No, I am not talking about the ubiquitous MacDo, where the car parks are never empty and the clients never full, but about French eating habits.

French supermarkets have never mastered the idea of matching open tills to number of customers waiting in line so there is leisure to clock the contents of other peoples’ trolleys while the lady currently being served twenty ahead of you is busy extracting her purse from underneath the shopping she has neatly packed on top of it and the other nineteen are busy putting their purses in the bottom of their bags in readiness.

The trolleys will be laden with ready prepared food, packets of biscuits, and those abominable bags of ready prepared salad leaves, washed in chlorine to remove the bugs acquired during the production process. Fast food seems to have taken over.

I am not convinced that ‘fast’ food is fast at all. It always seems to me to involve heating an oven for twenty minutes before proceeding, if not using the microwave at the same time for the combination meals, while extracting the offering from its’ packaging takes nearly as much time as heating the oven. Further, it is my view that the endless layers serve to reduce expectations roused by the styled food shown on the outer layer…by the time you are down to the actual object you have bought, your expectations are down to zero and can only rise on eating the product. Very clever psychology, that.

Should I judge French eating habits on the basis of visits to the supermarkets? What about the weekly markets and the specialist shops?

Well, what else is charcuterie but fast food? Otherwise the ladies who need all morning to extract themselves from the dressing gown and slippers and insert themselves into the neat little suit without which they cannot be seen in public would never be able to shop at eleven forty five and put lunch on the table at twelve thirty…husband chomping through the slices of pate de campagne or jambon persille while she dishes up the pork chop or the sausage with lentils.

What is faster than oysters? Unless you have to go to hospital half way through opening them for the ‘oyster knife through palm of hand’ syndrome. Then mussels would be a better bet. They open themselves.

Black pudding cooked Didier’s way….split open, the contents spread on bread, then put under the grill…..you have not lived!

No, France has always had fast food….it is just that it used to be edible.

Courtesy of  Real France Blog

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