Response to "Is There a Crisis in French Cooking?"

            Adan Gopnik’s essay “Is There a Crisis in French Cooking?” was thought provoking on many levels.  Even the title is mind boggling-I had no idea French cooking being in a state of crisis was even a concern (and I still am not entirely convinced).  I am still trying to decide whether I loved or hated reading this piece (which is a good sign because 9 times out of 10 when I say that after giving it some consideration I land on being in love with it).  It questions the politics, social implications and so much more of food.  I feel like to truly understand this piece someone would have to read it 10 times with a careful eye and then do further research on all of the various points it raises.  One subject in particular that caught my eye was the emphasis on “frenchness.”

            When discussing the professor Eugenio Donato, Gopnik conveys his fascination with the so-called “French Food” that Donato doesn’t truly believe to be completely French: “The invention of the French restaurant, Eugion believed, depended largely on what every assistant professor would now call an ‘essentialized’ idea of France,” (Gopnik 72).  I cannot say for certain that I grasped what Gopnik was trying to get at since this piece was very dense, but the way I saw it was that there is such a cliché and stereotyped view we have of French people and French food in our head, which in being so potent becomes Frenchness.  Frenchness is not baguettes and smoking cigarettes, it is us placing that perception on a culture we think we understand.

            This is such a complex and interesting issue to me.  One thing it made me think of was our discussion in class.  We talked about how we don’t really know how to define American food and how American food is, for the most part, other people’s food, just Americanized.  American Chinese food is vastly different from authentic Chinese food.  Same with Italian pizza.  As iconic as French food is, I think it is a similar situation to America.  This essay talked a lot about the aspect of the way food is prepared in France and the tradition of this preparation, but it is difficult to pinpoint an actual food that is French.  This may be my limited knowledge but from my study of French culture and language I find it difficult to come up with an answer.

            This article made me think not only of iconic French food but iconic Frenchness.  In my personal experience, I have been told many times that I look French.  After revealing that the foreign language I speak is French I have been told almost always that that is what people would have guessed.  That it makes sense.  Yet when I ask why that is the case, people don’t really know what to say.  I think they see my last name and then look for things to make me be “French” instead of the other way around.  The point is, among other things this article inspired much thought for me about the projection of Frenchness we put on things, as I’m sure we do with many other cultures.  It is a complex and interesting discussion that I believe is just commenced in this reading.