The Whiteness of French Food

The Whiteness of French Food
Law, Race, and Eating Culture in France
Mathilde Cohen
Abstract: Food is fundamental to French identity. So too is the denial of structural racism and
racial identity. Both tenets are central to the nation’s self-definition, making them all the more
important to think about together. This article purports to identify and critique a form of “French
food Whiteness” (blanchité alimentaire), that is, the use of food and eating practices to reify and
reinforce Whiteness as the dominant racial identity. To do so, it develops four case studies of
how law elevates a fiction of homogenous French/White food as superior and normative at the
expense of alternative ways of eating and their eaters—the law of geographical indications,
school lunches, citizenship, and cultural heritage.
Keywords: citizenship, critical Whiteness studies, cultural heritage, food law, French cuisine,
geographical indications, race, school lunches
Food is central to French identity. So too is the republican universalist ideology that denies
structural racism and the salience of racial identity. Both tenets are central to the nation’s self-
definition, making them difficult yet all the more important to think about together. In a special
journal issue dedicated to the understanding of Whiteness in France, it is critical to reflect on
whether and how Whiteness is produced through food and its regulation. Critical Whiteness
studies have shown that Whiteness is generated in multiple ways, from healthcare to education,
to spatial segregation, work opportunities, and leisure, but it is also shaped, several times per
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

day, by eating and drinking. This article’s claim is that the supposedly neutral quality of
Whiteness is particularly tangible in the context of food in a country where eating culture—
understood as the norms around when, where, how, what, and why we eat—has been the central
means of racial and ethnic identity formation through slavery, colonialism, and immigration. The
Whiteness of French food is all the more powerful in that it is unnamed, enabling the racial
majority to benefit from food privileges without having to acknowledge their racial origin.
Official discourses have taken colorblindness and indifference to differences to be the
defining traits of the French Republic, a position often referred to as “republican universalism.”1
According to this credo, since the Revolution of 1789, France embraced the values of liberty and
equality, premised on the idea that individuals have a direct relationship with the state
unmediated by group identity, thus negating racial identity and the experience of systemic
racism. The collection and analysis of “sensitive data”—including race and ethnicity—is
severely restricted,2 with the consequence that the precise racial and ethnic makeup of the
population remains unknown.3 This long-standing understanding of French cultural and legal
identity has shifted in the last decade with the introduction of antidiscrimination policies, though
grounded on an explicit rejection of racialized understandings of social personhood and the
preservation of the legal fiction that the state recognizes only individual citizens, not groups or
communities.4
French eating culture has followed a parallel trajectory in social and legal meaning. Seen
as a quintessential dimension of French identity, food is also portrayed as a common good
transcending class, gender, race, and ethnic identities. The French meal is presented as a national
ritual to which every citizen can partake on the same footing. Yet, as Sylvie Durmelat writes,
“gastronomy no longer offers the secular, universalist, rational, and irenic imaginary table

inviting all French palates to experience and partake, even if only vicariously, in the communion
of taste.”5 Much like the legal and social conflicts surrounding the headscarf and the burqa
reflect the racialized dimension of republican universalism, the availability, or not, of halal food,
and, more generally, the question of who eats what and when are central sites of contestation of
Whiteness and its operation as an unchallenged and unarticulated social and legal phenomenon.
What is French food? As is the case for other purported national cuisines, its boundaries
are controversial and unstable, covering significant diversity. Could it be that part of what
defines French food is its Whiteness? It is often said that classic French cuisine was nationalized
by the likes of Carême and Escoffier in the early nineteenth century through codification in
written recipes and published cookbooks.6 This haute cuisine was a manifestation of political
power, a class-based cuisine rather than one rooted in a social community and representative of
what people ate outside of a small elite.7 Yet, a set of core ingredients, dishes, drinks, cooking
methods, table manners, patterns of association or exclusion, and ordered sequences of food
throughout the day and the year continues to fuel the culinary canon. French foodways are
shaped by White middle- and upper-class ideas of what meals should be and are influenced by
the cuisine bourgeoise. These eating practices are elevated in law and culture to the status of
normal and normative, against which other practices become deviant and problematic—think
vegan or vegetarian diets, halal or kosher food, eating with one’s hands, or eating at times that do
not conform with the three established daily meals.
Steak frites, still found on the menu of most casual restaurants, used to be presented as an
icon of French food across social classes. Roland Barthes famously wrote in 1957 that “steak is
in France a basic element, nationalized even more than socialized,” and that fries “are the
alimentary sign of Frenchness.”8 Others, such as Annie Hubert, deny the existence of any

national dish, proposing that a national cuisine can only be identified negatively. One is not
French because one eats steak frites, but “because all the others, the foreigners, the Barbarians so
to say, do not eat like we do. It is the inferior or even repulsive or dangerous cuisine of the
‘other’ that strengthens our membership in the group.”9 The contours of French food, in other
words, are delineated negatively and racially. French food is the food eaten by the White
majority in opposition to the eating practices of those considered non-White. It is neither
Whiteness that defines French food nor French food that defines Whiteness, but the two are
mutually reinforcing.
This article has two main goals. First, it aims to shed light on a neglected area in the
study of food and race. Despite the growing importance of critical race theory among French
social scientists, the relationship between French food and Whiteness has not been systematically
investigated. Second, the article develops four case studies of how law elevates a fiction of
homogenous French/White food as superior and prescriptive at the expense of alternative ways
of eating: the law of geographical indications, of school lunches (cantines scolaires), of
citizenship, and of cultural heritage. In doing so, the article purports to identify a form of French
food Whiteness (blanchité alimentaire) encompassing the use of foods and of eating practices
seen as traditionally French to reify and reinforce White supremacy. The Whiteness of French
food lies in how the racial majority perceives its eating culture as normative, allowing its
members to imagine themselves as primary and legitimate members of the nation at the
exclusion of others. This study supports the view that race is a social construction, understanding
Whiteness as a situational status that evolves over time. At the same time, the analysis of food
complicates constructionist conceptions of race, given that eating is both a social and biological
act that transforms bodies.10

This article draws upon several bodies of literature in addition to legal scholarship, such
as food studies, critical race theory, and critical Whiteness studies. My contribution is situated
close to the works of scholars such as Andrea Freeman, Rachel Slocum, and Kyla Tomkins, who
have reflected on the intricacies of food, race, and power, and in particular on the role of eating
in shaping Whiteness.11 I add to this literature by examining a French case study. I pay special
attention to the role of law in making race an enduring and all-permeating ideology, especially in
a culture such as the French culture, which continues to some extent to deny the relevance of
race. The article relies on a close reading of statutes, regulations, and judicial opinions from the
end of the nineteenth century until today pertaining to food and wine. Through direct regulation,
food aid, subsidies, immigration law, labor law, nutrition guidelines, and property rights, among
other tools, law shapes food access and choices, privileging certain diets and stigmatizing others.
Because information on race and ethnicity is often inadequate in France and scholarship
on the relationship between food and race is only beginning to emerge, I paint with a broad
brush, occasionally making assumptions. Among some of the missing facts that would strengthen
the inquiry are data on the race and ethnicity of food workers (including farm, food plant,
grocery, and restaurant owners and employees) and their customers, children participating in
school lunches, those affected by diet-related diseases and agriculture-related environmental
degradation, as well as information on racial discrimination in the food industry.
The article proceeds as follows: after situating my intervention within the literature, I
present some of the constitutive elements of the Whiteness of the French eating culture and its
legal manifestations. The rest of the article focuses on four case studies illustrating how law on
geographical indications, school lunches, citizenship, and cultural heritage elevates a fiction of

French food as the superior and normative White food at the expense of different communities
and alternate ways of eating.
Literature
Eating cultures play an important role as anchors of national identity in multiple sociohistorical
contexts, but commentators have pointed out the special relevance of food to French identity.12
Pascal Ory notes that food is often thought of as “one of the distinctive elements” of French
identity, if not “the principal” element.13 Food figures prominently in accounts of how
individuals and groups define and distinguish themselves within the fabric of the nation. Pierre
Bourdieu famously argued in La Distinction that tastes—literal and metaphorical—are tools of
differentiation and hierarchization.14 He considered eating as a paradigmatic example of behavior
based at least in part on how it might open access to higher levels of social standing. Since
Bourdieu, scholarship on French food and characteristics associated with eaters’ identities has
broadened beyond class analysis to include gastro-politics, colonialism, gender, immigration, and
race.
Michaela DeSoucey, Vincent Martigny, Maryann Tebben, and others have written about
French food and national identity, pointing out the role of cuisine in building an imaginary
national community domestically and fostering nationalist sentiment with respect to other
countries.15 They have shown that food is mobilized as a marker of prestige and status of the
nation in the face of globalization and diminished international stature. Food increasingly figures
in accounts of French colonialism and the legacy of empire, with studies documenting the
circulation of foodways from the periphery to the center and vice versa.16 The forms of racialized
violence effectuated through these transfers are thus coming to the forefront of scholarly
discussion, providing a basis for the current study.17 Scholars have also investigated the

relationship between food and immigration, with a focus on what immigrant groups eat and how
their dietary practices evolve from generation to generation.18 Halal food in particular has
attracted significant academic attention as a site of contested food politics.19 Another angle
concerns the development of so-called “ethnic food businesses”—how immigrants market
“their” foods and how they are perceived.20 In that context, Manuel Calvo and others have
detected various manifestations of “alimentary xenophobia”21 directed at immigrant-owned food
businesses such as restaurants serving kebabs22 or Afro-Caribbean markets.23
What has not been systematically addressed is the relationship between French food and
race, in particular Whiteness. The Whiteness of French food often remains implicit and
uninterrogated. This gap is reflected within the social sciences and in society in a broad
discomfort with acknowledging and critiquing Whiteness. White scholars such as myself must
contend with a cognitive dissonance resulting from the awareness that racial privilege is enacted
on a daily basis through eating. Furthermore, eating, a simultaneously cultural and biological
process, is a fraught topic in a scholarly community that strenuously campaigns for the
consideration of race as a social construction against critics who accuse them of perpetuating
biological racism by using the very category of race.
There are exceptions. Laurence Tibère touches upon the topic of race in her scholarship
on the Reunion, where she argues that food has been “creolized,” becoming a “common
reference system” for all racial groups.24 Colette Guillaumin, often credited for being the first
French social scientist since Frantz Fanon to emphasize that Whiteness lies at the heart of
racism,25 is also one of the few to posit that food is a defining element for the formation of
French racial identity.26 In 1992, she argued that there is no such thing as a homogenous French
cuisine, but that immigrant cuisines serve as negative others to define “a ‘normal’ cuisine,

unified, odorless (or delicious, obviously), but which we would struggle to define precisely.”27
Lauren Janes, in her study of colonial foods during the interwar period in France, argues that
“whiteness is constructed through the embodied practice of eating.”28 Finally, in their analysis of
the controversial introduction of halal burgers at a popular fast food chain, Guillaume Johnson
and his coauthors allude to the idea that Whiteness builds upon sociospatial relations around
food.29
My contribution aims at problematizing the Whiteness of French food by tracking how it
operates through law and policy. I draw on the work of scholars who have explored the
relationship between Whiteness and food systems in the United States—and to a lesser extent in
Australia.30 Though none of these scholars claim that Whiteness is entangled with a specific
national cuisine or legal system, their work supports the claim that race—Whiteness in
particular—emerges and is reinforced through certain eating cultures and discursive practices
around them.
The Hierarchization of the French Eating Culture as White
Food-related boundaries of Whiteness have long been in the making. Arthur de Gobineau, the
infamous aristocrat whose racial theories shaped European racism, used dietary preferences in
his 1853 Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races to demean groups he characterized as non-
White.31 The idea of a connection between race and diet continued well into the twentieth
century in the scientific literature.32 During that time, foodways were thought to be capable of
making and unmaking race.33 To this day, the policing of Whiteness persists through everyday
banal food encounters. The eating practices of people whose racial status is ambivalent such as
Arabs/Maghrebis (and Jews before them) are subject to particular scrutiny for conformity with
White standards. A familiar strategy for those of Muslim backgrounds, for example, to “act

White”34 so as to fit in is to ostensibly “eat French,” most paradigmatically by consuming pork.35
This form of alimentary passing has made it into popular and legal culture. In 2017, France’s
supreme court for private law, the Cour de cassation, was called to determine whether lyrics of
the hip-hop group Zone d’expression populaire represented a racial insult toward the “Français
blancs dits de souche” (French Whites) as claimed by a far-right and Catholic organization.36
The lyrics included, among others: “They want integration though Rolex and ham. Here, they
like you when you’re rich and eat pork.” The Court noted that “the term ‘whites,’ the definition
of which is uncertain to say the least, if not difficult, not to say impossible” did not identify any
precise category of citizens who could have been harmed. No such impossibility was raised to
apprehend the terms “Black” or “Arab,” however, illustrating legal institutions’ unease with the
concept of Whiteness, be it in the context of food or in other contexts.
The reluctance to acknowledge and confront Whiteness is tied to what Ann-Laura Stoler
has dubbed “colonial aphasia”—the difficulty to address the nation’s history of a racialized and
imperial polity.37 This colonial unknowing is glaring in the study of food considering that slavery
as well as settler and franchise colonialisms have been essential for the emergence of
contemporary French foodways. Colonies existed in part to service the metropole with
agricultural products and foodstuffs, relying on enslavement, expropriation, and exploitation of
peoples’ labor and land. The importation of agricultural products from former colonies and
overseas territories continues, and is accompanied with the immigration of people to grow foods
in often exploitative conditions.38
Food colonialism is embedded in the law through the continuing disparities between the
mainland and overseas territories in terms of access to food, food prices, food quality, and a
clean environment.39 Despite variations across regions, foodstuffs are generally more expensive

overseas, where incomes also tend to be lower (except for metropolitans on secondment who get
paid at a premium), resulting in disproportionally high food spending for young families.40 Foods
marketed in the mainland and overseas have long operated under different quality standards. For
example, sodas and yogurts contain significantly more sugar overseas. To address the issue, the
French Parliament passed a law in 2013 prohibiting differential sugar contents.41 The statute also
banned the practice of selling food products overseas with longer expiration date labeling than
their metropolitan counterparts. Guadeloupean representative Victorin Lurel was the original
sponsor of the bill. He was concerned by the higher rate of diet-related diseases overseas, in
particular diabetes, in the face agrifood businesses’ colonial and racist claims that overseas
consumers prefer sweeter products due to their history of growing sugar cane.42 At the time of
writing, the statute remains underenforced.43 The history of nonreciprocity, inequality, and
forced dependence that has long characterized the food relationship between France and its
colonies is thus still very much at work.
French food itself has retained a surprising level of homogeneity and structure in the face
of colonialism, successive waves of immigration, and a growingly diverse population.44 Foods
marked as foreign are either exoticized or Frenchified, reenacting, the republican model of
integration according to which immigrants must assimilate into French culture and comportment
in order to belong and not remain perpetual outsiders. Couscous is an example of a food which
has been domesticated to exist according to what suits the White palate. Simultaneously one of
the most popular foods in France and most celebrated emblems of North African culture,45 it
might be “the archetypical culinary embodiment of France’s post-colonial multicultural
predicament.”46 Known in France since at least the sixteenth century,47 industrialized couscous

entered the mass market after Algerian independence in 1962 when “pied-noir owned companies
relocated to France, and began selling their product to the European market.”48
In 1977, the assimilation of couscous into French eating culture found a legal expression
in its exemption from a new statutory requirement prescribing the use of the French language in
certain private commercial and governmental activities. Officially, the mandate was intended to
protect consumers, but according to the legislative history it was also adopted to preserve the
integrity of French against what was perceived as a growing “contamination” by foreign
languages, English in particular.49 By then, couscous had made it into the small pantheon of
“typical products and foreign-named specialties known by the public at large,” which were
allowed to exist under their original designations. Ever since, couscous has become growingly
political, having been embraced by the left as a token of inclusiveness and challenged on the far
right as a symbol of non-Whiteness. The popularity of public gatherings of progressive political
and civic leaders in which couscous is served to symbolize a commitment to antiracism
(couscous républicains) contributes to a narrative of French universalism whereby cultural
appreciation of foreign foods validates the superiority of republican values. The conspicuous
consumption of couscous and other foods coopted through colonialism may also be a strategy for
disavowing Whiteness and its attendant histories of racism and empire.
Another strategy is food heritagization (patrimonalisation) as observed by Jean-Pierre
Hassoun, who conducted extensive fieldwork on the brand Reflets de France. Reflets de
France’s identity is based on the quest for an autotelic version of French food that owes nothing
to “outside” influences or ideas.50 Barthes famously asserted that milk is the anti-wine.51
Analogously, I argue that Reflets de France (literally, “Reflections of France”) aspires to be the
anti-couscous. Founded in 1996, the company prides itself on commercializing in supermarkets

over 500 exclusively French food products from the terroirs—cheeses, charcuterie, ready-made
meals, pastries, wine, and more.52 Until his passing in 2018, the brand collaborated with White
chef Joël Robuchon to select its products. A conservative upholder of traditional and regional
cooking, Robuchon was known for opposing the “globalization” of French cuisine.
Reflets de France’s rhetoric fetichizes the local, small, and family businesses, the
territory and its landscape, the authenticity of tastes, and regional diversity. In the 2010s,
lawmakers cited it as a model in their advocacy for the stricter regulation of the “Made in
France” label and the branding of France (La Marque France) internationally.53 This legal and
political use echoes Hassoun’s understanding of Reflets de France as promoting “narcissistic”
ways of eating based on the notion that because it is French it is tasty.54 The company plays into
the trope of the reassuring cuisine of the old days, raising the question of why or against what
customers need to be reassured and comforted.
The Racialized Law of French Food
Legal discourse is a critical access point for understanding the racialized contours of
contemporary French foodways. Food law defines a repertoire of desirable food choices and
practices while relegating others as secondary or less desirable. In what follows, I look at four
legal regimes contributing to the Whiteness of French food: the law of geographical indications,
of school lunches, of citizenship, and of cultural heritage.
The Law of Geographical Indications
Geographical indications (GIs) are legal terms used to identify goods as originating in a
particular region when some of their specific qualities are attributable to their place of origin and
purportedly cannot be replicated elsewhere.55 The label is most often applied to wines, spirits,

agricultural products, and increasingly highly specialized artisanal and industrial goods.56 Well-
known French geographical indications include Bourgogne, Champagne, and Bordeaux wines,
Bresse chicken, Le Puy Green lentils, and Roquefort and Camembert de Normandie cheeses.
France has been at the legal forefront in the recognition and protection of GIs. It was the first
country to develop a system of appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) (“controlled appellations
of origin”) starting in 1905, initially to delimit wine-growing regions and later other agricultural
products and foodstuffs.57 In 1992, the European Union introduced a protection of GIs modeled
after the French system.58 Since 1994, GIs have gone global. They are now included within the
World Trade Organization (WTO) as intellectual property rights.59
Geographical indications are fundamentally related to French colonialism and the
racialized project of ensuring that the White majority can maintain its foodways and agricultural
wealth. Kolleen Guy writes,
Terroir and the system of appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) were intended to protect
the products emanating from the “natural” state of a nation. Colonial products were
excluded from AOC protections because it was believed that they lacked the quality and
superiority locked in the land that produced “Frenchness.”60
More specifically, the story of GIs is tied to the wine industry. In the late nineteenth century, the
phylloxera aphid devastated French vineyards, reducing wine production by about 70 percent. To
compensate, French colonists developed winemaking in Algeria and began to import grapes and
wine back to France.61 Viticulture became intrinsically connected to settler colonialism, resulting
in the settlement of 50,000 families from the metropole and the dispossession of some 700,000
hectares of land from Algerians.62 This was an industrial wine system that delivered cheap, mass-

produced, and standardized wine.63 Between 1880 and 1930, wine production grew dramatically
and Algeria becoming the largest exporter of wine in the world.64 Once the French vineyard had
been reconstituted and production had recovered from the phylloxera crisis, wine producers’
organizations, particularly those in the South of France producing low-end wine, began to resent
the competition represented by Algerian wine.65 As prices declined with the increased amount of
wines on the market, they demanded that Algerian imports be limited, resorting to protests and
violence. Meanwhile, producers of high-end wine such as Bordeaux, Champagne, and Burgundy
lobbied for quality regulation so that Algerian wine in particular would be marked as inferior.66
A racialized dynamic was reenacted through these wine wars. The Indigenous
populations of Algeria, especially the Arabs, were vilified in colonial rhetoric as semi-primitive,
dirty, and deceitful people, while White colonists were elevated as the superior racial group.67
Similarly, negative intellectual and moral traits were attributed to Algerian wines, depicted as
fraudulent and artificial in contrast to “natural” French wines. This personification may explain
why legal intervention came in the form of a 1905 statute on “frauds and falsifications,”
specifying the conditions for the production of “natural” wine.68 The statute explicitly applied to
Algeria,69 requiring that wines clearly indicate the denomination of origin to avoid “misleading
commercial practices.”70 In the years that followed, other laws were passed to protect the
interests of metropolitan producers by introducing an express link between the “quality” of the
wine, its production region (the terroir), and the traditional method of production. In 1935, the
AOC legal framework as we know it was set up, combining several of the earlier regulations.
The Institut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO), established to monitor the new system,
denied Algeria AOC classification. According to Joseph Bohling, “appellation wines were to

connect consumers to the producers and evoke bucolic images of European France, not the pain
and suffering found in Algeria.”71
Through GIs, law is mobilized to guard the Whiteness of French (and mainly other
European) foods abroad as well as domestically. The protection prevents producers not located
within a predefined geographic area to market their goods under certain names or as using
certain methods. France has been the leading European country in terms of the value of GI
sales.72 After Italy, it has the second highest number of agriculture and food registrations as of
2016.73 Only about one-fourth of all registrations are for non-EU (“third country”) registrations,
and these are overwhelmingly wine registrations.74 Tara Brabazon thus argues that the GI system
“continues European colonization by other means. . . . The assumption was that non-European
goods were not ‘authentic’ and were ‘inferior’ to the European goods.”75 For Kal Raustiala and
Stephen Munzer, GIs are linked to a new form of neocolonialism “preventing emigrants, and
their offspring, from using GIs originated elsewhere.”76
At the turn of the twentieth century, while the GI regime was being created, law was also
mobilized to regulate school lunches as a legal project stitching nationalism to White bodies.
Cantines and Food Neutrality
Perhaps nowhere is the law’s impact on food and racial identity more immediately apparent than
in the context of school lunches. French public schools were created specifically to solidify
national identity and republican values during the Third Republic. They began serving hot food
at the preschool level in the mid-nineteenth century, with lunch programs spreading nationally
after school attendance became mandatory in 1882.77 Initially, the cantines were charitable
endeavors aimed at improving the nutrition and hygiene of poor children78 and at boosting
attendance.79 In a country where infant mortality resulting from inadequate nutrition had been a

constant preoccupation since the eighteenth century at least,80 children’s alimentation was seen
as paramount to fight depopulation and “degeneration.”
In the 1900s, an explicitly racialized discourse surfaced to promote the cantines. In his
1908 dissertation, physician Charles Gosselin considered race as one of the key factors to
measure children’s “total alimentary ration,” noting that “there are variations with races . . . It is
certain . . . that Germans and English children need more food than French children.”81 Similarly,
writing in 1906, Augusta Moll-Weiss, a prominent educator, advocated greater consistency in
nutritional planning in schools that would take into account that “children of the same age and of
the same nationality have identical needs.”82 She tied the cantines to the survival of the nation,
crediting them with enabling poor children to become “robust and resilient beings, capable of
proudly carrying the colors of France.”83 After World War II, the cantines were assigned an
explicit educational purpose in addition to their primary nutritional aim, reinforcing their
racialized dimension.84 School teacher Raymond Paumier, a champion of “modern” childhood
nutrition, counseled their “rationalization,” insisting in 1947 that balanced meals were necessary
to the “construction of the civilized little man.”85 This is also when the cantines were renamed as
restaurants scolaires (or restaurants d’enfants) to elevate them as educational spaces. The word
“restaurant” reflected the new didactic ideal of clean, ventilated, and well-lit lunch rooms serving
multi-course meals on ceramic plates emulating dominant bourgeois dining practices.
Today, each municipality continues to decide whether to offer cantines as part of its
elementary school system, how much to charge families, and what foods to serve. For secondary
education, the decision is made at the départemental and regional levels. The overwhelming
majority of schools offer hot lunches, with over six million children participating86—one
schoolchild out of two.87 Middle and high schools typically include self-service restaurants

allowing students to choose the components of their meals. By contrast, in many elementary
schools children sitting in groups of 6 to 12 are served in courses from common platters from a
set menu, and drink water from shared pitchers. Though the actual planning, preparation, and
provision of school lunches is the responsibility of local governments, they are constrained by
national laws and regulations. The content of the lunches is controlled in significant detail, with
regulations requiring that a diversity of dishes be served over the course of the week and the
month, the inclusion of a main dish at every meal comprising an animal protein,88 a mandatory
dairy course, specific portion sizes, water service, and the unlimited availability of bread.89
By law, cantines are subject to the so-called “principle of neutrality,” which guarantees
equal protection to all citizens regardless of their opinions in their relations with public
services.90 What does neutrality mean in the context of food provision? Rather than compelling
schools to accommodate dietary restrictions motivated by religious, ethical, or philosophical
views, neutrality is understood as exempting them from having to take into consideration
students’ beliefs.91 Schools must now manage food allergies by either offering alternative meals
or allowing students on a case-by-case basis to bring their lunch from home, but they are not
required to handle dietary restrictions based on identity differences.92 Several justifications are
put forward in the literature: accommodating would violate secularism and the separation of
church and state, for instance, because purchasing halal or kosher meat would indirectly
subsidize a religion,93 increase operating costs,94 exacerbate administrative burdens,95 and be
superfluous given that students are already accommodated when vegetarian lunches are
provided.
De facto, it is thus White Christian food norms that are considered neutral, much like
Whiteness itself is often construed as a neutral, nonracial identity. According to a 2018

Greenpeace survey, 69 percent of elementary schoolchildren are served (nonkosher and
nonhalal) meat or fish every single day during school lunches.96 A dairy course—cheese or
yogurt—is included in every lunch, despite the significant proportion of lactose-intolerant
children, especially among those of Asian, Black, Jewish, and North African ancestry.97 Most
schools offer a special Christmas meal at the end of December, and some maintain the Christian
tradition of fish Fridays all year round. While in practice many schools quietly accommodate
students with religious-based dietary restrictions, some cities have taken openly bigoted stances,
be it by imposing mandatory pork days or by doing away with substitute meals on pork days.98
This attitude is not new, as powerfully narrated in Axel Gauvin’s 1987 novel Faim d’enfance.
Set in 1958 Reunion, the protagonist, an adolescent of Tamil descent in an otherwise all-White
school, asserts his identity by refusing to eat the beef served weekly at the cafeteria and, later in
the novel, the archetypically White food imposed by the new headmistress who replaced rice
with bread.99
Despite their freedom to operationalize national nutritional directives by choosing which
specific foods to serve, according to Rahsaan Maxwell, the cantines exhibit a surprising
consistency of offering, revealing a culinary consensus.100 Whether located in an affluent, urban,
and multiracial area such as the Paris region or in a low-income, rural, and predominantly White
region such as Normandy, elementary schools offer substantially analogous foods selected from
the traditional French repertoire.101 The few foreign foods that appear on the menu are either
presented from a French perspective, for example, with a topping of French cheese or cream, or
show up for special, festive occasions, often in connection with the inclusion of a given
geographical cultural area in the curriculum. The cantines thus reproduce race by modeling a
one-sided account of what it means to eat French food and to be French.102

Families and associations have litigated, claiming that some of the cantines’ practices are
discriminatory, but the courts have tended to side with the government. In 2002, the Conseil
d’État considered the case of Orange—a town governed by the far-right since the mid-1990s—
where the cantines followed the Catholic abstinence from animal meat on Fridays, concluding
that there was no religious discrimination.103 In 2013, it upheld the national nutritional guidelines
requiring that 8 meals out of 20 contain meat or fish over objections from vegetarian families.
The conseillers’ justification was that the “frequentation [of cantines] is voluntary” and school
lunches offer “nutrients other than animal proteins.”104 In the face of growing pressure from
environmental organizations, however, the national nutritional guidelines were revised over the
government’s objections in 2018. A two-year experimental program required that schools offer a
vegetarian meal at least once a week.105 The rationale was primarily ecological, but proponents
also aspired to “evaluate the impact of daily vegetarian options thanks to which the convictions
of the entire population can be respected,”106 a nod to the need for accommodating identity-
motivated dietary restrictions.
In a highly centralized country, where the educational system is managed directly to a
large extent by Ministry officials, it is curious that the cantines are left to the discretion of local
governments. Most of the law applicable to their functioning derives from piecemeal regulations
and local decisions, rather than the revered statutory enactment, such that commentators have
suggested that it is “soft law.”107 Flexibility and decentralization allow for the continued
domination of White foodways under the guise of neutrality. It is worth noting that the debates
over dietary religious accommodations are of relatively recent vintage, centering primarily on
Muslim students. In 1983, when the political context was more favorable to embracing
multiracialism and multiculturalism, the Ministry of Education called municipalities to take into

consideration “families’ food habits and . . . customs, especially for children of foreign ancestry”
in school lunches.108 Accommodation only became a political issue in the late 1980s with the
newfound “visibility of Islam,” now the second-largest religious denomination, and the
racialization of its practitioners as non-White.109 It is when the boundaries of Whiteness are
destabilized by the integration of new groups that White food norms are reaffirmed as central
and used to police racial boundaries, particularly in the context of socializing children into
citizenship at school.
Citizenship
The connection between racial anxiety and food is particularly obvious in the context of
citizenship law. Silvia Falconieri has documented how colonial jurists were eager to use racial
anthropology to devise their legal categories, in particular to distinguish colonial subjects living
under the regime of indigénat from citizens.110 In theory, Whiteness was not required for the
acquisition of citizenship, but in practice evidence of White performance was often decisive in
the absence of established White lineage from at least one parent.111 In addition to physical
appearance and skin color, proficiency in the French language, education, profession, and
reputation, colonial administrators paid special attention to applicants’ way of life, including
their manner of dress and foodways.112 Eating habits became critical to establishing applicants’
Whiteness, or at least their ability to act White and thus be considered worthy of citizenship.
To illustrate this point, in 1919 one Ignace, born in Madagascar to a Malagasy mother,
applied for citizenship on the grounds that he was the unrecognized son of a French national.113
The records of the Antananarivo colonial civil bureau contain a memo mentioning approvingly
his service in the French Foreign Legion during the war, his seriousness, and his humility, before
scrutinizing his lifestyle. A shift in Ignace’s dwelling and diet is observed. Before the war,

Ignace “lived with his mother . . . in a simply furnished cottage kept in the indigenous style [à
l’indigène]. The basis of their diet was rice.” Upon returning from the front, Ignace moved in
with a Greek friend from the Legion. The memo observes that now “he always eats with this
European and is nearly constantly in his company,” concluding that the application should be
granted. While Ignace’s service in the armed forces is the primary basis for the positive
appraisal, his transition from the typical rice-based, Malagasy diet despised by colonists to a
“European” diet clearly militated in his favor. There is a long French history of linking rice
consumption to racial identity. Since Voltaire at least, rice-eating has been denigrated as leading
to debility, femininity, and passivity in Asian cultures, while wheat and bread-eating has been
celebrated for fostering European virility and dominance.114 Writing about colonial Madagascar,
Violaine Tisseau reports that the métis population in the cities sought to emulate the colonists by
ostensibly consuming White foods such as bread, pot au feu, flans, cakes, or custard sitting at the
dinner table.115 Ignace’s renunciation of rice and eating on a mat on the floor together with his
commensality with a White man must have been assessed as signs of White enculturation and
performance.
Officially, immigration and citizenship bureaucrats no longer consider racial
performance. However, the malleable legal requirement that applicants for naturalization
demonstrate their “republican integration into French society”116 has been applied racially, in
particular to exclude Muslims. In a well-known 2008 case, the supreme court for public law, the
Conseil d’État, upheld the denial of citizenship to a woman married to a French citizen on the
grounds that she had “adopted a religious practice incompatible with essential values of the
French community, particularly the principle of equality of the sexes.”117 Among the exhibits
submitted as evidence was her admission that, while she could buy groceries on her own, most of

the time she went to the supermarket accompanied by her husband. The subtext here was that she
failed to adhere to an unstated norm at the intersection of gender, class, and race on the proper
way to shop for food in French culture.
In a less publicized case in 2014, another woman was denied citizenship on the grounds
that she wore a hijab during her citizenship interview and conceded to practicing gender
segregation when hosting guests.118 The use of gender segregation at the dinner table as an
argument to deny citizenship has acquired renewed legal and cultural relevance after the
inscription of the gastronomic meal of the French on the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s list of intangible cultural heritage, which I will discuss
in the following section. The UNESCO bid stated that “the seating arrangement [of the
gastronomic meal] may reflect status in terms of hierarchy or gender.”119 According to the
French state, there is thus a correct form of gender segregation at the dinner table (alternating
between men and women) worth consecrating as an intangible cultural heritage, and an incorrect
form (men and women sitting separately) warranting rejection from the national community.
Never mind the long French history of hosting single-sex meals, including among feminists, who
purposefully organized feminine banquets in 1848 as a form of political empowerment.120
UNESCO’s “Gastronomic Meal of the French”
In 2010, UNESCO inscribed “the Gastronomic Meal of the French” onto its World Intangible
Heritage List.121 The meal is defined as a four-course repast beginning with apéritif and ending
with digestif, served with appropriate wines and tableware, and made up of carefully chosen
components.122 This inscription was the result of efforts initiated by a group of historians,123 later
coopted by then President Nicolas Sarkozy.124 A markedly conservative right-wing politician,
Sarkozy had run on an anti-immigration platform, proposing a bolstered French “national

identity.”125 At the inauguration of the 2008 Salon de l’Agriculture—a yearly agricultural exhibit
celebrating rurality and French terroir—he declared that French gastronomy was “the best in the
world” and ought to be consecrated by UNESCO.126 That same year, a nonprofit organization,
the Mission Française du Patrimoine et des Cultures Alimentaires, was established to support a
bid to see it recognized as an intangible cultural heritage. A couple of years earlier, a similar
effort to persuade UNESCO on behalf of White star chefs to declare French cuisine part of the
world’s cultural patrimony had failed due to its perceived commercialism and lack of community
support. It had miscalculated UNESCO’s shift to the immaterial since the 1990s, that is, away
from fine arts and antiquities, to protecting living traditions, embodied practices, and oral
expressions. 127 UNESCO aspired to move from the singular to the collective in a more inclusive
way. It was thus key this time around to convince the organization that the project was grassroots
and devoid of commercial incentives. Historian Julia Csergo was entrusted with the task of
conducting background research and fine-tuning the application. She was the driving force
behind the reformulation of the abstract and elitist notion of French gastronomy into the more
egalitarian-sounding “social practice” of the “gastronomic meal.”
Sidonie Naulin argues that the Sarkozy government’s motivations behind the UNESCO
bid was to reassert French prominence on the global stage and reap any outbound or inbound
economic benefits.128 But the application also represented a strategic use of international law to
reify and maintain the Whiteness of French food both outside and inside France. Food was just
one tool among others in Sarkozy’s nativist agenda as Minister of Finance and the Interior and as
President. The bid came in the wake of several legal interventions that furthered systemic racism
such as broadening the powers of the police and toughening immigration and citizenship laws.129
It could only sustain its story of a nationally practiced meal by excluding difference, despite its

claim to represent “the entire French nation” defined as a “large, diverse and unified”
community, one that was “united by shared practices like the gastronomic meal.”130 The
UNESCO recognition played into French universalism and its attendant denial of racial and
ethnic inequities. As Craig Adams notes:
Such a “mono-culinary” representation of French foodways would potentially lead to
significant portions of the population being left out of any such definition. Given the
document’s reference to the Republic, the universalizing force displayed in the
nomination file cannot simply be considered the result of the structure of UNESCO’s
bureaucratic file, but should instead be understood as the expression of French
Republican ideas of identity.131
The creation and defense of the idea of a gastronomic meal of the French involved
erasing not only the diversity of eating practices of French citizens across races and ethnicities,
but also among Whites, essentializing a supposed innate national (and racial) character. For Ruth
Cruickshank, “the repas gastronomique des Français seeks to solve a perceived problem of
French decline by inventing a codified ‘French’ meal which, as well as eliding cultural diversity,
fails to grasp how food cultures survive by maintaining their currency through the negotiation of
change and the accommodation of external influences.”132 In short, it is a whitewashed (and
bourgeois) version of French foodways that is now consecrated by the World Intangible Heritage
List.
In 2020, couscous joined the intangible cultural heritage list, with UNESCO hailing it as
an example of “international cultural cooperation”—a stark contrast to the gastronomic meal of
the French. Tellingly, though couscous is touted as a cherished national dish, France did not

participate in the bid, which had been jointly presented by Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, and
Tunisia.
Conclusion
This article has connected critical Whiteness studies and food studies in the French context. It
has shown that the set of eating habits known as French are racialized in a way that reinforces
White dominance. The four case studies examined here—geographical indications, school
lunches, citizenship law, and world heritage law—buttress an ideal of White alimentary identity
implying that non-White and non-Christian communities are insignificant, alien, or deviant. Law
has been a primary tool used to shape food production and choices, privileging and normalizing
certain alimentary practices and stigmatizing others. The current legal regime marginalizes racial
and ethnic minorities in their foodways through the elevation of White French food as the high-
status, legally protected food.
The Whiteness of French food is at work domestically as an internal mode of
racialization and subordination, but also internationally due to its position as the ultimate high-
status food. According to Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, “it is the tour de force of French cuisine
to be defined as at once national and cosmopolitan.”133 Outside of France, gourmet food is now
associated with a broadening range of cuisines, but French eating culture remains in many
countries a model and basis for culinary technique and schooling, high-end restaurants, and fine
dining.134 This status leads Zilkia Janer to argue that “the enduring hegemony of French cuisine
as the highest standards of European culinary modernity-rationality against which all other
cuisines are measured” is an aspect of coloniality in the food cultures of the New World.135
Though this article has focused on the Whiteness of French food from within, it has relevance for
the broader understanding of racial identity formation through eating in other sociocultural

contexts. As such, it is but one instalment of what I hope will be a series of scholarly
contributions on the Whiteness of French food in France and outside of France.
Mathilde Cohen is the George Williamson Crawford Professor of Law at the University of
Connecticut and formerly a research fellow at the CNRS. She works in the fields of
constitutional law, comparative law, food law, and race, gender, and the law. Her research has
focused on various modes of disenfranchisement in French and US legal cultures. She has
written on why and how public institutions give reasons for their decisions and the lack of
judicial diversity. She currently examines the way in which bodies coded as female are
alternatively empowered and disempowered by the regulation of the valuable materials they
produce and consume, in particular milk and the placenta. Email: mathilde.cohen@uconn.edu
Notes
* For helpful conversations and comments on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Rebecca Bratspies,
Alexia Brunet Marks, Amy DiBona, Melanie DuPuis, Elizabeth Emens, Silvia Falconieri, Joshua
Galperin, Marc-Tizoc González, Margaret Gray, Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez, Jean-Louis
Halpérin, Jean-Pierre Hassoun, Timothy Lytton, Wythe Marschall, Sarah Mazouz, Robin
Medard Inghilterra, Eric Millard, Diana Mincyte, Ann Morning, Melissa Mortazavi, Fabio
Parasecoli, Michael Roberts, Johanna Sax, Steph Tai, Steven Wilf, Lionel Zevounou, and an
extremely generous anonymous peer reviewer, as well as participants in the Academy of Food
Law and Policy 2019 Annual Conference, the NYU Food Reading Group, NYU’s “Race” in
Translation Sociology Seminar, and the Université Paris Nanterre’s Centre de Théorie et
d’Analyse du Droit Workshop. For research assistance, I thank Cécile Flahaut, Olivia Pesce, and

Amanda Studley. For library assistance, I thank the University of Connecticut law library staff,
in particular Tanya Johnson. Unless otherwise specified, all translations from French texts are
mine.
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58. Council Regulation (EEC) No. 2081/92 of 14 July 1992 on the protection of geographical
indications and designations of origin for agricultural products and foodstuffs, OJEU L 208, 1.
59. European Commission, “Geographical-Indications,”
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60. Guy, “Imperial Feedback,” 150.
61. Harry W. Paul, Science, Wine, and Vine in Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge
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62. Hildebert Isnard and James H. Labadie, “Vineyards and Social Structure in Algeria,”
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63. Joseph Bohling, The Sober Revolution: Appellation Wine and the Transformation of France
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 20.
64. Giulia Meloni and Johan Swinnen, “The Rise and Fall of the World’s Largest Wine
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65. Nathan Pedigo, “The Struggle for Terroir in French Algeria: Land, Wine, and Contested
Identity in the French Empire” (PhD diss., Southern Illinois University, 2015), 8–9.
66. Meloni and Swinnen, “The Rise and Fall.”
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68. Meloni and Swinnen, “The Rise and Fall.”
69. Loi du 1er Août 1905, art. 16.
70. Loi du 1er Août 1905, art. 4.
71. Bohling, The Sober Revolution, 8
72. Tanguy Chever, Christine Renault, Séverine Renault, and Violaine Romieu, Value of
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73. Congressional Research Service, Geographical Indications (GIs) in U.S. Food and
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74. Ibid., Tbl. 1, p. 7.
75. Tara Brabazon, “Colonial Control or Terroir Tourism? The Case of Houghton’s White
Burgundy,” Human Geographies—Journal of Studies and Research in Human Geography 8, 2
(2014): 17–33, here 22, doi:10.5719/hgeo.2014.82.17.
76. Kal Raustiala and Stephen R. Munzer, “The Global Struggle over Geographic Indications,”
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77. Didier Nourrisson, “Manger à l’école: une histoire morale,” Food & History 2, 1 (2004): 227–
240, here 231, doi:10.1484/J.FOOD.2.300279.
78. Victor Duruy, “Circulaire aux préfets relative à la distribution d’aliments chauds aux enfants
des salles d’asile,” in La petite enfance à l’école, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris : Institut national de
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79. Charles Gosselin, Les cantines scolaires (Paris: Ollier Henry, 1908), 15, 116–117.
80. Catherine Rollet, “Allaitement, mise en nourrice et mortalité infantile en France à la fin du
XIXe siècle,” Population 33, 6 (1978): 1189–1203, https://www.persee.fr/doc/pop_0032-
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81. Gosselin, Les cantines scolaires, 28.
82. Augusta Moll-Weiss, “Les cantines scolaires,” La revue 62 (1906): 151–161, here 159
(emphasis mine), https://education.persee.fr/doc/revpe_2021-
4111_1906_num_48_1_5614_t2_0593_0000_2.
83. Moll-Weiss, “Les cantines scolaires,” 161.

84. Kilien Stengel, Une cantine peut-elle être pédagogique? La place de la transmission dans la
restauration scolaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012).
85. Cited by Nourrisson, “Manger à l’école,” 237.
86. Anne Kimmel-Alcover, “Restauration scolaire et laïcité: quand la religion de l’élève s’invite
à la table de la cantine,” Revue de droit sanitaire et social 1 (2014): 146–157,
https://core.ac.uk/display/130194383.
87. Association jeunesse et droit, “L’égal accès des enfants à la cantine de l’école primaire 28
mars 2013—Rapport du défenseur des droits,” Journal du droit des jeunes 327 (2013): 23–35,
here 25, https://www.vie-publique.fr/rapport/33084-legal-acces-des-enfants-la-cantine-de-lecole-
primaire.
88. Décret et arrêté du 30 septembre 2011.
89. Arrêté du 30 septembre 2011 relatif à la qualité nutritionnelle des repas servis dans le cadre
de la restauration scolaire, art. 2; Décret No. 2011-1227 du 30 septembre 2011 relatif à la qualité
nutritionnelle des repas servis dans le cadre de la restauration scolaire.
90. Loi No. 83-634 du 13 juillet 1983, modifiée par la loi du 20 avril 2016 relative à la
déontologie et aux droits et obligations des fonctionnaires, art. 25.
91. Circulaire du 16 août 2011 relative au rappel des règles afférentes au principe de laïcité—
Demandes de régimes alimentaires particuliers dans les services de restauration collective du
service public.
92. Circulaire NOR: IOCK1110778C du 16 août 2011 relative aux demandes de régimes
alimentaires particuliers dans les services de restauration collective du service public.
93. Kimmel-Alcover, “Restauration scolaire,” 146–157.

94. Circulaire du 21 décembre 2004 relative aux conditions d’entrée en vigueur de la loi du
13 août 2004.
95. Circulaire du Ministère de l’Intérieur du 20 août 2011.
96. Greenpeace, “Au menu des cantines,” 2018, https://www.greenpeace.fr/aumenudescantines/
(accessed 12 August 2019).
97. Lanutrition.fr, “Combien de Français sont intolérants au lactose?,” 28 May 2015,
https://www.lanutrition.fr/les-news/combien-de-francais-sont-intolerants-au-lactose-.
98. Chalon-sur-Saône’s 2015 elimination of substitute meals for pork was struck down after the
Ligue de défense judiciaire des musulmans sued. Conseil d’État, 11 December 2020, Commune
de Chalon-sur-Saône, No. 426483.
99. Axel Gauvin, Faims d’enfance (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 11, 69.
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National Culture in a Globalized World,” British Journal of Sociology 70, 4 (2019): 1424–1447.
doi:10.1111/1468-4446.12643.
101. Maxwell, “Everyone Deserves Quiche.”
102. Melissa Mortazavi, “Consuming Identities: Law, School Lunches, and What It Means to Be
American,” Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 24, 1 (2014): 1–45,
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103. Conseil d’État, 25 October 2002, Mme Evelyne R, c/Commune d’Orange, No. 251161.
104. Conseil d’État, 20 March 2013, Association végétarienne de France c/ Ministre de
l’Agriculture, No. 354547.

105. Loi No. 2018-938 du 30 octobre 2018 pour l’équilibre des relations commerciales dans le
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106. Assemblée Nationale, Amendment No. 791, 7 September 2018, Équilibre dans le secteur
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The Whiteness of French Food

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The Whiteness of French Food

Law, Race, and Eating Culture in France

school lunches, citizenship, and cultural heritage.

geographical indications, race, school lunches

journal issue dedicated to the understanding of Whiteness in France, it is critical to reflect on

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

Official discourses have taken colorblindness and indifference to differences to be the

grounded on an explicit rejection of racialized understandings of social personhood and the

as a quintessential dimension of French identity, food is also portrayed as a common good

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

not conform with the three established daily meals.

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

majority in opposition to the eating practices of those considered non-White. It is neither

of eating: the law of geographical indications, of school lunches (cantines scolaires), of

act that transforms bodies.10

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

school lunches, those affected by diet-related diseases and agriculture-related environmental

degradation, as well as information on racial discrimination in the food industry.

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

and alternate ways of eating.

Bourdieu famously argued in La Distinction that tastes—literal and metaphorical—are tools of

differentiation and hierarchization.14 He considered eating as a paradigmatic example of behavior

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

concerns the development of so-called “ethnic food businesses”—how immigrants market

detected various manifestations of “alimentary xenophobia”21 directed at immigrant-owned food

businesses such as restaurants serving kebabs22 or Afro-Caribbean markets.23

biological racism by using the very category of race.

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

My contribution aims at problematizing the Whiteness of French food by tracking how it

The Hierarchization of the French Eating Culture as White

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

concept of Whiteness, be it in the context of food or in other contexts.

agricultural products and foodstuffs, relying on enslavement, expropriation, and exploitation of

in often exploitative conditions.38

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colonies is thus still very much at work.

of colonialism, successive waves of immigration, and a growingly diverse population.44 Foods

might be “the archetypical culinary embodiment of France’s post-colonial multicultural

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

integrity of French against what was perceived as a growing “contamination” by foreign

right as a symbol of non-Whiteness. The popularity of public gatherings of progressive political

and civic leaders in which couscous is served to symbolize a commitment to antiracism

(couscous républicains) contributes to a narrative of French universalism whereby cultural

disavowing Whiteness and its attendant histories of racism and empire.

Another strategy is food heritagization (patrimonalisation) as observed by Jean-Pierre

anti-couscous. Founded in 1996, the company prides itself on commercializing in supermarkets

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

political use echoes Hassoun’s understanding of Reflets de France as promoting “narcissistic”

customers need to be reassured and comforted.

The Racialized Law of French Food

of school lunches, of citizenship, and of cultural heritage.

The Law of Geographical Indications

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

country to develop a system of appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) (“controlled appellations

World Trade Organization (WTO) as intellectual property rights.59

Geographical indications are fundamentally related to French colonialism and the

wealth. Kolleen Guy writes,

superiority locked in the land that produced “Frenchness.”60

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3819684

and suffering found in Algeria.”71

their offspring, from using GIs originated elsewhere.”76

Cantines and Food Neutrality