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Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: The Taste of Empire

In the years following the First World War, state officials, colonial lobbyists, culinary experts, and even the famed chef Georges Auguste Escoffier promoted imperial foodstuffs in France. The utility of this initiative was obvious to all involved. France had lost a significant measure of agricultural self-sufficiency during the war and continued to struggle with food provisioning amidst a turbulent global economy. The fertile French empire, which united parts of West Africa, North Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands as well as Madagascar and the French Antilles, could easily supply French consumers with a range of essentials: starchy staples like rice and couscous; key proteins in the form of frozen meat and groundnuts; exotic fruits like bananas and pineapples; and tasty flavorings such as curry and vanilla. In short, the empire had the potential to provide French metropolitan consumers with nutritious and cost-effective foods that would greatly expand their culinary repertoire. Yet, as Lauren Janes reveals in Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: A Taste of Empire, most French consumers were reluctant if not adamantly resistant to efforts to integrate colonial foods substantively into their diets. Drawing upon archival research, discourse analysis, and theories of eating culture, Janes offers a compelling analysis of this failed effort. The issue, she argues, was not simply the integration of colonial foods into French cuisine, but the incorporation of the French empire into the French national body. “In interwar Paris,” she argues,