Be French and Feel Fabulous!
Written by Shazia Islam
Summer is finally here in the big T.O., and there’s no shortage of things to see and do. From flamboyant festivals to flashy fireworks, from beach volleyball to beach babe watch, from mouth-watering barbecues to thirst-quenching beer gardens, from amusing stage shows to foot-stomping music shows, really, the choices are endless. But with all the entertainment and recreation, come the scents of summer as well, wafting through your open door, from hot dog vendors, ice-cream trucks, barbecue grills, and popcorn stands. It’s yet another season when staying fit poses a challenge. It shouldn’t be that hard since outdoor recreation usually experiences a peak during the summer months, with gleeful participants soaking up the warm rays of the sun. Not just that, but people tend to eat lighter meals when the temperature’s hot, substituting a dish of curry rice for a Mediterranean salad. No one wants hot curry sitting in their tummy while they walk in the sweltering heat of the city, though hot curry’s hard to resist, especially when the meal comes with naan and masala chai. Basically, when we’ve got just as much food choices as we have things to do in this city - T.O. is not just your ordinary urban sprawl - it’s not easy to pass up a gastronomic side of home-cooked fries for the sake of staying trim.
What’s so great about staying trim? Well, we all know that the summer gives us the chance to expose ourselves to the world. After an unbearably long winter spent buried underneath layers of itchy fabric, our skin is screaming for some air. Whether it’s a bare chest or midriff, a six-pack or a washboard tummy, a nicely toned physique or sculpted musculature, you know the saying, if you’ve got it, flaunt it! Sure that might come easy for the genetically-gifted, but for most of us, it’s a long hard struggle to keep the weight off in order to have that moment when the admiring gaze of passers-by heats us up more than the sun. Is there an easier way to feel good about our bodies without having to exercise 24-7, engage in ass warfare at the gym, and deny ourselves the foods we love? What if there actually was a way to do just that?
Do you want to know how the French do it?
French cuisine. One of the best the world has to offer. Typical French dishes include Steak Frites, a nice combination of meat n’ potatoes, Coq au Vin, rooster cooked in wine, lardons (strips of fatty bacon), mushrooms, and garlic. The most popular and the most controversial French dish is Foie Gras, duck or goose liver that has been fattened by a process called ‘gavage’ in which the bird is force fed a few weeks before slaughter. The taste is described as rich and buttery. For strict vegetarians, try Potatoes Anna, a dish of sliced and layered potatoes cooked with a devilishly large amount of butter. Speaking of butter, who can resist Crème Brûlée, burnt cream, a rich custard with a layer of hard caramel. Éclairs, these long, thin pastries filled with cream and topped with icing are more fresh and flavourful than the ones you get at a fast food joint or in a box at a mega supermarket. Also, Milles-feuilles, which literally means a thousand sheets, is a dessert of orgasmic proportions constructed of several layers of puff pastry with a sweet filling of cream or jam in between each layer. It’s topped off with the characteristic wavy pattern of the white/chocolate icing. Crêpes are world-famous and have taken on various different forms to suit the culture. They are made of wheat flour, eggs, milk, salt, and butter, bien sûr! And what would a good French meal be without fresh wholesome bread, fresh out of the oven at the local boulangerie? French bakers usually bake their bread at least three times a day and sell the bread unwrapped to keep the crust nice and crispy. Baguettes, croissants, hazelnut bread, olive bread, and rolls, you name it, the French love their bread, and serving a meal without a basket of fresh bread and creamy butter might be considered a faux pas, as it is an inherent trait of French culture.
As for wine, yeah, the French love it. Sorry, that’s a bit of an understatement there, but what more can be said? Heck, even kids get to take part in this tradition at an early age, learning to develop their taste buds for good wine with a sip here and a sip there. Not exactly like a typical North American kid clamoring for a processed vanilla cone from the ice-cream truck dude! But if you’re not an avid wine drinker and would much rather reach for a sugary cooler or belly ‘enhancing’ beer, here’s something to motivate you to try some of the red stuff. Wine is full of nutrients and antioxidants. It’s known to lower blood pressure and keep your cholesterol levels at bay. Drinkers of fine wine tend to have a lower incidence of heart disease. Now this is if you drink in moderation, a glass or two everyday, rather than binge drink on the weekends the way we North Americans binge eat.
So, if you noticed, the French sure eat an awful lot of buttery dishes, and they drink wine like fish, and eat bread like there’s no tomorrow! BUT, they sure look damn good in a nicely tailored suit or a little black dress. They’ve got style, sex appeal, and elegance down to an art. In fact, everything is an art for the French. Every movement, every bite, every sip has intention. Perhaps this is what makes French women so irresistible, as Mireille Guiliano points out in her book “French Women Don’t Get Fat”. It tells the tale of Mireille’s experience as an exchange student in America, and how she gained a hefty 20 lbs and returned to France overweight. In order to get back to her former trim self, Mireille had to re-acquaint herself with the ways of French womanhood, which is all about elégance suprême. She managed to get back into shape, and then wrote a book about it, advocating all things French, even listing at the end of the book what French women do and don’t do, as a way of setting them apart from their American counterparts. Hmmm…a bit of arrogance there, non? But perhaps the French have something to be arrogant about. They have culture, tradition, good taste, good etiquette, a way of life that celebrates the natural senses, a way of life that slows everything down so the things we in our fast-paced North American lifestyle take for granted are actually savoured and appreciated. Mireille’s book contains scores of delicious French recipes that are fairly easy to prepare and that keep your taste buds stimulated.
That’s the key to looking and feeling good, you see. The French don’t care about losing weight or even worry about staying trim. Long-term healthy living is built into their system. Yes, they eat the carbs, the meat, the butter, the rich desserts, and drink the drink, but they consume with pleasure, not with fear and doubt. Les Francaises mangeons tout, mais mangeons lentement et avec petite partie de nourriture – the French eat everything, but eat slowly and with small portions. North Americans tend to gorge, and we like to horde our supermarket purchases too. The French, on the other hand, like to keep it simple, and pay a visit to the local market every two or three days to get everything fresh to be used for the next day or two. They eat in small quantities, and if you’re a French woman, you never have a second helping. Less is more. Yes, less is more because our taste buds really feel the infusion of flavour, as each bite is relished, forks put down in between the chewing to engage in artful conversation about philosophy and the state of the world. Afterwards, we walk, and we walk a lot, on the sidewalks, up the stairs, to the markets, and we walk with a lightness in our step because our stomachs are not filled to overflowing, but filled with just enough to get us through the next few hours until it’s time for the next engaging repas – meal.
What’s wrong with the way North Americans view food? Lots. Forget about the love-hate relationship, it’s more about guilt, our past childhoods, non-stop treadmill fitness, constant exposure to beauty myth babble, so-called ‘experts’ telling us to eat this and avoid that. Forget about our food addictions, it’s more like psycho weight obsession. Glenn Close cooked the poor pet rabbit in “Fatal Attraction”, but what really should have been cooked was the billion-dollar weight loss industry which profits from our I-hate-being-fat issues. Yes, we eat a heck a lot of junk, and the food industry really needs to clean up its act and stop throwing in all the artificial flavourings that make our senses lazy and give us quick fixes instead of a truly incredible gastronomic-friendly experience. Then again, we as consumers need to make the right choices about the stuff we put into our bodies. Anything that’s been packaged has been processed. Anything’s that’s been picked up on the go is suspect because no matter what the peeps at Tim Horton’s and McDonald’s say, you can’t be “lovin’” something you scarfed down in the five minutes before the nine-to-fiver begins. Forget about the taste, how about even chewing the garbage you just swallowed whole? We get to work feeling no less tired. After work, we go to the gym to do the daily exercise routine to exorcise all the guilty fat from our conscience. We realize afterwards that it all tasted like plastic as we sit down to mindlessly munch on our micro-waved TV dinner in time for the next episode of “So You Think You Can Dance” to remind ourselves of just how mediocre our lives are.
America, the paragon of egalitarian values, somehow suffers from a gastronomic class system unknown in France. The right and the opportunity to enjoy the earth’s seasonal best seems to be monopolized by an elite…the great majority of Americans are conditioned to demand and accept bland, processed, chemically treated, generally unnatural foods, which through packaging and marketing have been made to seem wholesome (Guiliano, 76)
Where’s the real food?
The above, of course, is a gross generalization of Canadian and American food culture. I’m sure many of us have engaged in purifying our systems of all the filth and excess wrought by a culture of convenience. Still, that cleansing is often based on fear, avoidance, expectations, fitting into a size 00, looking thin and sexy – the two appear to be synonymous according to our standards – and being ‘health-conscious’. Well, how do we feel “healthy” when we are so paranoid about the damage that one gram of fat might do to our bodies? Yes, bad fat damages in the long run, but good fat is good fat, and in the long run, we really shouldn’t be thinking about fat anyway, more like, how do we stop war and create more peace or how do we make sure everyone gets a share of the pie.
If it’s about feeling sexy, and getting ‘the look’, it won’t happen through denial. It’ll happen through blanket acceptance of who you are, first and foremost, and the fact that the layers of whatever you have, whether it be fat or past trauma, chemicals or stress, guilt or shame, can all be wiped out in a single stroke of self-love. Yes, love yourself as the French love themselves and their food and culture. Sex appeal is not in actual physical beauty, but in the way you carry yourself. And we carry ourselves well when we feel good about what we’ve put into our bodies, when our bodies have received the proper nourishment. We can taste plenty, but should eat less because there’s always more the next day. We just have to remind ourselves that people on the streets or living in the third world aren’t so lucky. They’re fed undercooked, watery rice or a bowl of soup whenever charity is fashionable and can be sold at a price. But choices abound for the privileged among us and so, we ought to count our blessings. The French count their blessings in every mouthful they take, every sip they make. There is the underlying belief that there is no moment like the present. And even if the future looks dim, at least they savoured the moment like they savoured that one perfect bite.
Copyright © 2008 Shazia Islam. All Rights Reserved.
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