Co-author of “France Before our eyes”, the journalist and essayist Jean-Laurent Cassel decrypts the politicization of the diet and the “fractures” that appear there.
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Co-author with Jerome Fourquet of France Before our eyes (threshold, 2021), the journalist and essayist decrypts the politicization of the food.
“A good wine, a good meat, a good cheese For me it is French gastronomy “, recently affirmed on France 3 the communist candidate in the presidential election, Fabien Roussel. While she wanted to gather, her statement aroused very strong reactions, especially on the left. How to understand this runaway?
In his Declaration , Fabien Roussel also added that “the good and the handsome”, everyone must have access, with this underlying idea that we all agree on the standards of the good. In reality, the diet he highlights a little vintage figure of the Communist elector of the years 1970-1980, the worker with his bowl, his beret and his litron. Jean Gabin, if I caricature a little.
There is a nostalgic aspect in this defense of the French meal. What we realize through the outraged reactions that it triggered is that in fact, there is no more common base, repository that is consensus. It also reveals that the stomach, the gastric are now political.
Where did the critics come from?
From his own camp. On the one hand, there are environmental activists and for animal welfare that have been shocked by promoting the diet. And then there is another criticism, that of the left “moral”, which sees in this glorification of the franchouillard diet, very “sausage-pinard”, a call of the foot to an identity and nationalist right. Sandrine Rousseau, the former candidate for ecologist primaries, who is the flag holder of a left who defends a more mixed, inclusive diet, has reacted to the Fabien Roussel statement by a simple tweet : “The couscous, favorite dish of the French …”
So there is a real food fracture on the left?
The political debate has been deported to cultural subjects at the expense of socio-economic subjects. All this evokes a translation on the culinary ground of a controversy, generated in 2011 by a famous note from Terra Nova. This document, produced by a laboratory of ideas close to the PS, advocated to abandon the vote of the workers because, culturally, on immigration, the marriage for all, they were conservative. And replace them with graduate urban, minorities, women; A new democratic electoral coalition, a little American.
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