Eating like French Women

Over the last few weeks, then, I have been trying to live more like a French woman and I am feeling good. It really comes down to eating mindfully - to be in the moment with all your senses. I love how in the book, French Women Don't Get Fat, the author describes the process of eating from going to the market (which French women do every 2 or 3 days) to select the ingredients right to the presentation of the food on a beautifully made up table. 

For the last while I have been buying an organic vegetable box from a project, Harvest of Hope, that supports people in the township. It was quite a mindset change to be presented with vegetables which were in season and to learn what to do with what was in the box. I was forced to look up recipes in which I could use the vegetables that I did not normally use; this in itself was a learning curve. We so easily take over-wrapped fruit and vegetables off the shelf with little regard to whether or not they are in season, have been in cold-storage or have created huge carbon footprints by being imported from New Zealand or Norway. 

I bought a vegetable brush and to the strains of Edith Piaf (well, sometimes, when my daughter is indulging her French appetite) scrub the veggies and make pots of soup or sauces for pasta, or simply roast veggies. I now look forward  to the challenge of unpacking the box  and thinking up a recipe for the week's yield.

To come back to French women, putting your food on a plate and sitting at the table makes food a conscious occasion. When you eat in front of the television or on the run (as I sometimes do), you lose focus and fail to register when you have had enough. It takes a little bit more effort and planning to get everyone in the same place at the same time but sitting at the table allows us to catch up with each other at the end of a busy day and it certainly has been a pleasure.

• French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano

Our complicated relationship with .... Food

Towards the end of last year I was completely fed up with my body - it seemed hell-bent on doing its own thing, in spite of me eating healthily, doing regular yoga, walking (OK, maybe not so regularly). So I did what I usually do - I bought a book. 

Women, Food and God jumped out at me off the shelf. The blurb at the back promised to "reveal how our relationship with food is the doorway to freedom and what we want most: the demystification of weight loss and the luminous presence that so many of us call 'God'" - quite a claim, but I was interested to see what she had to say especially since I have this ongoing quest to define spirituality and religion. I did not encounter any new revelations and felt that the book was directed at people with more complicated relationships with food than I have. But it did remind me of another book which I had read cover-to-cover about two years ago, French Women Don't Get Fat.

I had taken that book on holiday to Mauritius and devoured it while lounging in the sunshine at the edge of the Indian Ocean. Periodically, I read out the bits which we were going to implement at home,  to my husband. We enthusiastically, in the idyllic environment of having someone cook for us every hour, embraced the principles. To our credit, I must say that we carried on eating like French women for a good while back home before the rat race intruded more forcefully.

Anyway, I hauled it out to read again and everything makes as much sense now (away from the sun and the ocean) as it did then. This book is written by a French woman who spent an exchange year in the US as a teenager and returned home "looking like a sack of potatoes", to quote her shocked father when he picked her up at the airport on her return. It describes the lifestyle of the French and eating for pleasure, yet staying healthy. It makes good sense.

I am also coming to the end of another book which deals with similar issues (interesting how books become magnets for other books) - When Hungry, Eat. I enjoyed the insight into the process of what makes you leave the country of your birth and all that is familiar, to settle in a new country. I also enjoyed her writing about the time before and immediately after democracy. As far as eating goes, I did not feel that I gained any major new insights. 

All three books in different ways, highlight how our relationship with food is tied up with beliefs, culture, comfort, pleasure and control. How many of us remember not being allowed to leave the table until our plates were empty? At the end of the day, like so much else in life, it comes down to finding the balance. It is a sobering thought that humans are the only animals that eat when they are not hungry. 

• Women Food and God by Geneen Roth
• French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano
• When Hungry, Eat by Joanne Fedler