Plus Petite

Everything is smaller in France. The sidewalks, the drinking glasses, the ceilings in the mall, shampoo bottles, cars, all that jazz.

They have less space in France so it would make sense to have smaller things and be more prone to conservation but I also think it’s representative of the culture of excess in the United States. We have to have things bigger better, more impressive.

I think that this “culture of excess” can be linked to American eating/exercise habits as well. People in France and Poland put butter on their sandwiches, that’s like unheard of in the United States. (Although I’m starting to realize now that I’m here in Krakow that just as many Polish people are chubbin it out as Americans, and I shouldn’t go by my super tall/skinny cousins as a guide to the Polish norm! lol) Americans are carb weary forgoing pasta and bread for lettuce wraps while in France they chow down on baguettes everyday. Milk in France is like half and half! I drink skim milk at home and I’m going to have to take some time to get used to it again because the milk I drink every morning in France for breakfast is creamy and delicious.

I feel like Americans are super health conscious on one end and then really chubby and lazy on the other - there’s like no middle ground. Exercising and going to the gym is much bigger in the U.S. than it is France. I honestly don’t think the concept of moderation exists in the U.S. Thus we are both one of the heaviest populations in the world as well as the ones obsessed with dieting, exercise, and body image. I think I eat healthier in the U.S. but eat more and obviously walk less even on campus than I do here.

Europeans I’ve noticed both in Poland and in France utilize space better in their homes. They make the most of what they have.

My host mom in France considers Tours a small city but to me it’s pretty grand especially compared to a place like Grand Blanc, Michigan.

I went to a bar/café in town called The Guinguette on the banks of the Loire River and it had such a nice ambience with strung lights, completely outdoor tables and chairs, an area for games, a stage for music that I thought I would have loved to have had this place around when I was a teenager.

There are so many cafes, parks, and shops in Tours! In Grand Blanc the main hang out was the Starbucks where I went to too many times. Teenagers hang out along the banks of the Loire at night in circles talking and smoking (tobacco and weed) and it seems like such a nice slow paced sort of lifestyle here that I wonder how my life might have been different had I grown up here.

All this being said, I still feel like the United States is my home and always will be. 

La nourriture (Food)

I'm concerned with my diet in France. I eat bread and butter/or/cheese at literally every meal.

When you walk down the streets of Tours during lunchtime you cannot walk one block without seeing at least 3 people eating baguettes or baguette sandwiches.

I talked with my host mom this morning about the diets of Americans and French. I told her that a lot of Americans are carb weary because of the Atkins rhetoric we hear all the time. She cooks a lot of good food, but we eat cheese, butter, and cream sauces often. I wonder how the French stay so skinny!

Her answer was that it's the processed foods that make one fat not the natural stuff like bread, potatoes and butter! She also said that France was catching up with America in terms of weight gain. :P

It also seems as though the French don't drink as much during meals. They'll have a glass of wine during dinner or a glass of water but the glasses here are small compared to those in America and I feel like I look odd pouring myself as many glasses as I do during a meal!

I guess it's part of the culture of excess in the United States... everything does seem to have to be bigger in America. I'm going to talk more about the "culture of excess" in another blog post!

Oh another funny thing - I bought tweezers here that have pictures of French macaroons on them. The macaroons here are different than the American version and I'm excited to try them!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37158245/ns/travel-luxury/?pg=10#TRAVEL_100514_WhatNotToDoParis_Concierge

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Here's a typical sampling of what I eat daily in France:

Breakfast - Baguette with butter, jam, nutella, or honey, pain au lait (small rectangular bread), café au lait, les chouquettes (think of cream puffs without the cream, pictured below)

Lunch - Baguette with cheese, baguette with sliced ham, cheese and butter = classic French sandwich and lunch, various crudités.

Dinner - Lettuce with vinaigrette dressing, wine, baguette & cheese, some type of meat, vegetables (vegetables and meat are prepared with only a little spicing), and a speciality dish from different regions in France particularly Lyon because that's where my host mom was born.

Dessert - French desserts are reaaaalllllyyyy good, crème chocolat, tarte aux fruits, or simply fruit after dinner.

*My host family doesn't do courses, but a lot people who I've talked to their families do.

Almond Milk and Fish, yo

It's summertime which means that in addition to being bored and useless til I go to France in a few weeks, I have to take on the responsibility of finding and making healthy meals for myself since I no longer have the caf at my disposal.

My summertime quest for healthy food/meals sort of started off (of all things) with a tweet about hemp milk by Edward Norton. I had never heard of hemp milk before so I looked it up and found a site that explained different alternatives to milk which include soy, rice, hemp, oat, and almond. Soy milk is really good, so I wanted to try what else was out there. So I chose almond milk, and tried it. And boy is it hard to drink. I don't consider myself a picky eater, but after a few seconds, I was so repulsed I was ready to spit all the milk out. I'm not sure quite how to describe the taste other than it's like an almond army attacking your taste-buds. The flavor is so intense it almost feels like you'll never be able to even think about eating an individual almond again. Diluting the milk with water didn't help to quell the unpleasantness much either. After taking only a few sips I sat there looking at the fairly large container and thinking what a pity it was that it was probably going to go to waste. The fact that I was going to be throwing away something so ridiculously low fat and healthy --it's 50 calories a cup and brimming with vitamins like B12, D, & E, was pretty disappointing. However the story does not end here...

Lo and behold my perennial favorite for just about everything under the sun, The New York Times, has a section called Recipes for Health with relatively simple recipes that tah-dah are healthy for you! :) There was a recipe for a Banana Smoothie highlighted on the site that I happened to click on because the picture caught my attention. In the recipe you can substitute some of the ingredients like peanut butter for almond butter or skim milk for almond milk. Then I got excited that maybe bulbous carton of almond milk wouldn't go to waste afterall! I made the recipe, improvising a bit, here's the link to it and really liked the results! So everything worked out in the end.



Another thing...
During the last week in school I had a really good grilled salmon salad in the caf and became more interested in eating fish. The thing with fish is that despite being incredibly healthy to eat comes with all this baggage about mercury levels, extinction, and controversy about farms that grow them. Most health experts (or whoever it is that dictates to the general populace what's good for us and what isn't) urge people to eat more fish particularly because they're high in protein and low in fat. Yet, so many species are over-harvested or raised on the aforementioned fish farms that grow them in an unhealthy and cruel way, that navigating the waters of buying fish can be a bit confusing. The Environmental Defense Fund has a great tool up that can help you find which fish to buy and eat. Find it here:

I hope my Democratization of the Environment professor is proud of me that I actually am taking what I learned and applying into to my life and spreading the news to others. ;)