Pollan and Berry continually reference the “French Paradox” that some cultures (particularly European) manage to eat terribly by all nutritional accounts but are still skinnier, happier and healthier than Americans. As Pollan pointed out in our reading for last week, this is due primarily to their food culture and ingrained habits.

I have experienced my own personal morsel of French culture and I can validate these claims easily. French people eat modest portions, there is no such thing as seconds, and they take their time with their meals. The art of dinner conversation, family values and post and pre-meal games are all emphasised and circle around the ritual of eating. Snacking is infrequent and in general they pay far less attention to food on the whole than we do. So we can take what we want and try and learn from these cultures, but we must face our own identity as Mr. Schlosser does in Fast Food Nation. We can throw up our hands and say, “Why can’t we just be more like the French?! What’s their secret?!” But the real question is, “Why are we the way we are?”

We are a nation heavily franchised and monocultured. I love the word monoculture in this context because though it has agricultural significance it can also be read on the level of consumer culture and food culture. The strip-malling and franchising of almost every industry on the market is now stitched into the fabric of the American identity. Food is central to this. We truly are what we eat and everything we eat is the same. And we like it that way.

Back to the French. When I went to France for a month, I visited the Bayeux Tapestry, commissioned in the 1070’s, and the Notre Dame Cathedral, which began construction in 1163. The French culture is so old it has fermented like their wine into something that is so part of them they aren’t even aware. Their cultural tradition is so old it inhabits every moment of their lives and every instance of their interaction with the world. This is at once beneficial and limiting. The French may benefit from age-old dietary habits that work for them very well, but it makes them inherently uncreative and intolerant in some cases (I don’t want to generalize or insult!).

Compare this to our country. In my hometown of Beverly, MA, you can remnants of some of the oldest communities of Europeans on this land. I can walk to houses that were originally built in the 1630s. But on the scale of William the Conqueror and Gothic architecture, these houses are infantile. These cultural fabrics do not weave themselves and they take hundreds of years to take shape. American culture is infantile, and it is vulnerable. With no other historical cuisine to draw from hundreds of years of habits, we are forced to take the hamburger and suffer the consequences while the rest of the world admires our daring indulgence and individuality, originality.

Schlosser mentions the young children who were first marketed to by the fast food industry in evil, agressive fashion. America as a country is the small child who did not know better than the older, wiser and better established cultures. We will pay in heart disease, diabetes and growing income inequality and if the United States can make it much further, maybe develop and redefine a more productive and prosperous food culture. But until then, our earth and children suffer.