Mummy, I noticed that as well. I spent a year in England a few years ago, and was amazed at the differences. I referred to my oven as my "Easy Bake oven" because it felt like a toy
Shopping was interesting. Cottage cheese came in little bitty containers, instead of the giant tubs we are used to. Everything came in small containers meant to serve a couple of portions. When I first arrived, I shopped as we Americans do, and loaded the shopping cart full and had to take a taxi home. My cabinets were well stocked and my skinny fridge was overflowing. My landlord gasped and said that when he was growing up, his family never had as much food in their kitchen as I did, and that was for his whole family. I was just one person. He also commented that he thought it could be too tempting to overeat
By the end of the year, I was living more like the locals. I walked several miles round trip to Tesco, carrying home only what would fit in one or two bags, and just shopped whenever I needed a little something. No more taxi cabs filled with food.
So I get the differences that Guiliano was trying to point out in her book. However, several critics have said she was describing a lifestyle from several decades ago, and that the French no longer live that way. They are living busier lifestyles, eating more convenience foods, and they are gaining weight. Maybe not at the rate we are, but they are gaining.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/03/news/obese.php
Quote:
Doctors here are perplexed by the runaway success in the United States of the best-selling advice book "French Women Don't Get Fat."
"Oh, but they do!" said Dr. France Bellisle, a prominent obesity researcher here. "I work in a nutrition department where we see lots of people who are overweight. And I can tell you that French women are getting obese - and some massively obese - these days."
In fact, France is suffering something of an obesity crisis, with rates here rising "at an alarming rate," particularly among young people, Bellisle said. True, absolute rates are still lower here than in the United States and most other European countries: 11.3 percent of the French are obese and nearly 40 percent overweight, compared with more than 50 percent overweight in Britain and the United States.
But the sudden sharp rise - 5 percent annually since 1997 - is causing great alarm in a society renowned for thinness, a country that long seemed exempt from a worldwide epidemic of obesity.