Ten billion baguettes are still sold every year in France, three out of four loaves sold every day. But all is not well on the bread front. Though the country still has some 34,000 independent boulangeries, the highest density of bakeries in the world, bread sales and boulangeries are on a dé-croissant spiral, the latter, from 54,000 in 1950, no longer, sad to say, the ubiquitous, enticing presence on every village square. While the average Frenchman in 1900 ate three baguettes a day, today he will consume barely half of one, half as much as 30 years ago. Young people too have cut back as much as a third in the last decade.
"People are too busy or work too late to go to the bakery," Bernard Valluis complains. He is a co-president of the Observatoire du Pain,the bakers' and millers' lobby which is running a billboard campaign in 130 cities to halt the slide. "Teenagers are skipping breakfast," he says. Or, God forbid, they and others are succumbing to breakfast cereals. Or health fads. Like French culture, in danger of being swamped by Hollywood, the petit dejeuner is under sustained attack from Kellogg's. At lunch and dinner bread is ceding its place to pasta and rice.
Not surprisingly the Observatoire takes this existential crise all very seriously. Its website (www.tuasprislepain.fr) explains that "France is a 'civilisation of bread' and this food is part of the traditional meal 'à la française'."
Its cri de coeur finds a champion in American historian Steven L Kaplan whose new book, Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread), explores the centrality of bread in French history, the ancien régime's bread laws and the country's obsession, sacred and profane, with white bread. "It is not a trivial matter because historically white bread is so identified with upward mobility, with well-being. The bread of the Eucharist was a piece of white wheaten bread until the Church sold out and went for those horrible wafers."
Worrying times, and as the old French adage has it, "Pas de gain sans pain".