Why it's rude to diet in public
Recently, after a trip to France, I was inspired to have a dinner party. I visited the farmer's market and made a simple but, if I may say so, rather scrumptious meal: bruschetta with roasted red peppers, insalata caprese with buffalo mozzarella, basil, garden tomatoes, and boutique olive oil; barbecued chicken; fresh corn; green salad; finished off with some young strawberries drenched in limoncello, a lemon liquore from Southern Italy. Plus a few bottles of Pinot Grigio. Then espresso. This was a meal few people could complain about.
But they did. Of the four women there, not one of them could eat the entire meal with the pleasure I had hoped to offer them by cooking it. One was on the protein diet (the one that insists you will lose weight "healthfully" by eating bacon and peanut butter for breakfast). She ate only the mozzarella out of the salad, said the bruschetta looked so good she was mad she couldn't have them (practically mad at me for serving them), and wondered aloud whether it was okay for her chicken to have marinade on it. Another was on a blood-type diet, where you eliminate whole categories of food, like wheat or dairy, depending on whether you're O-negative or AB (I'm not joking). She ate everything but the mozzarella in her salad, could only have dark meat when I'd only made breasts, and asked if there weren't some strawberries left that weren't drenched in that terribly high-sugar limoncello. Another ate only the green salad, made a production out of taking the skin off the chicken, and mentioned that corn is really a starch, not a vegetable; she did manage, however, polish off a bottle of wine herself. The last couldn't eat the red peppers on the bruschetta or tomatoes--no nightshade vegetables!--and tried sopping up all the olive oil in what was left of her tomato salad with her cloth napkin.
I was miffed. If it weren't for the men at the table, who, god bless them, ate everything with gusto, complimented the cook, and asked for more, like decent human beings, I would have been near tears. These women, friends who are usually kind and considerate, had almost ruined my dinner party with their selfish needs. They viewed their complaints and requests as taking care of themselves and having willpower, but it was more like proving to themselves and everyone at the table (as if we cared) that they were sticking to some moral, skinnier-than-thou diet regime. I won't invite a single one back until they go off their damned diets.
In the United States, we view eating as an individual act, not a social one. We design our days' eating in order to maximize whatever health advice the latest women's magazines have scolded us with, and to address our personal physical problems, real or imagined. What we eat becomes as highly personal an expression of our personalities as how we dress. We can no longer sit down and eat a good meal with friends without inflicting our food neuroses and diet-of-the-week on them, forgetting that the point of the meal is not calculated nourishment, but rather, a good time.
There are, of course, some things that some people simply can't eat. I have heard of real food allergies and intolerances, though I have never met anyone who actually had one. These people usually call the host before the party to explain--"I go into anaphylactic shock around peanuts"--which gives her a chance to change the Thai chicken in peanut sauce to lamb medallions, so everyone's happy, including her. Others make subtle choices at the table without calling attention to themselves. Diabetics usually manage to handle their serious food needs without making it obvious or making anyone else uncomfortable. Dieters could take a cue from them: How many diabetics announce at the dinner table that if they eat such-and-such, they'll have to go adjust their insulin? For some reason, in our country, it's consider a private matter to be diabetic, and a public matter to be on a diet.
Dieting in public is a pet peeve of the French. They understand that preparing a meal is more than just shoving a variety of foods in front of people, hoping there's something they'll eat, as you do with a child. They believe that announcing your dislike of a food or your inability to eat it at the table is completely gauche. They realize that making a meal is an art. You serve it in a certain order and style to orchestrate a pleasurable evening, titillating the senses, satisfying them, and creating an atmosphere for good conversation. Not only does dieting destroy the pace and the pleasure of a meal, it ruins the discussion. You never get any farther than talking about what people can and cannot eat and why, and even how much weight they've lost this time around. Deadly.
When I was in Paris recently, I talked with some French women about how American women diet. Paule Caillet, a petite cooking school teacher who was herself trying to lose a few kilos--slowly, she said, by avoiding bread and pastries at home--said no one she knows would ever mention being on a diet at the table. "French women might starve themselves at home to lose a few kilos, but when they go out, it's considered rude to be different from the rest of the group and not share the enjoyment with them," she said.
Muriel Pourchet, a 50-year-old handwriting analyst, told me it mortifies her to go out to eat with American women. "I have very good friends that I love who are well-educated people, but when I go with them in a restaurant in Paris, I'm ashamed every time," she said. "They're polite, they say please, but they never want a meal the way it's served, and they call the server over ten times to ask things that French people would never dare ask--Dressing on the side! No ice cubes! No sauce! No butter." Pourchet said that French women who are watching their weight avoid foods discreetly at the table without making the host uncomfortable. "You say yes to wine, leave it, and they don't ask again. You say yes the first time to bread, put it in front of you, and you leave it. There are little tricks that make you comfortable and the person next to you is not going to make it a subject of conversation. We never mention eating less." These days, said Pourchet, it is socially acceptable for women to refuse the cheese course, and sometimes dessert. But no one asks about or explains the refusal.
Marie-Anne Fleischer, who recently organized a gourmet tour of Cannes for a group of professional businesswomen from New York, told me she was astounded when these women refused food at the best restaurants in the country--as a point of pride, showing off their willpower. "The better the food and the less they ate, the happier they seemed to be about it," she said. "All they did really was talk about their diet--it was kind of a challenge for them have all these tempting things and to be able to resist what was in front of them." She couldn't believe the extent of their culinary masochism. "Whenever they arrived at a restaurant, they said they couldn't eat sugar, they couldn't eat fat, they couldn't eat meat--they couldn't eat anything basically," Fleischer said. "Finally I understood that they could only eat asparagus and raspberries."
Instead of eating food, Fleischer said, these fashionably-thin women ate vitamins at the restaurants. "They had piles of vitamins on the table that they were taking while the rest of us were eating and enjoying it very much. One vitamin was to replace what was in the meat, another what was in the fat. It was hilarious." Fleischer said she's sure that the women were eating so little that they must have been snacking in the hotel. "For us, it would be the opposite," she says. "If we're getting too fat and have to diet, it's embarrassing, so we will not show it in public. If you're out with friends, you just eat normally. We never nibble between meals." This approach not only results in more pleasure, she says, but French women tend to be thinner than American women (only 7 percent of them are fat, compared to 25 percent of American women) because they eat full, satisfying meals, and don't snack all the time. "My attitude toward food is you have to have it, so it might as well be a very pleasant experience," Fleischer said. "I'm like any French lady --we spend a lot of time at the table, we spend a lot of time discussing what we're going to eat next. And we enjoy it."
Of course, French women are at an advantage. They didn't grow up in a culture that has always been suspicious of women's appetites, ever since the Puritans equated anything stimulating to eat as causing sexual arousal, and any woman who displayed her enthusiasm for food as being obviously less than completely virtuous. Nor do they live in a culture where weight is a sign of character, and dieting, morality. They live in a culture that likes to eat. They understand moderation. They may try to shed a few pounds now and then, but in France, a woman's weight is less important to her overall aura of attractiveness than how she carries herself, dresses, and plays up her flirtatious features. "Most women are concerned about their weight, but it doesn't affect how they feel about themselves," Claire Weyl, an attorney, told me over a 1 1/2-hour lunch break. "We eat with pleasure. We don't feel guilty about what we eat, and we don't feel guilty about our bodies."
Her, I'd like to have over for dinner.
