy lives to share it with our loved ones.

It is odd to think of French cuisine as being in any danger of disappearing. Naturally we associate the expense of fine cooking as being necessary to the production and service of a high-quality meal! Not with high-sodium, factory-produced ready meals designed to dupe our stomachs and empty our wallets. Yet restaurants producing good, fresh, home-made food from from scratch are steadily disappearing, skilled chefs and waiters replaced with slave-wage automatons, small restaurateurs forced into closing their restaurants.

We should choose restaurants who pay and treat their employees well, who source locally and as bio-organically as possible and who reinvest profits to better the service to their customers. Before you sit down at a restaurant, ask if their meals are entirely home made and prepared from fresh produce*. Keep in mind, 80% of restaurants use industrial, factory-produced meals.

There is plenty we can do alongside our hosts about the perilous state of French cuisine today. Avoid being duped by what’s served to you on a plate: sign up to vegr.fr now and find out more about what you can do to support [the restoration of] real cuisine in France. This is the country of 260 cheeses and around 27,000 wineries! It’s a global fight to protect a global heritage that belongs to us all. The moment you set foot in this country and carry away with you memories of shared moments over dinner, and when you rekindle those memories by visiting French restaurants at home, that heritage is part of you and belongs to you. Make no mistake about it: this is your fight too.

Alex Hoskins
Subscriber and collaborator, vegr.fr

*Est-ce-que ce plat est cuisiné sur place à base de produits bruts et frais?

Texte en couverture des menus des restaurants Les Philosophes, La chaise au plafond et du Petit fer à cheval à Paris 4