Just off a bustling street near her apartment in Paris, Mathilde Touvier, one of France’s leading nutrition scientists, slips into Picard, the frozen-food grocery chain. Ms. Touvier beelines for the back, where freezers brim with bags and boxes of prechopped raw vegetables.
She plucks out a bag of onions. “If you cut all these by yourself,” she says, “you would cry. And it takes a lot of time.” At home, she regularly melts Picard’s onions, along with its frozen garlic and diced parsley, in olive oil for a fast tomato sauce to serve with whole wheat pasta or homemade pizza (using organic, ready-made dough purchased at a nearby supermarket). Ms. Touvier, a working mother of two, says it’s all about “the gain of time.”
Before there were MAHA moms and trad wives boasting homemade bread and feta on social media, there was a societal push to get Americans back into the kitchen. Cooking was framed as resistance to corporations peddling ultraprocessed fare that Michael Pollan notoriously called “edible food-like substances.” The promise was sweeping: “Cooking Solves Everything,” as Mark Bittman titled his 2011 book. By buying and preparing farm-fresh food, Americans could reclaim their health and repair the food system. Today, Make America Healthy Again leaders have, at least in rhetoric, picked up where that movement left off, railing against ultraprocessed foods and touting “MAHA boxes” of fresh produce to be shipped nationwide.
All this overlooks a key fact: The burden of food procurement and cooking is still shouldered overwhelmingly by women, most of whom now also work outside the home. Asking people to cook more is usually asking women to cook more. Even in households that want to make every meal from scratch, the hours — planning, buying, cleaning, not to mention the actual cooking — simply aren’t there.
Parisians like Ms. Touvier have come to embrace a middle path. As is the case in America, companies in France have been marketing convenience foods to women for decades as liberation from kitchen drudgery. Also as in America, France has been grappling with rising rates of chronic diseases, such as obesity. But in France, where I’ve been living for nearly two years, federal and local governments acted decisively.
Among other things, Paris went to great lengths to preserve its fresh food market tradition — fruit and vegetable stands, fishmongers, butchers, fromageries — and improve the nutrition of school lunches. A prepared food sector also has proliferated alongside dual-income families, with ready-made food shops and brands like Picard offering consumers healthier alternatives to ultraprocessed junk. (The company, which has more than 1,100 stores across France, made an appearance on “Emily in Paris.”) I expected the open-air markets, but defrosted bouillabaisse and canned ratatouille weren’t what I imagined to be staples of Parisian culinary life. Yet they’ve become mainstays.
There’s no shortage of calorie-dense culinary delights, patisseries and junk food here, including at Picard. But healthy convenience is also prominent. Ms. Touvier, a critic of ultraprocessed foods, says her lab employees are 70 percent women, many of them mothers, and that she views healthier prepared foods as “part of the solution” for busy families.
French people cook more than Americans, but the country has made it easier for them to do so quickly and nutritiously. This was a conscious effort, says Serge Hercberg, an epidemiologist and former president of France’s nutrition and health program. “Until 2000, people were absolutely not aware in France about the consequences of food consumption on health,” he said. The “French paradox,” the now contested idea that France has a lower rate of coronary heart disease death despite a saturated-fat-rich diet, was widespread. Mr. Hercberg was accused of going against his culture for suggesting charcuterie and cheese were anything but delicious.
He and his colleagues soldiered through years of food industry pushback with a campaign to clean up the French food environment and slow the rise of diet-related ailments like obesity and diabetes. They lobbied successfully for soda taxes and started ad campaigns about the health benefits of fruits and vegetables (emphasizing frozen and canned food as good options). Along with Ms. Touvier, they developed Nutri-Score, a voluntary system of front-of-package nutrition labels now used in a handful of other European countries. Packaged products feature a colored scale — green A to a dark orange E, depending on how much salt, sugar, saturated fat and calories they contain, as well as how many healthy elements, such as fruits, vegetables, proteins and fiber, they include.
Over 1,400 brands have now adopted Nutri-Score, covering 62 percent of the French food market. The program inspired companies to reformulate their products for better ratings and “helped spur consumer demand for healthy convenience products,” said Mr. Hercberg. Notably, low-income areas still have fewer healthy options.
Paris embraced the “15-minute city” ideal — that everyone should be able to reach life’s essentials within a short walk or bike ride. To make that possible, the city leases spaces to local food purveyors — “the reason there’s a bakery every five minutes,” explained Carlos Moreno, a University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne professor who developed the idea. In 2021 it began financially supporting sustainable food shops, from organic caterers to small cheese factories, including stores situated in social-housing buildings. Urban planning regulations in Paris impede the construction of large supermarkets, helping preserve the city’s open-air-market tradition. Every district is encouraged to host fresh produce markets each week. And a deputy mayor is charged with creating a healthy, sustainable food environment, alongside a broader billion-euro effort to ensure that local farmland feeds the city.
By 2012, as Michelle Obama was struggling as first lady to get traction for her Let’s Move campaign to reduce childhood obesity in the United States, France had already banned vending machines in schools. Today, Paris strives to serve children mostly organic lunches low in added salt, sugar and fat, including vegetarian meals every week. The city is working to ensure that as many of the ingredients as possible are locally and sustainably sourced, and all plastics — from single-use cutlery to food containers — are being phased out. The lunch period is also meant to instill French values of food appreciation and culture. Children are supposed to sit for three or four courses.
The result: The French spend more time cooking, eating and dare I say enjoying their food as Americans. Obesity rates are still too high, but they’ve increased far more gradually than in America. France has one of the lowest obesity rates in Western Europe. Seventeen percent of adults had obesity in 2020 — the most recent available data — and in the province that’s home to Paris, the rate is even lower (14 percent). In the United States, the adult obesity rate is nearly 40 percent. Roughly a quarter of French people report meeting the national dietary guidelines for fruit and vegetable consumption. In America, the number hovers around 10 percent.
France’s relatively low obesity rate and higher propensity for cooking and eating well are not accidents of history. They were carefully fostered by policy and regulation. When Americans visit Paris and marvel at how svelte people are, it’s not because the Parisians have superior willpower. They are objects of their environment, just as Americans are objects of theirs.
Americans are set up for sickness. The U.S. government has done relatively little to improve access to affordable healthy food and minimize junk. Ms. Obama’s Let’s Move campaign faced enormous backlash from Republicans. Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, says he wants to banish chronic disease, but he’s so far succeeding only in incremental steps, like having some junk food companies agree to swap artificial food dyes for natural ones, or granting waivers to states to restrict SNAP recipients from using their benefits to buy unhealthy products.
To really change how people eat, the United States needs to pull every lever it can to dramatically improve the food environment. Healthy foods must be more available, accessible and convenient. With more adults, and especially women, working outside the home, food policy needs to make nutritious meals more appealing and easier to eat. That includes making fresh produce more accessible, as well as healthier prepared and frozen food.
Researchers have shown that making pizza more nutritious — with real tomato sauce and less saturated fat and sodium — could meaningfully improve public health. The demand for healthier prepared foods can be cultivated, as it was in France, by allowing SNAP benefits to cover nutritious hot meals, or giving tax breaks to supermarkets that sell healthier fare. At the same time, nutritionally bankrupt junk must be labeled, taxed and minimized everywhere. Maybe then we could all eat more like the Parisians: cooking when we can and want to, savoring our food and, when we’re pressed for time, grabbing a frozen vegetable stew or a rotisserie chicken on the way home from work.
Julia Belluz is a contributing Opinion writer and a co-author of the book “Food Intelligence.”
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