Mathilde Cohen* "Law, Food, and Race: The Whiteness of French Food" French Politics, Culture, and Society (à paraître en 2021) - Centre de ...
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Mathilde Cohen*
“Law, Food, and Race: The Whiteness of French Food”
French Politics, Culture, and Society (à paraître en 2021)
English Abstract:
Food is central to French identity. So too is the denial that racial differences exist and matter.
Both tenets are central to the nation’s self-definition, making them difficult, yet all the more
important to think about together. This article purports to identify a form of French food
whiteness (blanchité alimentaire), that is, the use of food and eating practices to reify and
reinforce whiteness as the dominant racial identity. To do so, it develops three case studies of
how law elevates a fiction of homogeneous French/white food as superior and normative at the
expense of alternative ways of eating and their eaters—the law of geographical indications,
school lunches, and cultural heritage law.
French Abstract:
Si l’alimentation est centrale à l’identité française, le déni de l’existence de différences raciales
et de leur impact fait tout autant partie de la façon dont la nation se définit, ce qui les rend
difficiles, mais d’autant plus importants à penser ensemble. Cet article utilise le champ juridique
pour identifier une forme de blanchité alimentaire, c’est-à-dire l’utilisation de la nourriture et
des habitudes alimentaires pour réifier et renforcer la blanchité comme identité raciale
dominante. Trois exemples sont mobilisés pour montrer que le droit élève au rang d’alimentation
supérieure et normative une fiction de nourriture française et blanche homogène aux dépens de
formes d’alimentations alternatives et de leurs mangeur.euses : le droit des appellations
d’origine contrôlées, la réglementation des cantines scolaires et le droit du patrimoine de
l’humanité.
*
Professor of Law, University of Connecticut. For helpful conversations and comments on earlier drafts, I am grateful
to Amy DiBona, E. Melanie DuPuis, Elizabeth Emens, Silvia Falconieri, Margaret Gray, Jean-Pierre Hassoun, Wythe
Marschall, Diana Mincyte, Fabio Parasecoli, as well as participants in the NYU Food Reading Group. For research
assistance, I thank Cécile Flahaut and Amanda Studley. For library assistance, I thank the University of Connecticut
law library staff, in particular Tanya Johnson. Unless otherwise specified, all translations from French texts are mine.
1“je déchirerai les rires Banania sur tous les murs de France”
[I will tear apart the Banania laughter on all the walls of France]
Léopold Sédar Senghor1
Introduction
Food is central to French identity. So too is the Republican universalist ideology that
denies that racial differences exist and matter. Both tenets are central to the nation’s self-
definition, making them difficult, yet all the more important to think about together. More
specifically, in a special issue of this journal dedicated to the understanding of whiteness in
France, it is critical to reflect on whether and how whiteness is produced through food and its
regulation. Critical whiteness studies have shown that whiteness is generated in multiple ways,
from healthcare to education, to spatial segregation, work opportunities, leisure, but it is also,
shaped, several times per day, by eating and drinking. This article’s claim is that the supposed
neutral and un-marked quality of whiteness is particularly tangible in the context of food in a
country where foodways have been central means of racial and ethnic identity formation through
slavery, colonization, and immigration. The whiteness of French food is all the more powerful
that it is unnamed. It fades into the background, enabling the racial majority to benefit from food
privileges without having to acknowledge their racial origin.
Despite the colonial and racialized foundation of the French state, official discourses
have taken colorblindness and indifference to differences to be the defining traits of the French
republic, a position often referred to as “republican universalism.”2 According to this credo,
since the Revolution of 1789, France has embraced the values of liberty, equality and fraternity,
dismissing racial and ethnic differences as irrelevant. Under French law, the collection and
analysis of “sensitive data”—including race and ethnicity—is severely restricted.3 The French
census does not collect such information, with the consequence that the precise racial and ethnic
makeup of the French population as a whole remains unknown.4 This long-standing
understanding of colorblind French cultural and legal identity has shifted in the last decade with
the introduction of anti-discrimination policies, though premised on an explicit rejection of
racialized understandings of social personhood and the preservation of the legal fiction that the
state recognizes only individual citizens, not groups or communities.5
French food has followed a parallel trajectory in social and legal meaning. Seen as a
quintessential dimension of French identity, it is also portrayed as a common good transcending
class, race, and ethnic lines. The French meal is presented as a national ritual to which every
citizen is expected to partake on the same footing. Yet, as Sylvie Durmelat writes, this vision has
begun to crumble, “[g]astronomy no longer offers the secular, universalist, rational, and irenic
imaginary table inviting all French palates to experience and partake, even if only vicariously, in
the communion of taste.”6 Much like the legal and social conflicts surrounding the headscarf and
the burqa reflect the white supremacist dimension of republican universalism, the availability, or
not, of halal food, and more generally the question of who eats what and when, are central sites
of contestation of whiteness and its operation as an unchallenged and un-articulated social and
legal phenomenon.
2What is French food? As is the case for other purported national cuisines, its boundaries
are controversial and unstable, covering significant diversity. Could it be that part of what
defines French food is its whiteness? It is often said that classic French cuisine was nationalized
by the likes of Carême and Escoffier in the early nineteenth century through its codification in
written recipes and published cook books.7 This haute cuisine was a manifestation of political
power, a class-based cuisine rather than rooted in a social community and representative of what
people ate outside of a small elite.8 Yet, a set of core ingredients, dishes, drinks, and way of
composing and eating them, continues to fuel the French culinary canon. French foodways are
shaped by white, middle and upper-class ideas of what meals should be, influenced by the
cuisine bourgeoise. The white majority’s way of eating is structured by specific ingredients,
dishes, cooking methods, table manners, patterns of association or exclusion, ordered sequence
of food throughout the day and the year. These eating practices are elevated in law and culture to
the status of normal and normative, against which other practices become deviant and
problematic—think vegan or vegetarian diets, halal or kosher food, eating with one’s hands,
eating at times that do not conform with the three French meals.
The steak-frites, still found on the menu of most casual restaurants, used to be presented
as an icon of French food across social classes. Roland Barthes famously wrote in 1957, “steak is
in France a basic element, nationalized even more than socialized” and fries “are the alimentary
sign of Frenchness.”9 Others, such as Annie Hubert deny the existence of any national dish. She
proposes that a national cuisine can only be identified negatively. One is not French because one
eats steak-frites but “because all the others, the foreigners, the Barbarians so to say, do not eat
like we do. It is the inferior or even repulsive or dangerous cuisine of the ‘other’ that strengthens
our membership in the group.”10 The contours of French food, in other words, are delineated
negatively and racially. French food is the food eaten by the white majority in opposition to the
eating practices of those considered non-white. It is neither whiteness that defines French food
nor French food that defines whiteness, but the two are mutually reinforcing.
This article has two main goals. First, it aims to shed light on a neglected area in the
study of food and race. Despite the growing importance of critical race studies among French
social scientists, the relationship between French food and whiteness has not been systematically
investigated. Second, the article develops three case studies of how law elevates a fiction of
homogeneous French/white food as superior and normative at the expense of alternative ways of
eating and their eaters: the law of geographical indications, the regulation of school lunches
(cantines scolaires), and cultural heritage law. In doing so, the article purports to identify a form
of French food whiteness (blanchité alimentaire) encompassing the use of foods and eating
practices seen as traditionally French to reify and reinforce white supremacy. The whiteness of
French food lies in how the French racial majority perceives its food culture as normative,
allowing its members to imagine themselves as legitimate and primary members of the nation at
the exclusion of others. This study supports the view that race is a social construction,
understanding whiteness as situational status that evolves overtime. At the same time, the
analysis of food complicates constructionist conceptions of race given that eating is both a social
and biological act that transforms bodies. As Andrea Freeman has demonstrated, racialized food
oppression has embodied consequences, including malnutrition and diet-related diseases. 11
3This is a theoretical article, which is not designed to present detailed ethnographic or
archival research. An interdisciplinary project, it draws upon several bodies of literature in
addition to legal scholarship, such as food studies, critical race theory, and critical whiteness
studies. My contribution is situated close to the works of scholars such as Andrea Freeman,
Rachel Slocum, and Kyla Tomkins, who have reflected on the intricacies of food, race, and
power, in particular on the role of eating in shaping whiteness.12 I add to this literature by
bringing a French case study grounded on legal texts and practices as primary tools of
racialization. As a legal scholar I pay special attention to the role of the law in making race an
enduring and all-permeating ideology, especially in a culture such as the French that continues to
some extent to deny the existence and relevance of race. I rely on a close reading of statutes,
regulations (décrets, arrêtés, circulaires, notes de service), and judicial opinions from the end of
the nineteenth century until today pertaining to food and wine. Far from neutral, these various
legal sources contribute to the material construction of a French version of whiteness through the
policing of eating and drinking practices. Multiple legal regimes have a bearing on who gets to
eat what and how, including immigration and citizenship law, labor law, intellectual property,
agricultural subsidies, nutrition guidelines, food safety, and food labeling, among others.
Through direct regulation, food aid, subsidies, and property rights, law shapes food access and
choices, privileging certain diets and stigmatizing others.
Because information on race and ethnicity is often inadequate in France and scholarship
on the relationship between French food and race is only beginning to emerge, I paint with a
broad brush, occasionally relying on anecdotal evidence or making assumptions. Among some of
the missing facts that would strengthen the inquiry are data on the race and ethnicity of food
workers (including farm owners, farm workers, restaurant owners, restaurant employees, and
food plant workers), school children participating in school lunches, customers patronizing
farmers’ markets, specialty shops, and restaurants coded as French, as opposed to mainstream
supermarkets and restaurants serving food thought of as non-French, those affected by diet-
related diseases, agriculture-related environmental degradation, as well as figures quantifying
racial discrimination in the food industry, be it in employment or service.
The article proceeds as follows: after situating my intervention within the literature, I
present what I see as some of the constitutive elements of the whiteness of French food: food
colonialism, white food spaces, and hyper-racialized foods or brands. The rest of the article
focuses on three case studies illustrating how food law elevates a fiction of French food as the
superior and normative white food at the expense of alternative ways of eating and their eaters—
the law of geographical indications, the regulation of school lunches, and cultural heritage law.
Literature
Numerous authors have pointed out the centrality of food to French national identity.13
Pascal Ory notes that food is often thought of as “one of the distinctive elements” of French
identity, if not “the principal.”14 Food figures prominently in accounts of how individuals and
groups define and distinguish themselves within the fabric of the nation. Pierre Bourdieu
famously argued in La Distinction (1979) that tastes—literal and metaphorical—are tools of
differentiation and hierarchization.15 He considered eating as a paradigmatic example of behavior
based at least in part on how it might open access to higher levels of social standing. Since
4Bourdieu, scholarship on French food and characteristics associated with eaters’ identities has
broadened beyond class analysis to include gastro-politics, colonialism, gender, and immigration.
Michaela DeSoucey, Vincent Martigny, Maryann Tebben, and others have written about
French food and national identity, pointing out the role of cuisine in building an imaginary
national community domestically and fostering nationalist sentiment with respect to other
countries.16 They have shown that food is mobilized as a marker of prestige and status of the
nation in the face of globalization and diminished international stature. Food growingly figures
in accounts of French colonialism and the legacy of empire, with studies documenting the
circulation of foodways from the periphery to the center and vice versa.17 The forms of racialized
violence effectuated through those transfers are thus coming to the forefront of scholarly
discussion of French food, providing a basis for the current study. French anthropologists have
begun to develop theories and to conduct fieldwork on the relationship between food and gender,
evidencing phenomena such as the disproportionate share of domestic food labor falling upon
women within the household, gender discrimination in food consumption, and the fashioning of
gendered bodies via foodways.18 Finally, scholars have investigated the relationship between
food and immigration, with a focus on what immigrant groups eat and how their dietary practices
evolve from generation to generation based on factors such as national origin, class, and
gender.19 Halal food in particular has attracted significant scholarly attention as a site of
contested food politics and French identity.20 Another angle concerns the development of so-
called ethnic food businesses—how immigrants market “their” foods and how they are
perceived.21 In that context, Manuel Calvo and others have detected various manifestations of
“alimentary xenophobia”22 directed at food businesses owned by immigrants such as restaurants
serving Kebabs23 or Afro-Caribbean food markets.24
What has not been systematically addressed is the relationship between French food and
race, in particular whiteness. The whiteness of French food remains inexplicit and
uninterrogated. There are no studies of how whites eat and why. This gap replicates within the
social sciences the broader societal discomfort with acknowledging and critiquing whiteness. For
white scholars—the majority of French academia—a cognitive dissonance resulting from the
awareness that racial privilege is enacted on a daily basis through eating must be contended with.
Furthermore, eating, a simultaneously cultural and biological process, is a fraught topic in a
scholarly community that strenuously campaigns for the consideration of race as a social
construction against critics who accuse them of perpetuating biological racism by using the very
category of race.
There are exceptions. Laurence Tibère touches upon the topic of race and food in her
scholarship on the Reunion, where she argues that food has been “creolized,” becoming a
“common reference system” for all racial groups.25 Colette Guillaumin, often credited for being
the first French social scientist since Frantz Fanon to emphasize that whiteness lies at the heart of
racism,26 is also one of the few to posit that food is a defining element for the formation of
French (racial) identity.27 In 1992, she argued that there is no such thing as a homogenous French
cuisine, but that immigrant cuisines serve as negative others to define “a ‘normal’ cuisine,
unified, odorless (or delicious, obviously), but which we would struggle to define precisely.”28
American historian Lauren Janes, in her study of colonial foods during the interwar period,
argues that eating was and continues to be a performative act of French identity, noting that
5“whiteness is constructed through the embodied practice of eating.”29 Finally, in their study of
the controversy over the introduction of halal burgers at a popular fast food chain, Guillaume
Johnson and his co-authors allude to the idea that whiteness builds upon socio-spatial relations
around food.30
My contribution aims at problematizing the whiteness of French food by tracking how it
operates through law and policy. I draw on the work of scholars who have explored the
relationship between whiteness and food systems in the United States—and to a lesser extent in
Australia.31 Kyla Tomkins’ Racial Indigestion (2012) is an especially significant milestone in
this respect, as it uncovers U.S. eating culture in the literature and cultural production of the
nineteenth century as a significant root of the privileging of whiteness.32 In North America, an
important part of the food and whiteness conversation has centered upon alternative food
movements in the past couple of decades. Anthropologist Rachel Slocum has argued that
whiteness emerges spatially across the United States in progressive non-profit efforts to promote
sustainable farming and food security.33 Julie Guthman has shown that two alternative food
institutions—farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture—disproportionally serve
white and middle to upper income populations. The rhetoric of managers from these institutions,
such as “if they only knew,” is illustrative of the color-blind mentalities and universalizing
impulses often associated with whiteness.34 Similarly, Alison Alkon and Christie McCullen
argue that at the farmers’ markets they observed in California, a white farm imaginary was at
work, valorizing white farmers and “rending invisible the low-paid, predominantly Latino/a
workers who do the bulk of the cultivation.”35 Other scholars have looked into whiteness and
food pop culture. Amy Bentley has written about businesswoman and TV personality Martha
Stewart’s upper-middle-class-specific whiteness through the conspicuous preparation,
presentation, and consumption of certain refined and elaborate foods.36 Lisa Powell and
Elizabeth Engelhard have drawn attention to the symbolic whiteness associated with pumpkins in
contemporary America, most notably through the popularity of pumpkin spice lattes among
middle-class white women.37 Finally, in her examination of the law of milk, Andrea Freeman
pioneered the concept of “food oppression,” by which she means “institutional, systemic, food-
related action or policy that physically debilitates a socially subordinated group.”38 Though none
of these scholars claim that whiteness is entangled with a specific national cuisine or legal
system, their studies support the claim that race, whiteness in particular, emerges and is
reinforced through certain eating cultures and discursive practices around them.
The Hierarchization of French Food as White Food
Whiteness, the attribute of being recognized as a white person in French society, is all the
more powerful that it often remains unarticulated and unnamed. Members of the racially
dominant group experience a range of advantages without having to acknowledge their racial
origin. One of these is their ability to grow, purchase, prepare, be served, and consume a set of
foods that meets their cultural and biological needs as a matter of course when other groups may
be deprived of these opportunities. Their food is normal and normative—it is simply “French
food.” Social scientists have pointed out in the context of the United States that although
“[w]hites have a “point of view”—a group-specific perspective on the world—they mistake their
situated perspective for a “view from nowhere.””39 Similarly, in France, dominant food practices
are experienced and presented by the racial majority as racially neutral and from nowhere despite
6their colonial, raced, and exclusionary dimensions. Arthur de Gobineau, the infamous French
aristocrat whose racial theories were influential in shaping European racism, used dietary
preferences at several junctures in his 1853 Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races to
demean groups he characterized as non-white. For instance, when defining the supposed “three
constitutive elements of humankind,” foodways figure prominently in the demarcation of Blacks
(maligned as indiscriminate gluttons) and Asians (characterized as more temperate in their food
choices), but not of whites, for whom he instead focuses on moral qualities.40 The idea of a
connection between race and diet continued well-into the twentieth century in the scientific
literature. Biochemist and dietitian Armand Gautier devotes an entire section of his 1904 treatise
to the “influence of diets on races,” emphasizing that “bread is, with meat, the principal nutritive
substance of the man of white race.”41 During that time, foodways were thought capable of
making and unmaking race. In a 1937 speech, for instance, colonial doctor Alexandre
Gauducheau relies on examples from the colonies to argue that “diet, as much as preventive
medicine can transform races.”42
The food-related boundaries of whiteness have thus long been in the making. They are
alternatively perpetuated or disrupted through everyday banal food encounters such as by
cooking, eating, serving, or selling foods. The eating practices of people whose racial status is
ambivalent such as Arabs/Maghrebis (and Jews before them) are subject to particular scrutiny for
conformity with white standards. A familiar strategy for those of Muslim backgrounds, for
example, to “act white”43 so as to fit in is to ostensibly “eat French,”44 most paradigmatically by
consuming pork.45 In what follows, I analyze three dimensions of French food whiteness: the
enduring colonial foundation of French food, the preservation of white food spaces, and the role
of particular food products or brands in alternatively weakening or consolidating racial
boundaries.
French Food Colonialism
Colonialism and plantation slavery have been central to the development and
perpetuation of dominant foodways in France, yet French food studies tend to focus instead on
the regional foundation of French food. Experts state over and over that French cuisine is
quintessentially regional, that there is no such thing as a national cuisine, but only regional
cuisines.46 According to this mantra, what defines alimentary Frenchness is the notion of terroir,
which “served for hundreds of years . . . to describe how flavor and personality in a product are
determined according to its specific region or origin.”47 As Christy Shields-Argelès notes, “the
‘region’ seems to function as a magic word and at times to even represent a sort of contemporary
utopia; it is a space that encompasses gastronomy, traditions, quality and variety of products as
well as favorable systems of production and distribution.”48 Some versions of the glorification of
terroir remind of the Vichy propaganda and pétainiste ideology that venerated roots, the earth,
the provinces, and their lore.49 The logical inference from the centrality of terroir and regions
would seem to be that French food owes little to the outside world, not the least to former
colonies and present neo-colonies.
The trope of French food as regional food functions as a convenient distraction from the
continuing colonial underpinning of French eating. Ann-Laura Stoler has dubbed “colonial
aphasia” French scholars’ difficulty to address the nation’s history of a racialized and imperial
7polity, noting that colonial histories are rendered unspeakable in the present.50 This colonial
unknowing is glaring in the study of food considering that slavery as well as settler and franchise
colonialisms have been essential for the emergence of contemporary French foodways.51 Some
of the mainstay ingredients of “French” cooking only became, and remained, available in France
due to imports from colonies, such as potatoes, tomatoes, green (“French”) beans, cocoa, coffee,
cane sugar, and vanilla. In popular and mainstream scholarly food culture, these foodstuffs live
their lives as food commodities unaffected by histories of imperialism. Yet, colonies existed in
part to service the metropole with agricultural products and foodstuffs, relying on slave labor,
expropriation, and generally exploitation of peoples’ labor and land. Changing white eating
habits to “eat colonial” was also part of the imperial project. The consumption of foods from the
colonies justified the empire while supporting it economically and ideologically. During the
interwar period, the ministry of the colonies orchestrated a large-scale campaign to persuade
metropolitans to include in their diet rice, bananas, cocoa, and tea from the colonies as a token of
“patriotic solidarity.”52 Propagandists attempted to engrain the equation “Imperial products =
French products.”53 Reciprocally, French colonizers tried to bring their notions of domesticity,
including cooking and dining etiquette, to the colonies.54 Colonial administrators thought that the
“‘natives’’ contact with French food and cuisine would naturally expose them to the superiority
of French civilisation.”55 Elements of this dynamics are still at work. The importation of
agricultural products from former colonies and overseas territories continues, accompanied with
the importation of people to grow foods in mainland France in often exploitative conditions.56
The connection between colonialism, food, and race is particularly obvious in the context
of citizenship law. Silvia Falconieri has documented how French colonial jurists were eager to
use racial anthropology to devise their legal categories, in particular to distinguish colonial
subjects living under the colonial régime of indigénat from citizens.57 In theory, whiteness was
not required for the acquisition of citizenship, but in practice evidence of white performance was
often decisive in the absence of established white lineage from at least one of the parents.58 In
addition to physical appearance and skin color, proficiency in the French language, education,
profession, and reputation, colonial administrators paid special attention to applicants’ way of
life, including their manner of dress and foodways.59 Eating habits became critical to establish
whiteness, or at least applicants’ ability to act white and thus be considered worthy of
citizenship.
To illustrate, in 1919, one Ignace, born in Madagascar to a Malagasy mother, applied for
French citizenship on the ground that he was the unrecognized son of a French national.60 The
records of the Antananarivo colonial civil bureau contain a memo mentioning approvingly his
service in the French Foreign Legion during the war, his seriousness, and his humility, before
scrutinizing his lifestyle. On that score, the unnamed bureaucrat writing the report emphasizes a
shift in Ignace’s dwelling and eating. Before the war, Ignace “lived with his mother . . . in a
simply furnished cottage kept in the indigenous style [à l’indigène]. The basis of their diet was
rice.” After Ignace came back from the front, he moved in with a Greek friend from the Legion.
The memo observes that now “he always eats with this European and is nearly constantly in his
company,” going on to conclude that the application should be granted. While Ignace’s service in
the armed forces appears to be the primary basis for the positive appraisal, his transition from the
typical rice-based, Malagasy diet despised by colonists to a “European” diet clearly militated in
his favor. France has a long history of linking race and racial inferiority to rice consumption.
8Since Voltaire at least, rice-eating has been denigrated in scientific, medical, and moral discourse
as leading to debility, femininity, and passivity in Asian cultures, while wheat and bread-eating
are praised for fostering European virility and dominance.61 Writing about colonial Madagascar,
Violaine Tisseau reports that the métis population in the cities sought to emulate the colonists by
ostensibly consuming white foods such as bread, pot au feu, flans, cakes, or custard sitting at the
dinner table.62 Ignace’s renunciation of rice and eating on a mat on the floor together with his
commensality with a white man must have been assessed as signs of white enculturation and
performance.
Officially, racial performance is no longer considered by immigration and citizenship
bureaucrats. However, in practice, the malleable legal requirement that naturalization candidates
demonstrate their “republican integration in French society”63 has been applied in a racialized
way, in particular to exclude Muslims. For instance, in 2014, a woman was denied citizenship on
the ground that she wore a hijab during her citizenship interview and admitted to practicing
gender segregation in her household when hosting guests. These behaviors manifested her “lack
of assimilation in the French community” according to the sous-préfecture. 64 The use of gender
segregation at the dinner table as an argument to deny citizenship has acquired renewed legal and
cultural relevance with the inscription of the gastronomic meal of the French on the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) list of intangible cultural
heritage. I discuss this inscription in detail later in the article, but for now, suffice it to note that
the bid to UNESCO stated that “the seating arrangement [of the gastronomic meal] may reflect
status in terms of hierarchy or gender.”65 According to the French state, there is thus a correct
form of gender segregation at the dinner table (alternating between men and women) worth
consecrating as an intangible cultural heritage, and an incorrect form (men and women sitting
separately) warranting rejection from the national community. Never mind the long French
history of hosting single-sex meals, including among feminists, who purposefully organized
feminine banquets in 1848 as a form of political empowerment.66
Another facet of continuing food colonialism effectuated through the law lies in the
continuing disparities between the metropole and overseas territories in terms of access to food,
food prices, food quality, and a clean environment.67 Despite differences across overseas regions,
foodstuffs are generally more expensive overseas, where incomes also tend to be lower (except
for metropolitans on secondment getting paid at a premium), resulting in disproportionally high
food spending for young families.68 Foods marketed in the metropole and overseas have long
operated under different quality standards. For example, sodas and yogurts contain significantly
more sugar than in the metropole. To address the issue, the Parliament passed a law in 2013
prohibiting differential sugar contents.69 The statute also banned the practice of selling food
products overseas with longer expiration date labeling than their counterparts in the metropole.
The original sponsor of the bill was Victorin Lurel, a representative from Guadeloupe. He had
grown concerned by the greater rate of diet-related diseases in overseas regions, in particular
diabetes and obesity, in the face agrifood businesses’ colonial and racist claims that overseas
consumers prefer sweeter products due to their history of growing sugar cane.70 At the time of
writing, the statute still remains underenforced.71 The history of nonreciprocity, inequality, and
forced dependence which has long characterized the food relationship between France and its
colonies is thus still very much at work.
9White Food Spaces
French food spaces are enduring sites of white identity formation and domination.
Whiteness builds its own closed food spaces through food craft stores such as butcher shops,
cheese stores, charcutier-traiteurs, wine stores, organic markets, farmers’ markets, patisseries,
confiseries, and chocolateries. Patronizing these stores calls for overlapping forms of privilege.72
Typically located in city centers, owned and staffed by whites, their products tend to be more
expensive than those found in supermarkets, and their modus operandi demands time and know-
how, especially for goods such as meats and cheeses requiring cutting and portioning upon
request. Customers are expected to know the name of the merchandise, its cut, and to be able to
gauge quantities and prices. If all of this were not terrifying enough, regulars are often known by
name and posturing is common—it is about who will order more and more of the most expensive
stuff every time the clerk asks, “et avec ceci?” [anything else?].
The French restaurant, be it located in France or abroad, is another space of white
belonging.73 The restaurant itself is a French invention of the eighteenth century, originally
designed for the elite.74 Eating out was and still is part of the display and performance geared
toward the claiming and attributing of status through the seeking and avoidance of different
venues.75 In principle, restaurants serving French food are open to all—anyone can make a
reservation or simply show up. In practice, there is a wide range of restaurants, from the simple
bistro to the gastronomic establishment, leading to differentiated clienteles defined by power
relations, class inequalities, and racial and ethnic hierarchies. The French restaurant’s ownership
and labor structure often mirrors societal racial hierarchies. Owners, chefs, managers, and front
of the house personnel tend to be white, while line cooks, dishwashers, and bussers are likely to
be first generation immigrants of color.76 At any price point, the French restaurant can be
unwelcoming for those who do not identify or are not identified as white, be it because it is
white-owned and mainly frequented by whites, because the personnel and decorum are
intimidating, or because of the food served (typically meat and dairy-heavy) is culturally
inadequate. Similar to the specialty food store, the French restaurant operates on diners’ race and
class-based implicit knowledge. It is understood that there are “proper” sequences of dishes and
drinks to order and table manners to demonstrate—what wine to order, how to taste it, which
silverware to use, how to handle napkins, and so on, as demonstrated by Guyanese poet Léon-
Gontran Damas in his poem “Hoquet,” in which a mother wants a mulatto “son with good table
manners Hands on the table . . . a stomach should be polite.”77
Beyond the spatiality of exclusion, the whiteness of French food is at work through
specific food items and brands such as couscous, Banania, and Reflets de France, which are
three iconic alimentary sites of racialization.
Couscous, Banania, and Reflets de France
French food has retained a surprising level of homogeneity and structure in the face of
successive waves of immigration and a growingly diverse population. Laurence Tibère opposes
the creolization of food in the Reunion to the metropole, “where food culture is highly
structured, the dynamics of integration – cultures influencing each other – of the type observed in
creolisation are not (or not yet) perceptible.”78 Foods marked as foreign are either exoticized or
10Frenchified, reenacting the French republican model of integration according to which
immigrants must assimilate into French culture and comportment to belong or remain perpetual
outsiders. Unfamiliar foods are either symbolically placed outside the border of the nation as
foreign, fueling tropes of reverence and appreciation for authentic difference, or absorbed into
French cuisine, sometimes to the point of non-recognition. This ability to simultaneously stamp
certain foods as exotic and authentic and incorporate others into French cuisine despite their
conspicuous non-white origin speaks to the opportunistic adaptability of French whiteness and its
universalist ideology.
Couscous is an example of a food which has been domesticated to exist according to
what suits the French white palate—it is eaten in versatile ways, from the would-be authentic as
a steamed starch accompanying a North African stew to the Frenchified such as tossed in a salad
with vegetables and cheese, incorporated into the sequence of the French meal as an appetizer or
a main dish. Couscous is simultaneously one of the most well-known and beloved foods in
France and one of the most celebrated emblems of North African culture.79 Alice Julier writes,
“couscous has become a popular and common food in France, such that polls show that people
across age, race, region, and occupation, now consider it a traditional food or dish.”80 As such it
might be “the archetypical culinary embodiment of France’s post-colonial multicultural
predicament.”81 Couscous has been known in France at least since François Rabelais wrote of
“coscotons à la moresque” (Moorish couscous) in the sixteenth century.82 Industrialized
couscous emerged as a product of colonial society, entering the mass market after the Algerian
independence in 1962 when “pied-noir owned companies relocated to France, and began selling
their product to the European market.”83
Positioning couscous as a beloved national dish,84 as is often done in popular culture, is
simultaneously a racial, ideological, and economic statement. It implies that people of North
African ancestry can become French if they blend their identity with the dominant white value
system. Couscous has become growingly political, having been coopted by the left and center as
a token of inclusiveness while challenged on the far right as a symbol of non-whiteness. In 1997,
then center-left Minister of the Interior, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, touted couscous as a “French
dish” in the context of arguing for a more “republican” (that is, less restrictive) immigration
policy.85 The conspicuous consumption of couscous and other foods coopted through colonialism
may also be a strategy for disavowing whiteness and its attendant histories of racism and empire.
The popularity of “couscous républicain” (republican couscous) contributes to a narrative of
French universalism whereby cultural appreciation of foreign foods validates the superiority of
republican values. The expression refers to public gatherings of political and civic leaders on the
left in which couscous is served to symbolize a commitment to anti-racism and an inclusive
polity. Though well-intended, as Laura Lindenfeld has pointed out in the context of Mexican
food in the United States, “[c]elebratory images of ethnic food traditions obscure the social and
political location of race and ethnicity.”86 The omnipresence of couscous on French plates
contributes to concealing the very real race-based economic and social oppressions that
characterize French society.
The white appropriation of couscous also reflects hegemonic tendencies to market and
consume ethnicity. As Sylvie Durmelat has pointed out, the “dish’s assimilation into mainstream
culture . . . remains . . . marked by persistent racist stereotypes, whether it is via the
11provincialization, or Mediterranianization of a ‘cosmopolitan’ specialty, or via comedy.”87 bell
hook refers to this form of whiteness constitution as “eating the other.” hook observes that
through appropriation and consumption, “ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up
the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”88 This process is manifest in the French passion
for Banania, the banana-flavored instant cocoa mix whose racist imagery finds a trenchant
response in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s poem quoted in the epigraph to this article. For most of its
existence, the product’s packaging has featured colonial, debasing images of smiling African
soldiers (tirailleurs), inviting a form of “Western cannibalism.”89 Through the Banania
iconography, the colonized are depicted as happy to be robbed of their lands, political
sovereignty, and forced to produce goods for whites.
While new foodways are integrated into mainstream white culture, a counter movement
can be observed in the form of yearnings for a return to an imagined ancestral way of eating.
Since the 1990s a variety of private and public actors have worked on identifying, listing, and
sacralizing a food heritage seen as quintessentially French and in danger of disappearing. The
label “fait maison” (home-made), legislated via a 2014 statute to distinguish restauranteurs
serving ready-made, vacuum-packed, and frozen meals from those cooking from scratch is the
latest expression this longing.90 Economic interests and the international reputation of French
cuisine are at stake in this preservation movement. At the same time, traditional gastronomy
itself has entered the realm of industrial production. Iconic French dishes such as crêpes,
ratatouille, boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, raclette, and many others can all picked up on
supermarket shelves in packages claiming values such as artisanship, small-scale, and localism,
giving rise to what one might call industrialized terroir.
Jean-Pierre Hassoun has conducted extensive fieldwork on the brand Reflets de France,
which illustrates the phenomenon of food heritagization (patrimonalisation).91 Roland Barthes
famously stated that milk is the anti-wine.92 Analogously, I would argue that the brand Reflets de
France and the foods it markets aspire to being the anti-couscous. Their identity is based on the
quest for an autotelic version French food that owes nothing to “outside” influences or ideas.
Founded in 1996, Reflets de France (literally, reflections of France) prides itself on
commercializing in supermarkets over 500 exclusively French food products from the terroirs—
including cheeses, charcuterie, ready-made meals, pastries, wine, and more.93 The company’s
website includes a short film celebrating the first twenty years of the brand, casting its farmers,
employees, vendors, and clients, most of whom appear to be white. Since its founding the brand
has collaborated with white chef Joël Robuchon to sample and selecte their products until his
passing in 2018. A conservative upholder of traditional and regional cooking, Robuchon was
known for opposing the “globalization” of cuisine. Reflets de France’s rhetoric fetichizes the
local, small and family businesses, the territory and its landscape, the authenticity of tastes, and
regional diversity. Hassoun sees in Reflets de France a “narcissistic” way of eating based on the
notion that because it’s French, it’s tasty.94 The brand plays into the trope of the reassuring
cuisine of the old days, raising the question why or against what customers need to be reassured
and comforted. In so doing, the brand’s discourse and products naturalize the white/French claim
to the land and ideologies of white self-sufficiency.
12After having described various aspects of the privileging of whiteness effectuated
through French food, the next Part turns to the legal underpinnings of this racial hierarchization
of eating.
The Racialized Law of French Food
Legal discourse is a critical access point for understanding the racialized contours of
contemporary French foodways. Food law defines a repertoire of desirable food choices and
practices while relegating others as secondary or less desirable. In what follows, I look at three
legal regimes contributing to the whiteness of French food: the law of geographical indications,
the regulation of school lunches, and cultural heritage law.
The Law of Geographical Indications
Geographical indications (GIs) are legal terms used to identify goods as originating in a
particular region when some of their specific qualities are attributable to their place of origin and
purportedly cannot be replicated elsewhere.95 They attach to products from a given territory
rather than to definite features of a product or to specific producers. The label is most often
applied to wines, spirits, agricultural products, and increasingly highly-specialized artisanal and
industrial goods.96 Well-known French geographical indications include Bourgogne,
Champagne, Bordeaux wines, Bresse chicken, Le Puy Green Lentil, Roquefort, and Camembert
de Normandie. France has been at the legal forefront in the recognition and protection of
geographical indications. It was the first country to develop a system of appellation d’origine
contrôlée (AOC) (appellations of origin) starting in 1905, initially to delimit winegrowing
regions and later other agricultural products and foodstuff.97 In 1992 the European Union
introduced a protection of geographical indications modeled after the French system.98 Since
1994, geographical indications have gone global. They are now included within the World Trade
Organization (WTO) as intellectual property rights via the Trade-Related Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS) Agreement.99
Geographical indications are fundamentally related to French colonialism and the
racialized project of ensuring that the white majority can maintain its foodways and agricultural
wealth. Kolleen Guy writes,
Terroir and the system of appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) were intended to protect
the products emanating from the ‘‘natural’’ state of a nation. Colonial products were
excluded from AOC protections because it was believed that they lacked the quality and
superiority locked in the land that produced ‘‘Frenchness.’’ . . . We might read the AOC
regulations, in part, as a colonial by-product, emerging from a need to reinforce
hierarchies and distinctions in the face of a new empire where boundaries appeared
porous. 100
More specifically, the story of geographical indications is tied to the wine industry. In the late
nineteenth century, the phylloxera aphid devastated French vineyards, destroying one-third of the
vines and reducing wine production by about 70 percent. To compensate, French colonists
developed winemaking in Algeria and began to import grapes and wine back to France.101
13Viticulture became intrinsically connected to settler colonialism, resulting in the settlement of
50,000 families from the metropole and the dispossession of some 700,000 hectares of land from
Algerians.102 This was an industrial wine system that delivered cheap, mass produced, and
standardized wine.103 Between 1880 and 1930 wine production grew dramatically, Algeria
becoming the largest exporter of wine in the world at the time.104 Once the French vineyard had
been reconstituted and production had recovered from the phylloxera crisis, wine producers’
organizations, particularly those in the South of France producing low-end wine, began to resent
the competition represented by Algerian wine.105 As prices declined with the increased amount
of wines on the market, they demanded that Algerian imports be limited, resorting to protests and
violence.106 Meanwhile, producers of high-end wine such as Bordeaux, Champagne, and
Burgundy lobbied for quality regulation so that Algerian wine in particular would be marked as
inferior.107
A racialized dynamic was reenacted through these wine wars. The indigenous
populations of Algeria, especially the Arabs, were vilified in colonial rhetoric as semi-primitive,
dirty, and deceitful people, while white colonists were elevated as the superior racial group.108
Similarly, negative intellectual and moral traits were attributed to Algerian wines, depicted as
fraudulent and artificial, by contrast to “natural” French wines. This personification may explain
why legal intervention came in the form of a 1905 statute on “frauds and falsifications”
specifying the conditions for the production of “natural” wine.109 The statute explicitly applied to
Algeria,110 requiring that wines clearly indicate the denomination of origin to avoid “misleading
commercial practices.”111 In the years that followed, other laws were passed to protect the
interests of French producers by introducing an express link between the “quality” of the wine,
its production region (the terroir), and the traditional method of production. In 1935, the
appellations d’origine contrôlées legal framework as we know it was set up, combining several
of the earlier regulations. The Institut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO), established
to monitor the new system, denied Algeria AOC classification. According to Joseph Bohling,
“[a]ppellation wines were to connect consumers to the producers and evoke bucolic images of
European France, not the pain and suffering found in Algeria.”112
Through geographical indications, law is mobilized to guard the whiteness of French (and
mainly other European) foods abroad as well as domestically. The protection prevents producers
who are not located within a pre-defined geographic area to market their goods under certain
names or as using certain methods. France has been the leading European country in terms of
value of geographical indications sales.113 After Italy, it has the second highest number (229) of
agriculture and food registrations as of 2016.114 Only about one-fourth of all registrations are for
non-EU (“third country”) registrations, and these are overwhelmingly wine registrations.115 Tara
Brabazon thus argues that the geographical indications system “continues European colonization
by other means. . . . The assumption was that non-European goods were not ‘authentic’ and were
‘inferior’ to the European goods.”116 For Kal Raustiala and Stephen Munzer, geographical
indications are linked to a new form of neo-colonialism “preventing emigrants, and their
offspring, from using GIs originated elsewhere.”117
At the turn of the twentieth century, while the geographical indications regime was being
created, law was also mobilized to regulate school lunches as a legal project stitching
nationalism to white bodies.
14Cantines and Food Neutrality
Perhaps nowhere is the law’s impact on food and racial identity more immediately
apparent than in the context of school lunches (cantines scolaires). Public schools have a long
history of serving hot food—the first programs were launched in preschools in the mid-
nineteenth century, spreading nationally after school attendance became mandatory in 1882.118
Initially, the cantines were charitable endeavors aimed at improving the nutrition and hygiene of
poor children119 as well as boosting attendance.120 In a country where infant mortality resulting
from inadequate nutrition had been a sporadic problem since the eighteenth century at least,121
children’s alimentation was presented as paramount tool of social hygiene to fight depopulation
and degeneration.
In the 1900s, an explicitly racialized discourse reminiscent of Gobineau’s theories
surfaced to justify and promote the cantines. In his medical dissertation the topic dated from
1908, a certain doctor Gosselin considered race as one of the key factors to measure children’s
“total alimentary ration,” noting, “there are variations with races… It is certain . . . that Germans
and English children need more food than French children.”122 Similarly, writing in 1906,
Augusta Moll-Weiss, a prominent educator, advocated for greater consistency in nutritional
planning in schools that would take into account that “children of the same age and of the same
nationality have identical needs.”123 She tied the cantines to the survival of the nation, crediting
them with enabling poor children to become “robust and resilient beings, capable of proudly
carrying the colors of France,” rather than weak and famished preys to tuberculosis.124 After
World War II, the cantines were assigned an explicit educational purpose in addition to their
primary nutritional aim, reinforcing their racialized dimension.125 School teacher Raymond
Paumier, a champion of “modern” childhood nutrition, counseled their “rationalization,”
insisting in 1947 that balanced meals are necessary to the “construction of the civilized little
man.”126 This is also when cantines scolaires became known as restaurants scolaires, or
restaurants d’enfants, a terminology chosen to elevate them as educational spaces. The word
restaurant reflected the new didactic ideal of clean, ventilated, and well-lit dedicated lunch rooms
serving multi-course meals in ceramic plates emulating dominant white dining practices.
Today, each municipality continues to decide whether to offer cantines as part of its
elementary school system, how much to charge families, and what foods to serve. For secondary
education, the decision is made at the départemental and regional levels. The overwhelming
majority of schools offer hot lunches, with over six million children participating127—one school
child out of two.128 Middle and high schools typically include self-service restaurants allowing
students to choose the individual components of their meals. By contrast, in many elementary
schools, children sit in groups of 6 to 12, are served in courses from common platters from a set
menu, and drink water from shared pitchers. Though the actual planning, preparation, and
provision of school lunches is the responsibility of local governments, they are constrained by
national laws and regulations. The content of the lunches is controlled in significant detail, with
regulations requiring that a diversity of dishes be served over the course of the week and the
month, the inclusion of an entrée at every meal comprising an animal protein,129 a mandatory
dairy course, specific portion sizes, water service, and the unlimited availability of bread.130
15By law, cantines are subject to the so-called the principle of neutrality, which guarantees
equal protection to all citizens regardless of their opinions in their relations to public services.131
What does neutrality mean in the context of food provision? Rather than compelling schools to
accommodate dietary restrictions motivated by religious, ethical, or philosophical views,
neutrality is understood as exempting them from having to take into consideration students’
beliefs.132 Schools must now manage food allergies by either offering alternative dishes/meals or
allowing students on a case-by-case basis to bring their lunch from home, but they are not
required to handle dietary restrictions based on identity differences.133 Several justifications for
this discrepancy are put forward in the legal literature: accommodating would violate secularism
and the separation of church and state, for instance because purchasing halal or kosher meat
would indirectly subsidize a religion,134 increase operating costs,135 exacerbate administrative
burdens,136 and be superfluous given that students are already accommodated when vegetarian
lunches are provided.
De facto, it is thus white Christian food norms which are considered neutral, much like
whiteness itself is often construed as a neutral, non-racial identity. According to a 2018
Greenpeace survey, 69% of elementary school children are served (non-kosher and non-halal)
meat or fish every single day during school lunches.137 A dairy course—cheese or yogurt—is
included in every lunch, despite the significant proportion of lactose intolerant children,
especially among those of Asian, Black, Jewish, and North African ancestry.138 Most schools
offer a special Christmas meal at the end of December and some maintain the Christian tradition
of fish Fridays all year round. While in practice many schools quietly accommodate students
with religious-based dietary restrictions, some cities have taken openly bigoted stances, be it by
imposing mandatory pork days or by doing away with substitute meals on pork days.139 This
attitude is of course not new, as powerfully narrated in Reunionese author Axel Gauvin’s 1987
novel Faim d’enfance. Set in 1958 Reunion, the protagonist, an adolescent of Tamil descent in
an otherwise all-white school, asserts his identity by refusing to eat the beef served weekly at the
cafeteria and, later in the novel, the archetypically French white food imposed by the new
headmistress who has replaced rice with bread.140
Despite their freedom to operationalize national nutritional directives by choosing which
specific foods to serve, according to Rahsaan Maxwell, the cantines exhibit a surprising
consistency of offering, revealing a consensus on French culinary culture.141 Whether located in
an affluent, urban, and multi-racial area such as the Paris region or in a low-income, rural, and
predominantly white region such as lower Normandy, elementary schools offer substantially
analogous foods selected from the traditional French repertoire.142 The few foreign foods that
appear on the menu come from Italy, North Africa, the United States, the Netherlands, and
Switzerland in the form of pasta, pizza, chicken nuggets, burgers, couscous, tajine, Dutch or
Swiss cheeses—all foods which have become part of mainstream French and global food culture.
These international foods are presented at the table from a traditional French perspective. For
example, Maxwell observed that pastas are served with a topping of French cheese or cream.
Dishes selected from other cuisines only appear on menus for special, festive occasions, often as
a result of the inclusion of a particular geographic cultural area in the curriculum. They are
exoticized by the appearance of costumes, special decorations, or flags reinforcing the cultural
distance. The cantines thus reproduce race by modelling a one-sided account of what it means to
eat French food and therefore to be French.143
16You can also read
