| Reviewed
by Kate Lum
I opened Mireille Guiliano's popular new work, "French
Women Don't Get Fat," with interest, and some
trepidation. I hoped to enter a glamorous world, of women
with great accents and even better wardrobes, miraculously
impervious to American culture, steeped in sensuality and
style. To some extent, I did. Guiliano is a Frenchwoman by
birth but, as the New York-based president of the venerable
champagne producer Clicquot, Inc., she lives in New York
most of the time. In her seasoned opinion, North American
women have lost our sense of delight in eating. Where is
the chocolate? She wonders. Where is the carefully
prepared homemade food? Where is the champagne?
Where, Mon Dieu, are the carbs?
In lieu of our common North American habit of strict self-deprivation,
followed by guilty bingeing, Guiliano suggests a re-focused
attitude. She describes a life of delicate balances: pleasure,
with moderation; lavish meals, with hours of snack-free time;
home cooking, with frequent moderate exercise. She deplores
diets, snacking, fast food, and the self-denigrating mentality
behind many North American women's relationships to
our bodies.
Much of her book is a pleasure to read. She invites us
into the kitchens of her childhood, with recipes, memories,
mouth-watering descriptions of luscious food. She holds forth
on the subject of sensuality: "We have always known," she
asserts, "that one doesn't have to be a great
beauty to seduce, but one does have to be sensual." Women
should be, she says, "bien dans sa peau," comfortable
within our own skins. Besides, she winks, "Sex itself
is a great anti-aging formula with no side effects."
So, is it possible, and is it advisable, for women raised
in North America to graft onto our thinking the ideas of
another culture? My delight in, and concern about, this book
are both embodied in its title: "French Women Don't
Get Fat: The Secret of Eating For Pleasure."
Let us look at the subtitle first. Have North American
women lost a sense of pleasure, of delight, in the process
of eating? Absolutely. Our speed-obsessed culture, with its
thin-obsessed media, its ageism, and its (still) sneakily
punitive ideas about women, contrives to make eating a loaded
business for women here. Eating disorders are rampant, cropping
up in ever-younger girls. Who a culture values, as Naomi
Wolf once noted, it feeds. Many of our self-feeding habits
reflect the ways in which women are still not truly valued
here.
In light of all this, a book which calls, hey! You should
be living! You should be enjoying your body and your food!
is valuable. A book that insists we are mad, if we think
a life without champagne and chocolate is admirable, is deliciously
radical. And yet, maybe not radical enough.
Guiliano's intention is not to challenge the standard
of thinness for women anywhere. Her descriptions of food
are larded, so to speak, with cautionary words. Here I come
back to the main part of the title: "French Women Don't
Get Fat." And we, according to Guiliano, shouldn't
either. With heartbreaking acuity, she recalls her own brief
foray into plumpness in her youth. She recalls a strong sense
of shame, unkind comments, and a family doctor who put her
on the 'right' path. She suggests we all use
his techniques when we find ourselves- horrors! - plump:
two days of leek soup only, followed by no snacks and three
(sensually satisfying) meals per day.
My concern here would be for women, and there are millions,
already struggling with eating disorders: Guiliano does not
put a dent in the belief that thinness is best, and a sign
of true style. She will tell you to emphasize delight, but
delight is hard to manage in the grip of the fear of fat.
She will scoff at the slavery of gyms and workouts, but will
mention that, if you have dessert, you'd better walk
that extra mile.
If I had to choose whether to live in the usual North American
way: obsessing over my weight, scarfing Macdonald's,
heading grimly to they gym; or in Guiliano's way: delighting
in gourmet food, strolling the boulevards, smelling the flowers,
I would raise a glass to Guiliano. After all, as she says, "French
women avoid anything that demands too much effort for too
little pleasure." Salut! But what French women can't
avoid, it seems, is the dictum that thinner is better. For
women of any size, who need to lose that restrictive ideal
in order to heal and be free, the Guiliano lifestyle may
be no more than a prettier, very Parisian, new cage.
|
