The French Way (28 page)

By the mid-to-late 1990s the American chain had won a dominant position in the market for hamburgers and for fast food in general. The bad days of Dayan were far behind: in 1997 the company had 550 outlets in France, over twice as many as its nearest rival, France Quick, and it controlled 60 percent of the entire fast food market.
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McDonald's also broadened its appeal. Golden Arches were appearing outside city centers, in shopping malls, on major roadways, in small towns, and in even poorer suburbs. The company partnered with Galeries Lafayette, as well as Disney, and opened outlets that featured themes such as sports. Its clientele also matured: almost half its customers were not adolescents.
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In total sales McDonald's was the top restaurant chain, lapping its French competitors like Buffalo Grill and Taverne de Mai'tre Kanter. Unable to compete with McDonald's, Burger King shuttered its operations. By 1998 McDonald's was opening new stores at a pace of more than one unit per week, employing 25,000, earning €1.47 billion, and serving a million meals per day.
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France had become the company's third largest overseas market in sales, trailing only Japan and Germany.
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Fast food, however, occupied only a small fraction of the restaurant business, lagging far behind traditional restaurants and cafes.

The arrival of McDonald's remade the industry. Fast food was not new: long before the construction of the first McDonald's franchise one could buy crepes and
gaufres
from sidewalk vendors. But fast food, defined as selling prepared food over the counter at relatively low prices to be consumed on the premises or taken away, boomed in the 1970s and ‘80s largely because of specialized American-style hamburger outlets—with McDonald's winning the biggest market share and forcing some competitors out of business, including many of the viennoiseries.
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Some rivals closed shop, but others adapted to the competition from abroad. There was widespread copying of McDonald's operations within the French fast food business.
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French chains—both burger outlets like France Quick, and viennoiseries—borrowed directly from the Americans. What was copied ranged from restaurant layout to standardized food preparation and computerized accounting (but not the franchise system). Many of these changes were adopted while McDonald's was paralyzed by its legal troubles in the 1970s. Large French hotel and restaurant chains invested and helped consolidate local fast food operators. Some even acquired expensive urban real estate, as McDonald's had done, for their prime sites. McDonald's also induced innovations in food processing and the manufacture of restaurant equipment. French and European food suppliers in general were not accustomed to high-volume, standardized output and could not produce everything needed for a McDonald's menu.
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For example, when McDonald's arrived in Europe in the 1970s farmers did not cultivate Russet potatoes; suppliers were unable to provide frozen french fries; and bakeries could not produce uniform, soft buns. McDonald's intervened and through a combination of lucrative contracts, technical and financial aid, and threats to build its own facilities, transformed food processing. But farmers could only become suppliers if they “McDonaldized” their crops. In time European suppliers provided everything McDonald's needed and in so doing improved their own production techniques. The firm also changed labor practice in the fast food business by hiring young part-time help—especially students. Firms like France Quick followed suit.

Part-time employees, who could be trained in hours and viewed their job as temporary, challenged the pattern of work in traditional restaurants where cooks and waiters regarded their positions as careers.

Besides such deskilling, McDonald's exported its opposition to trade unions. Its strong antiunion stance, like that of the Walt Disney Company, caused continuous legal troubles, vandalism, and serious labor protests. Employees charged the company with paying a minimum wage, forcing employees to be available for surges of customers, and failing to grant them the rights guaranteed by the labor code like mandated breaks and bonuses for night shifts. And what McDonald's lauded as job flexibility—that is, irregular hours and seasonal work—would become synonymous with
precarite
—the opposite of job security. Unions and the political Left worried that “McWork,” the exemplar of precarite and American-style deregulation, would spread to other service sector jobs.
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Beyond business and labor practices, what effect did McDonald's and fast food in general have on French eating habits ? We have studies of McDonald's impact on other cultures, but little for France.
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There are data indicating a slight decline of the traditional midday meal at home and other data showing the closing of cafes. Eating a quick lunch or buying take-out food became more common in these decades.
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But causation is complicated here, and these changes cannot simply be attributed to hamburger chains. There were other reasons, such as the increased role of women in the workforce, intensified urbanization, traffic congestion, greater leisure, higher incomes among adolescents, and shorter midday breaks. But the proliferation of fast food outlets, led by McDonald's, also contributed. Similarly, as fast food boomed, the number of cafes declined: in the mid-1980s, compared to the 1960s, there were less than half of these neighborhood haunts for eating, drinking, and
bavardage.
An alternative to the cafe, especially for the young and for families, was the Golden Arches.

One should not exaggerate—hamburgers did not transform how the French ate. A mere 3.2 percent of all meals outside the home were
consumed at McDonald's in the late 1990s.
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Statistical studies for the period 1988-97 showed a firm attachment to traditional ways, to
bien manger
at home at regular hours. Researchers found that four of five continued to eat their midday meal at home and nine of ten did so for their dinner.
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Eating outside the home was much less frequent in France than in the United States. Among the reasons for maintaining this tradition were the pleasures, including the conviviality and relaxation, that accompanied the family meal; the esteem awarded traditional and creative cuisine; and the growing interests in natural and wholesome products, as well as a diverse menu.

Among those who frequented hamburger outlets in the early 1990s, the most numerous were fifteen-to twenty-four-year-olds and frequency declined with age: only a tiny fraction of those between thirty-five and forty-nine ate burgers, and virtually none of those over age fifty.
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Even among teenagers hamburgers occupied a small fraction of the diet. For those who did elect to eat outside the home at midday, most continued to devour other fare like sandwiches or eat at viennoiseries. McDonald's, the leader in fast food, had to compete with a host of nonhamburger fast-service restaurants, from grills, theme restaurants, and highway stops to trendy cafes, sandwich shops, and sidewalk quiche and pizza stands, not to mention school or company cafeterias and home delivery.
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In fact, upscale French-style sandwich chains like Cosi outnumbered McDonald's and its counterparts in the late 1990s.
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Eating in either the traditional or alternative fast food mode was one form of implicit resistance to the American way of food; but there was one episode that spoke to a more intense and direct confrontation.

In 1999 McDonald's inadvertently became the target ofpopular resistance to American-led globalization. This is the story of Jose Bove, the political radical turned sheep farmer who directed an assault against the Golden Arches. The background for his protest was the competition over trade, especially agriculture, between France and the United States in the 1990s. There was also the growing alarm over food safety including fears about hormone-treated beef from the United States,
the outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain, a simmering debate over genetically modified American crops like soybeans, and contaminated Coca-Cola removed from stores in France and Belgium in the spring of 1999. And there was deepening anxiety about the alleged deterioration of French cuisine caused by the spread of fast food associated with McDonald's. The European Union (EU), with French support, had banned the import of hormone-treated beef on the grounds of safety, and this eventually provoked the U.S. government, as a reprisal, to raise duties on certain French luxury imports, including Roquefort cheese—which happened to be both Bove's crop and a specialty associated with
le terroir.
In August 1999 Bove and other activists vandalized a McDonald's construction site in the small southern town of Millau using a tractor, pick axes, and power saws.

Bove's brief jailing did not prevent him from leading the charge against “industrial food” and globalization. He said his action was “symbolic dismantling,” in the name of “the battle against globalization and the right of the people to feed themselves as they choose.”
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Bove attacked Americans for forcing
la malbouffe
—meaning standardized, yet unsafe, food—on the French. He insisted that
l'agriculture paysanne
was essential to national culture, and thus the United States via McDonald's was threatening both food and small farmers—two markers of French national identity. The mayor of a town near Millau imposed a 100 percent tax on Coca-Cola, proclaiming, “Here we cannot make plastic cheeses and hormone beef. Roquefort is unique, a symbol of our battle against the globalization of taste.”
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These charges were informed by the trope about Americans who ate badly and treated everything, including food, as merchandise. Even though Bove denied he was anti-American, pointing out he had spent part of his youth in California, the American challenge was essential to the uproar. As one political analyst wrote, “Behind all this lies a rejection of cultural and culinary dispossession. There is a certain allergy in Europe to the extent of American power accumulated since the cold war's end, and the most virulent expression of that allergy today seems to be food.”
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The incident at Millau catapulted Bove to national and international fame. The radical with his pipe, walrus moustache, jovial persona, and earthy demeanor became an instant folk hero, but this was a “peasant” who knew how to exploit the media. When he appeared for his trial the following summer he arrived in a farmer's wagon pulled by a tractor—reminding some of the tumbrels that carried victims to the guillotine during the French Revolution—surrounded by 20,000 colorful supporters, some wearing T-shirts saying “The World Is Not Merchandise and I'm Not Either,” and a full retinue of television crews.
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He later traveled to Seattle for a meeting of the World Trade Organization carrying a huge piece of Roquefort. After Millau, McDonald's franchises suffered from a rash of “incidents” throughout France, including the dumping of rotting apples and manure on their premises and the “kidnapping” of effigies of Ronald McDonald by so-called ecowarriors, one of whom identified the clown as “the subliminal ambassador of mercantile empires of standardization and conformism.”
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Jose Bove touched a national nerve. It was a battle between Roquefort and the hamburger, between true cuisine and la malbouffe, between the small farmer and the multinational, between the peasant and the
seigneur
, between France and American-led globalization.
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Or, as a journalist for
Le Monde
exclaimed, “[Bove] was right. Resistance to the hegemonic pretentions of the hamburger is, above all, a cultural imperative.”
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Protestors of every sort joined in, including antiglobalization organizations, ecologists, small farmers, consumer groups, communists, labor unions, and a host of other specialized interests like housing activists and backers of the movement to revive the Occitan language. One radio broadcaster called Bove “the spirit of France”; the daily press praised him, and, to be sure, politicians joined hands. President Jacques Chirac said that wrecking McDonald's was not an acceptable way of protest, yet “[i]t would be in nobody's interest to allow one single power, a respectable and friendly one, to rule undivided over the planet's food markets.”
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Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said, “I am personally not very pro-McDo” and then invited Bove to dine with him.

Figure 8. A jubilant Jose Bove at his trial, as pictured on the cover of his book. Courtesy Editions La Decouverte.

Bove's antics shocked McDonald's, and the chain retaliated. The company had always prided itself on conveying both an American and a local image, but after the trashing at Millau it intensified its efforts at appearing French. It took out full-page newspaper ads mocking anti-Americanism and proclaiming the business was indigenous. In one ad an overweight American in a cowboy hat complained, “What I don't like about McDonald's in France is that it doesn't buy American beef.”
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The text of the spoof spelled out, in reference to the European ban on hormone treated beef, that only French beef was guaranteed to be safe. The message was that McDonald's may have been “born in the United States,” but it was “made in France.” Everything in the Big Mac was French except the cheese (because France did not produce cheddar).
A manager of McDonald's-France proclaimed that 80 percent of all its food materials were French in origin and the rest were predominantly European. French farmers were McDonald's “partners”: 45,000 livestock breeders supplied 27,000 tons of beef per year. He added that 90 percent of its franchises were owned by French entrepreneurs and its employees were virtually all French.
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The CEO in Oak Brook, Illinois, Jack Greenberg, called Bove's crew “terrorists,” pointing out that they had the wrong target since McDonald's was creating jobs for thousands of French adolescents and work for French business such as construction companies.
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