The Bread Man.

Last Sunday E and I woke up early (well, early for jet lagged Americans) to go to the open-air market just minutes by foot from our apartment. We wanted to absorb everything, taking stock of all the available goods, before committing to any one particular vendor’s wares. We noticed right away an especially delicious-looking display of small breakfast bread loaves in various flavors and promised each other we’d return. We kept our word: after purchasing conservative quantities of tomatoes, carrots, zucchini, cherries, and strawberries, we made our way back to the Bread Man. E asked for a pain aux fraises et au chocolat blanc (bread with strawberries and white chocolate), and I chose a pain aux pépites chocolats (bread with chocolate chips).

Upon hearing our French, the Bread Man brightened and asked, “Which nationality?” We replied that we were Americans, and he was delighted. “Americans, yes?” he clarified jovially. “So Lyon is cold for you!”

Wasn’t that the truth! The day E and I arrived in Lyon it was in the low fifties with rain, and the next morning was no warmer—less so, in fact. “Here some years we ski on our national holiday!” he enthused. “Can you ski on your national holiday?” he winked at us. We all laughed. “Impossible!” I said, while E too assured him there were no such opportunities in our native land. Skiing in July! If you’re not in very select locations or you don’t own a snow machine, you are likely unable to celebrate the Fourth of July with snowballs.

Quickly, as happens with many of his line of work, he turned to the quality of his craft. “You have bread like mine in American stores, no?” I replied that while we had bread—even bread meant specifically for breakfast and dessert—we definitely had nothing of the caliber he offered us, at least not in stores. He nodded knowingly. “Yes,” he agreed, “your bread is industrial. Me, I make all my own bread. All of this”—he waved a hand across the whole spread—“all made by my hands. In America, you make things much more quickly than I do, but then you lose the love of your food. I make everything with much care, yes, much care.”

And how true is that. I am not the sort of person who thinks everything in France is better and more interesting and more chic than everything in America or vice versa. Both countries should be appreciated and celebrated for their differences, particularly their strengths. Nonetheless, I think the Bread Man is right on target: we are so separated from our food in America that many of us either hate it, anesthetize ourselves with it, or struggle between the two. It’s a consumable like everything else, something to be mashed into our mouths while working, watching television, or driving hurriedly from one appointment to the next. We don’t love our food because we expect it to fill voids for us or because we are so disillusioned that it hasn’t. We tie it to what it does to us, for better or worse, rather than from its source.

The French are paradoxical as it relates to food. On the one hand, everything they eat is loaded in fat—butter, cream, grease, take your pick, and it’s probably there. Bread and butter are served in large quantities at each meal. Lunch and dinner are both accompanied by wine, and sometimes by a few wines. The French spend—quite literally—hours of their lives à table (at the table), lingering long after the last morsels and drops are gone. Our group had dinner at the high-class Brasserie du Nord on Sunday night. Our reservations were at 7:00 p.m., we were seated immediately, and yet we didn’t leave until after around 10:30. It took that long to eat our three-course meal. Each course was eaten slowly with much laughter and conversation interspersed between bites and courses. Both wine selection and food preparation are sciences at which native French people are expected to be proficient; serving at a restaurant, even a merely decent one, requires the highest levels of such knowledge. Servers, in fact, often have culinary degrees. Yet with such importance placed on food, the French remain one of the healthiest, slimmest, and most robust nationalities on the planet. How is this possible?

For one, the quantities are much smaller. I haven’t left a table hungry yet, but much less is served to me than I would expect at even a Steak ‘n’ Shake in the U.S. Also, the streets are teeming with walkers and bike-riders. Rush hour is nothing to be worried about because if a person lives within four miles or so of his/her office, she/he walks. Everyone is aware of how much they are eating because they eat so very slowly and deliberately. Meals are accompanied by things other than food to look forward to, such as the entertaining and fulfilling company of others.

Of course, not all of these elements of the French meal could be adopted in the U.S. We lead faster-paced lives, we frequently live a longer distance from our jobs, and we enjoy the peace and quiet of our fierce individualism (myself included). But what if we did slow down, eat a little less of the delicious foods we love, and invite friends over often to share a meal with us? What if we did prepare our food on a regular basis—and take pride in it as a craft that sustains life—rather than buying “industrial bread”? I wonder how our health and our entire society would change, with or without the gym.