Au Revoir to All That: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine
By Michael Steinberger
Bloomsbury £16.99, 256 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

The French call it déclinisme, the national propensity for measuring, discussing and wallowing in the country’s seemingly perpetual decline.

Books, newspaper columns and television chat shows dwell obsessively on the downhill direction of French society, democracy, work habits, civility and culture. Conferences and colloquies on such subjects are more numerous than Paris strip shows, as Theodore Zeldin, Oxford historian of France, once observed.

Now comes Michael Steinberger to kick the French where it really hurts, in the ballotines. To Steinberger, wine critic for Slate and an FT contributing writer, France is losing the culinary superpower status it has enjoyed since at least the 19th century. Au Revoir to All That reminds us that French chefs, recipes, wines and even food terms have long ruled the globe, in what he calls “the most benevolent example of imperialism the world has ever known”.

The soufflé began to collapse under postwar socialism, with its taxes, 35-hour work week and other bureaucratic burdens. Top chefs could no longer maintain both quality and profitability. The café, France’s gift to the low end of the food chain, has seen its numbers shrink from 200,000 in 1960 to 40,000 today.

Artisanal cheeses and small vineyards are vanishing. As recently as 1990, one-third of all wine consumed in the US was French; now it’s one-sixth. The French themselves are drinking half as much wine per capita as four decades ago.

Local traiteurs and pâtissiers are being squeezed out by hypermarkets, which now account for three-quarters of food sales in France. McDonald’s is the country’s largest private employer. “France is increasingly seen as a culinary museum,” laments Steinberger, “a place with a bright past but not a very promising future”.

The future, he says, belongs to Tokyo, London and the northern Spanish town of San Sebastián, which has more Michelin-starred restaurants per capita than any place in the world. The problem is not that France’s étoile has waned but that others have risen. Innovative chefs such as Spain’s Juan Mari Arzak and Britain’s Heston Blumenthal are forging new frontiers in food chemistry. World-class restaurants now flourish in deepest Wales, lost cheeses have found their artisans in the US, and ambitious wine is made nearly everywhere. Meanwhile, the French have become too busy for fine dining. Their average meal now lasts 38 minutes, down from 88 in the 1980s.

Steinberger, one of those many Americans who adore France, clearly had a fine time writing his jeremiad. He dined with celebrity chefs (Paul Bocuse, Alain Ducasse, Christian Constant), matched wits with Jean-Luc Naret, powerful editor of the Michelin Guide, and marched with José Bové, the luxuriously moustachioed leftist who rails against malbouffe (fast food) and was once jailed for demolishing a McDonald’s.

But Steinberger’s suggestions for reform are disappointingly mild: lowering the 19.6 per cent value-added tax on restaurants (an idea newly enacted by President Nicolas Sarkozy), encouraging France’s minorities to pursue culinary careers, and organising the world’s food lovers to save French cuisine much as aesthetes once did for flooded Italian art treasures.

A better strategy would be for French foodies to forget past glories and focus instead on what made their cuisine great to begin with: imitation. The classic French masters borrowed from everywhere. If French chefs spent more time outside their own country, they could absorb the new influences, tastes and techniques that might yet rescue France’s reputation for gustatory greatness, depriving the déclinistes of at least one cause for despair.

Donald Morrison’s ‘The Death of French Culture’ is published by Polity Press later this year