How the French eat

A peek into the daily eating habits of many French people

French food is famous all over the world. But when people think of French food — if they think about it at all — they usually think of Michelin-starred fine dining restaurants, alongside the usual snails, frogs legs and smelly cheese stereotypes.

But there’s much more to French food than meets the eye. Having lived in France for around two years, I think I’ve some idea of how a lot of French people approach food in their daily lives. Here’s a quick guide to how France eats.

Breakfast
As with Italians and Spaniards, French people don’t tend to eat very much for breakfast. A lot of people skip breakfast entirely, meaning that their first meal of the day would only occur at 13H00 or 1pm. If they were to eat breakfast (or “little lunch”, as it’s called in French), they might have some cereal and/or some bread, yoghurt, fruit and/or a hot chocolate, which they are liable to drink from a bowl. While you can buy a croissant or a pain au chocolat / chocolatine from a pâtisserie, they’re seen as quite unhealthy and so people don’t tend to eat them very often.

As you may have noticed from that list, all the items are sweet. That’s because there’s an unspoken rule that consuming savoury foods for breakfast is criminal. When…