je ne vois pas en quoi, la diététique francaise sous l'occupation
ni les habitudes gastronomiques des enfants au retour de l'école,
pourrait être d'un quelconque intérêt sur un forum de voyage !!!

Mez
"Earl Evleth" a écrit dans le message de news:
...


This question popped up in my mind because there
is the general consensus (perhaps) that the term
"junk food" only applies to American food of the
McDonald's variety.

But a visit to any French grocery store will allow
one to see junk food which is not American in origin.

First, what is junk food?? To borrow a term it could be food
with ³no redeeming nutritional value". So is the pornographic
equivalent in food.

My wife is currently working on a medical history project
dealing with the "diet" of the French curing the occupation period.
It was an epoch in which the diet was "low calorie" because the food
eaten, largely vegies, had low calorie levels. Man differs from the
vegie eating Mountain gorillas in that the latter spend all day
eating low calorie stuff and their intestinal tracts are four times
larger than our own. Like cows they had to eat a lot to get enough to
live on. Man found starch containing roots, which have more calories
than eating carrot greens, and threw in some animal protein too,
which is high calorie stuff. Anyway, the non-Germans in Europe during
WWII were all on a Nazi imposed diet and not having gorilla digestive
tracts could not make up for it. They were eating junk food.

The French of today are different. For children there is the practice
in late afternoon of their having a "snack" (now a French work) which
generally consists of some high calorie item to energize the little
ones until dinner around 8 PM. So items from the grocery store
or the patisserie are used. Our daughter as a 5 yr old adored
the "palmier", a sort of large cookie in the form of a palm cutting,
covered with carmelized sugar. The list of patesserie offerings is large;
pain aux raisins, chausson aux pommes, financier, pain au chocolat
Flan, tarte au citron, etc etc.

These freshly prepared products are better than those coming out of boxes
of stuff sold at the market, which now includes chocolate ship cookies.
Many cookies or cookie like industrial products are heavy on the cholocate
and the choice is enormous.

So in a certain sense, the French do have their junk food. Possibly the
main
difference is that they don`t snack heavily and mostly not in front
of TV watching their favorite soccer (sorry football in French) team.


Earl