Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

In books and news articles, France often plays the foil to America, just as it once did to England. The French language serves as a sign of socio-economic distinction, a class marker, and for its disciples, it is probably easy to think that French ways are superior in everything from cooking to flirtation to parenthood.

Americans moving to France in search of a more sophisticated lifestyle are confronted with a stagnating economy, a society riven by inequality and racism, and a cuisine in many ways inferior to that of the US, Germany or other countries embracing fresh and organic good.

After an initial lost period, these American immigrants make careers out of France itself, trading off its pre-war reputation. "French women don't get fat", "Why French Parents Are Superior", "Bringing Up Bebe" and "La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life" -- these are all real works published by people monetizing their lifestyle choices by preaching French superiority to those they have left behind.

Unfortunately, none of it is true. I spent 14 years in Paris, enough time to gauge the average weight of French womanhood and watch many French parents strut their stuff. France is becoming heavier and heavier as fast foods make deeper inroads. And French parenting is often a hystrionic affair that verges on verbal abuse when applied to toddlers. It's shocking, actually.

So these articles simply use France as a rhetorical trope to introduce new ideas to American society. Those ideas should be considered independently of the distortions applied to France itself. In fact, someone should build an app that substitutes the word "Utopia" for France in those articles. It will clear the mind and steer the reader clear of the many impasses in which French society is stuck.

Paris sucks though. I half kid but it's kinda true. Polluted and crowded, super expensive, and a lot of people are pretty disagreeable in my experience. A lot of nicer cities exists.

I don't get your point about food either. Unless you are rich enough to shop exclusively Whole Foods or something, the average French food experience is a lot better than an American one. Plus basically all products are higher quality. Compare what you find in an American Walgreens to something like a Monoprix in France. It's pretty embarrassing how much cheap shit has filled American stores.

I was having chicken nuggets or pizza everyday for lunch in my US middle school FFS! How do we let kids live like that? French public school was giving me way better food (though it was like $4 instead of $2). Actual "3 course meal", you could avoid vegetables some days if you wanted to but for the most part super balanced. Agree about Fast Food really making inroads though.

And of course inequality exists, but it's not the US. I have never heard somebody say that someone should "just work two jobs" to make ends meet in France. That's more indicative of US craziness but still. Not from Paris though, maybe Paris has those kinds of people.

France has its problems but for the most part people aren't starving on the street and kids have access to veggies.

You're right. Paris does suck in many ways. And I know the smaller cities have their charms. But none of them prove the points of the authors, that French are better at parenthood, weight control and seduction. None.

We have to try to compare apples to apples with the supermarkets. Monop and Inno are actually at the high end, so you should compare them to Whole Foods or Safeway and you can't compare it to the downmarket chains. And in that case, Whole Foods wins on variety, freshness and health by a long shot, while also beating sparsely stocked places like Naturalia.

Downmarket chains in the US, like Walmart, might be compared to Ed, Champion or the German invaders Aldi and Lidl. And the shopping there is not pretty. Most of the food is processed.

France hides a lot of inequality, so I'm not sure we know it's true measure there. There's a much stronger habit of offshoring one's wealth to places like Switzerland and Monaco (and sure, the US uses the Caymans, but w/e). The rural poverty and alcoholism is pretty bad. Sequestering the immigrant populations in the high-rises of the banlieues is pretty bad.

Many people have a problem finding even one job, let alone two, and they are physically isolated from the rest of the economy.

Homelessness in Paris was actually pretty visible when I was there, in the tent cities around the Canal St. Martin for example. And it wasn't just Afghan migrants, but people that France itself had produced, who had no home. And when you get out of Paris, you can still see shantytowns of tarp and trailers shoved between the freeways.

Happy to concede that French children get more vegetables. I hope that's true.

>a cuisine in many ways inferior to that of the US, Germany or other countries embracing fresh and organic good.

Okay, I was with you until this bit. Food doesn't necessarily need to be fresh to be good or healthy, and there's nothing inherently good in organics. Putting fresh/local and organic food on a pedestal stinks of privilege at best, and represents a rather problematic neo-luddite worldview at worst.

People use 'organic' or 'locally sourced' as a proxy for any kind of food where the seller cares about flavour quality, nutrition, and appearance in equal amounts. The contrast to it, is 'industrial' food is of the sort where crop-yeild was the most important constraint to the seller.

I don't doubt most people would buy GMO foods if they were marketed as being healthier or tastier.

People certainly buy milk infused with all kinds of vitamins that aren't naturally present.

Good food, and innovations in food, follow the money. The money's not really in France. What ideas they had to contribute, other countries have now absorbed. There is as much good food and wine to be had in the Bay area as there is to be eaten in Paris, if not more.

But food culture, like all culture, takes a lot to build up.

The US might have a lot of high quality restaurants, but it also has walmart selling a ton of kinds of "asiago", most of them spreadable.

The fact that a movie like "supersize me" can be produced, is a symptom of a totally broken approach to food, not because eating pizza margherita and drinking wine for a month would be healthier than mcdonald's, but because any 10 year old would tell you it's idiotic to have a monotonous diet.

(For the uninitiated, Asiago is a single kind of cheese with a couple minor variations produced in northern italy. It is very much non-spreadable.)

Are you actually saying that France is given by inequality and racism compared to the US? Are you actually saying that the US and Germany have a superior food to France? US is superior to France in many ways, but clearly not those ones!

I think the point is that this kind of article tends to present it as uniformly better, rather than contrasting the good and the bad.

I feel this is an instance of Flanderization [1]. There are definitely some differences between France and the US, but they get blown out of proportion. And this is not specific to France, other articles take northern countries as the golden examples, or Japan, or China, by focusing on one particular aspect.

On the other hand, it can be good to keep in mind that other models of society can exist, even though they may not be exactly realistic.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization

Letting children play freely is hardly a new idea lol. I won't comment the cuisine and racism thing, daily reminder that the US police is murdering black people on the street (and on camera for added entertainment).

Still I agree with you that France is becoming more and more like the US and that worries me because I definitely think it is NOT the way to go at all.

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