look@round
October 19th, 2007, 02:46 AM
Here's an article from today's Westender magazine. Of course, when I saw on the cover of the magazine "Can the French teach West Coasters how to live?", I could'nt help reading this article :lol:
Well, that's a very "cliché" article, about the French & parisian way of life and the way we consider food.
But there's one thing I'd like to ask... Why do you guys have to eat so quickly all the time?!! Not only in Vancouver, but it was the same in Toronto.
I'm personaly not able to eat in 30 minutes for my lunch break... I would need 30 more minutes to appreciate that break!!
And the same for restaurant. You're always in a rush! You just arrived, and the waiter is already asking you "are you ready to order"?!!! Come on, we just arrived!!! We need to talk first, to read the menu, etc!!
That's one of the thing I think I'll never be able to adapt here...
So pls guys, take your time and enjoy your food :cheers:
Getting FRENCHED
Healthy living vs. living well: Vancouverites getting active while (left) the author drinks wine straight from the bottle, in a rowboat somewhere in France.
By Michael Harris
Oct 18 2007
There’s a hole in the logic of our West Coast lifestyle — and it’s shaped a lot like a croissant.
Every morning my mother walks for a couple of hours on West Vancouver’s seawall at an intimidating speed. Her reasons are twofold. Firstly, there’s the visceral thrill one gets from passing slow walkers and thinking how they’ll grow fat and die before you do. Secondly, there’s the Protestant Work Ethic. While she isn’t religious, like most Vancouverites she has adopted the belief that health — or “wellness,” as we call it now — is a function of personal toil.
Dr. Nigma Sciortino, who unpacked “wellness” for me recently, is an esteemed naturopath who serves as resident doctor for a local specialty supermarket. She notes that Vancouver is an ideal place to achieve a healthy life: we gulp down salmon, we don’t suffer from alarm-worthy pollution levels, and our climate allows us to play outside all year.
We have a headstart, yet, for all our power-walking and yoga, there’s something we still need to figure out.
“People will come to me and say they feel fine, but wellness is about more than not being sick,” says Dr. Sciortino. “It’s about the quality of life — the spirit, mind and body in one. In Paris, for example, that mentality is part of the culture.”
French Women Don’t Get Fat, the 2004 book by Mireille Guiliano, alerted the North American masses to this lifestyle theory, which proved popular enough to land the book on the bestseller list. Sciortino is a proponent of the basic premises in Guiliano’s book. “The French eat slowly, they take long lunches, there’s no rush,” she says. “Wine is good, but it’s not what keeps the French thin. And it’s not smoking either.” (There’s only a ten per cent difference in smoking rates between the U.S. and France, while the obesity gap is far greater). “We’re always rushing at the table, but eating should be enjoyed.”
Throughout her book, Guiliano chastises North America’s disregard for simple enjoyment. Furthermore, exercise machines, she writes, are “a vestige of Puritanism: instruments of public self-flagellation to make up for private sins of couch riding and overeating.” The French, because they typically eschew both fatty steaks and free weights, exist in that happy middle-ground called wellness.
I recently returned from a month in Paris (gosh, that’s fun to write). I kept myself busy ogling all the pretty people while trying to break down my dietary Vancouverisms. I ordered croissants and espresso for breakfast. I had soft white bread for lunch, with little tomatoes and gobs of brie inside. And for dinner — what else? — duck confit. In total, I lost about four pounds.
True, I walked everywhere. But that hardly felt like exercise. And I didn’t jog at all, though I normally submit to three brief sprints each week in Vancouver. When I asked Parisians about gyms, they tossed me sneers and asked what part of America I came from.
I met a Frenchman at the Turkish baths (like you do) and he invited me out for dinner the following night. I had the lamb and hunkered into it with (what I now think of as American) gusto. My date was visibly shocked and held a serene hand over my plate to slow me down. “Be gentle, Mi-kale,” said Olivier. “The lamb, you know, it is only a baby.”
I ate more slowly. I digested.
“If you eat at the speed of light,” says Dr. Sciortino, “you don’t give your pancreas a chance to digest the food. Seventy to eighty per cent of the people who see me have digestive problems and they don’t even know it.”
And yet, I never got over the length of time one must commit to a dinner in Paris. “Oh, you would like to order?” the waiter would say, slightly confused, after I had stared at him for half an hour. At the end of a meal, again, there was an obligatory 30-minute study-the-ceiling-and-contemplate-life period before any server would dare to suggest that he might possibly, if I felt ready, go and see if there was a bill somewhere.
You can’t even get a coffee to go. This discovery left me terrified and confused on the Champs-Élysées.
There are, of course, take-away options if you duck into a Starbucks — the chain has encroached on the major boulevards of Paris like a large and ornery flock of pigeons. McDonald’s is also increasingly available. (Once, I should admit, I purchased a “Royale with Cheese,” but that was only because I had to be somewhere in three hours.)
The rate of obesity in France —thanks to these slight American incursions on Parisian diets — has doubled in recent years, and now sits around 12 per cent.
Which is exactly where Vancouver’s obesity rate had settled when Statistics Canada checked in, in 2004. It’s saddening to think we have the same collective waist size as a people who roll over in bed every morning and eat a pound of butter. But if we could gain a little composure at the dinner table — if we even, for that matter, sat down at the dinner table — perhaps we could be more Parisian-thin than the Parisians. If we stopped trying to improve ourselves and started enjoying ourselves instead, we might be healthier than ever before.
The chorus from Tourism Vancouver says we can ski in the morning and go kayaking in the afternoon. It’s time we admitted to the world — and to ourselves — that no one in the history of Vancouver has ever done that. But perhaps we needn’t work so hard. If we combined a little West Coast “active lifestyle” with the Parisian interest in “actual life style,” we’d simultaneously become healthier and drop our bug-eyed obsession with health.
Well, that's a very "cliché" article, about the French & parisian way of life and the way we consider food.
But there's one thing I'd like to ask... Why do you guys have to eat so quickly all the time?!! Not only in Vancouver, but it was the same in Toronto.
I'm personaly not able to eat in 30 minutes for my lunch break... I would need 30 more minutes to appreciate that break!!
And the same for restaurant. You're always in a rush! You just arrived, and the waiter is already asking you "are you ready to order"?!!! Come on, we just arrived!!! We need to talk first, to read the menu, etc!!
That's one of the thing I think I'll never be able to adapt here...
So pls guys, take your time and enjoy your food :cheers:
Getting FRENCHED
Healthy living vs. living well: Vancouverites getting active while (left) the author drinks wine straight from the bottle, in a rowboat somewhere in France.
By Michael Harris
Oct 18 2007
There’s a hole in the logic of our West Coast lifestyle — and it’s shaped a lot like a croissant.
Every morning my mother walks for a couple of hours on West Vancouver’s seawall at an intimidating speed. Her reasons are twofold. Firstly, there’s the visceral thrill one gets from passing slow walkers and thinking how they’ll grow fat and die before you do. Secondly, there’s the Protestant Work Ethic. While she isn’t religious, like most Vancouverites she has adopted the belief that health — or “wellness,” as we call it now — is a function of personal toil.
Dr. Nigma Sciortino, who unpacked “wellness” for me recently, is an esteemed naturopath who serves as resident doctor for a local specialty supermarket. She notes that Vancouver is an ideal place to achieve a healthy life: we gulp down salmon, we don’t suffer from alarm-worthy pollution levels, and our climate allows us to play outside all year.
We have a headstart, yet, for all our power-walking and yoga, there’s something we still need to figure out.
“People will come to me and say they feel fine, but wellness is about more than not being sick,” says Dr. Sciortino. “It’s about the quality of life — the spirit, mind and body in one. In Paris, for example, that mentality is part of the culture.”
French Women Don’t Get Fat, the 2004 book by Mireille Guiliano, alerted the North American masses to this lifestyle theory, which proved popular enough to land the book on the bestseller list. Sciortino is a proponent of the basic premises in Guiliano’s book. “The French eat slowly, they take long lunches, there’s no rush,” she says. “Wine is good, but it’s not what keeps the French thin. And it’s not smoking either.” (There’s only a ten per cent difference in smoking rates between the U.S. and France, while the obesity gap is far greater). “We’re always rushing at the table, but eating should be enjoyed.”
Throughout her book, Guiliano chastises North America’s disregard for simple enjoyment. Furthermore, exercise machines, she writes, are “a vestige of Puritanism: instruments of public self-flagellation to make up for private sins of couch riding and overeating.” The French, because they typically eschew both fatty steaks and free weights, exist in that happy middle-ground called wellness.
I recently returned from a month in Paris (gosh, that’s fun to write). I kept myself busy ogling all the pretty people while trying to break down my dietary Vancouverisms. I ordered croissants and espresso for breakfast. I had soft white bread for lunch, with little tomatoes and gobs of brie inside. And for dinner — what else? — duck confit. In total, I lost about four pounds.
True, I walked everywhere. But that hardly felt like exercise. And I didn’t jog at all, though I normally submit to three brief sprints each week in Vancouver. When I asked Parisians about gyms, they tossed me sneers and asked what part of America I came from.
I met a Frenchman at the Turkish baths (like you do) and he invited me out for dinner the following night. I had the lamb and hunkered into it with (what I now think of as American) gusto. My date was visibly shocked and held a serene hand over my plate to slow me down. “Be gentle, Mi-kale,” said Olivier. “The lamb, you know, it is only a baby.”
I ate more slowly. I digested.
“If you eat at the speed of light,” says Dr. Sciortino, “you don’t give your pancreas a chance to digest the food. Seventy to eighty per cent of the people who see me have digestive problems and they don’t even know it.”
And yet, I never got over the length of time one must commit to a dinner in Paris. “Oh, you would like to order?” the waiter would say, slightly confused, after I had stared at him for half an hour. At the end of a meal, again, there was an obligatory 30-minute study-the-ceiling-and-contemplate-life period before any server would dare to suggest that he might possibly, if I felt ready, go and see if there was a bill somewhere.
You can’t even get a coffee to go. This discovery left me terrified and confused on the Champs-Élysées.
There are, of course, take-away options if you duck into a Starbucks — the chain has encroached on the major boulevards of Paris like a large and ornery flock of pigeons. McDonald’s is also increasingly available. (Once, I should admit, I purchased a “Royale with Cheese,” but that was only because I had to be somewhere in three hours.)
The rate of obesity in France —thanks to these slight American incursions on Parisian diets — has doubled in recent years, and now sits around 12 per cent.
Which is exactly where Vancouver’s obesity rate had settled when Statistics Canada checked in, in 2004. It’s saddening to think we have the same collective waist size as a people who roll over in bed every morning and eat a pound of butter. But if we could gain a little composure at the dinner table — if we even, for that matter, sat down at the dinner table — perhaps we could be more Parisian-thin than the Parisians. If we stopped trying to improve ourselves and started enjoying ourselves instead, we might be healthier than ever before.
The chorus from Tourism Vancouver says we can ski in the morning and go kayaking in the afternoon. It’s time we admitted to the world — and to ourselves — that no one in the history of Vancouver has ever done that. But perhaps we needn’t work so hard. If we combined a little West Coast “active lifestyle” with the Parisian interest in “actual life style,” we’d simultaneously become healthier and drop our bug-eyed obsession with health.