Passionate eating

In the land of plenty many are starving for a raw, more sensual experience of pleasure in food, which may explain why eating features so prominently in the Anglo-Saxon experience overseas. In his book "Toujours Provence," Peter Mayle asks us: "It is impossible to live in France for any length of time and stay immune from the national enthusiasm for food, and who would want to? Why not make a daily pleasure out of a daily necessity?"

The journalist A.J. Liebling put it differently in his book "Between Meals": "If I had compared my life to a cake, the sojourns in Paris would have presented the chocolate filling. The intervening layers were plain sponge." Indeed, nowhere has a culture of epicurism reached such celestial heights as in France, where for centuries cuisine has bequeathed itself to successive generations and defined an entire civilization, from its rural heartland to its haute bourgeoisie. France may no longer be an empire, but its food has survived war, famine and colonial ruin. Louis XVI and Napoleon III invented, respectively, the foie gras and the camembert that remain to this day subjects of almost rhapsodic enjoyment.

One might imagine where 20th century literature would be without Proust's high-fat, butter-rich madeleine. Then again, Liebling lamented Proust's prosaic "tea biscuit" and posited: "In light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautied soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece."

When in the lands of pasta and pbti we Americans are compelled to enter the dolce vita, to experience, sometimes for the first time, what Ackerman refers to as the "textures" of life. "We need to return to feeling the textures of life," she says. "Much of our experience in 20th century America is an effort to get away from those textures, to fade into a stark ... puritanical, all-business routine that doesn't have anything so unseemly as sensuous zest."

Sensuous zest, in this context, does not come in a can. It is not sugar-free. It is sometimes positively intoxicating. And it is rarely to go. For Americans, it often means learning to appreciate (or, in some cases, discover) the taste of the real over the artificial. And it invariably means learning how to eat slowly and to savor. The American way of putting everything on one plate and eating simultaneously is overkill in France. Each food is eaten separately, and slowly.

I admit I'm still struggling in this department. "Are you late for a plane?" my French husband asks when I eat. "Slow down," he intones. And I do. Today, after almost eight years of French living, the doors to my gastronomic perception have definitely swung wide open, if not been entirely unhinged. I have learned (but not mastered) the art of savoring meals with a certain singular gourmandise and acuity. I have overcome certain cultural prejudices and indulged in butter-drenched, garlic-roasted frog legs or pesto-stuffed snails, pulling out the little wormlike sod-dwellers with almost exasperating precision using a tiny silver escargot fork.

I have rediscovered familiar foods, their tastes and smells. Even my relationship to the simple and exquisitely versatile tomato has changed. In American supermarkets I am as deeply suspicious of the pristine, queerly odorless, genetically-altered fruit as I am of the one picked, unripe and immature, for our perennial and seasonless sating. In fact, the first fresh-picked, farm-grown French tomato I ever ate was an ugly, misshapen fruit, but its smell alone (not to mention its taste) was so intense it was almost sentient, and it took me back to summer days spent in the rich, pungent soil of Trinity County nearly 30 years ago. "Smell," said Helen Keller, "transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived."

Many of us have literally forgotten how to listen to our gut feelings, and the road from our stomachs to our heads is a rocky one reeling in the "revolutions" of free market fads and special interests. It takes hundreds of reports, from the likes of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the Life Sciences Institute, to confirm for Americans what Europeans have known for centuries. We're talking shamefully basic common sense: A daily glass of wine is actually good for you (and even OK when you're pregnant). Natural fresh foods are better than processed foods. Carbohydrates don't make you fat; overeating them does. So does snacking. Everything is OK in moderation.

All this implies that there are limits to things, and limits, like taxes or unprocessed cheese, are something most Americans are very uncomfortable with. Choice is our birthright. We'd rather have, say, 20 varieties of all-you-can-eat, nonfat, sugar-free, dairy-free ice cream and eat it whenever we want, than the thick, creamy, luscious real thing for one after-dinner pleasure.

"You Americans are too busy making a living to have a life," a French friend of mine once said. Gene Ford, author of "The French Paradox," laid out a different perspective: "Despite all our billions spent on health care, and the sweat and self denial, and the bland health food diets, we still die younger. And some would say that at the end of this journey, we didn't enjoy the scenery nearly as much as the average French peasant."

In other words, for those of us who choose to keep pumping the proverbial treadmill, it may be too late to live with sensuous zest by the time we end up, lean and mean, on our deathbed. Then again, maybe not.

As Oliver Wendall Holmes once said, "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris."

• View blog reactions