O texto seguinte servirá de base para responder à questão.
How World War Two changed how France eats
By June 1940, German forces had blitzed through France
in just six weeks, leading more than half of the country to
be occupied. As a result, French staples like cheese,
bread and meat were soon rationed, and by 1942 some
citizens were living on as few as 1,110 calories per day.
Even after World War Two ended in 1945, access to food
in France would continue to be regulated by the
government until 1949.
Such austerity certainly had an impact on how the French
ate during and just after the war. Yet, more than 80 years
after Allied forces landed in Normandy to begin liberating
the nation on D-Day (6 June 1944), few visitors realise
that France's wartime occupation still echoes across the
nation's culinary landscape.
In the decades following WW2, the French abandoned
the staples that had got them through the tough times of
occupation; familiar ingredients like root vegetables and
even hearty pain de campagne (country bread) were so
eschewed they were nearly forgotten. But as wartime
associations have slowly faded from memory, a bevy of
younger chefs and tastemakers are reviving the foods
that once kept the French alive.
There aren't many French residents old enough to vividly
recall life in wartime France today, and fewer still would
deign to discuss it. Author Kitty Morse only discovered
her great-grandparents' "Occupation diary and recipe
book" after her own mother's death. Morse released them
in 2022 in her book Bitter Sweet: A Wartime Journal and
Heirloom Recipes from Occupied France.
"My mother never said any of this to me," she said.
Aline Pla was just nine years old in 1945 but, raised by
small-town grocers in the south of France, she
remembers more than others might. "You were only
allowed a few grams of bread a day," she recalled.
"Some [people] stopped smoking ? especially those with
kids. They preferred trading for food."
Such widespread lack gave rise to ersatz replacements:
saccharine stood in for sugar; butter was supplanted by
lard or margarine; and instead of coffee, people brewed
roots or grains, like acorns, chickpeas or the barley Pla
recalls villagers roasting at home. While many of these
wartime brews faded from fashion, chicory coffee
remained a staple, at least in northern France. Ricoré ? a
blend of chicory and instant coffee ? has been on
supermarket shelves since the 1950s. More recently,
brands like Cherico are reimagining it for a new
generation, marketing it as a climate-conscious, healthful
alternative traditional coffee.
According to Patrick Rambourg, French culinary historian
and author of Histoire de la Cuisine et de la Gastronomie
Françaises, if chicory never wholly disappeared in
France, it's in large part thanks to its flavour. "Chicory
tastes good," he explained. "It doesn't necessarily make
you think of periods of austerity."
Other products did, however, such as swedes and
Jerusalem artichokes, which WW2 historian Fabrice
Grenard asserted "were more reserved for animals
before the war." The French were nevertheless forced to
rely heavily on them once potato rationing began in
November 1940, and after the war, these vegetables
became almost "taboo", according to Rambourg. "My
mother never cooked a swede in her life," added Morse.
Two generations later, however, Jerusalem artichokes, in
particular, have surged to near-omnipresence in Paris,
from the trendy small plates at Belleville wine bar Paloma
to the classic chalkboard menu at bistro Le Bon Georges.
Alongside parsnips, turnips and swedes, they're often
self-awarely called "les legumes oubliés"("the forgotten
vegetables") and, according to Léo Giorgis, chef-owner of
L'Almanach Montmartre, French chefs have been
remembering them for about 15 years.
"Now you see Jerusalem artichokes everywhere, [as well
as] swedes [and] golden turnips," he said. As a chef
dedicated to seasonal produce, Giorgis finds their return
inspiring, especially in winter. "Without them, we're kind
of stuck with cabbages and butternut squah."
According to Apollonia Poilâne, the third generation of
her family to run the eponymous bakery Poilâne, founded
in 1932, a similar shift took place with French bread.
Before the war, she explained, white baguettes, which
weren't subject to the same imposed prices as
sourdough, surged to popularity on a marketplace rife
with competition. But in August 1940, bread was one of
the first products to be rationed, and soon, white bread
was supplanted by darker-crumbed iterations bulked out
with bran, chestnut, potato or buckwheat. The sale of
fresh bread was forbidden by law, which some say was
implemented specifically to reduce bread's palatability.
"I never knew white bread!" said Pla. When one went to
eat at a friend's home during wartime, she recalled, "You
brought your bread ? your bread ration. Your own piece
of bread."
Hunger for white bread surged post-war ? so much so
that while Poilâne's founder, Pierre Poilâne, persisted in
producing the sourdoughs he so loved, his refusal to
bake more modern loaves saw him ejected from bakery
syndicates, according to his granddaughter, Apollonia.
These days, however, the trend has come full circle:
Baguette consumption fell 25% from 2015 to 2025, but
the popularity of so-called "special" breads made with
whole or heirloom grains is on the rise. "It's not bad that
we're getting back to breads that are a bit less white,"
said Pla.
For Grenard, however, the most lasting impact the war
left on French food culture was a no-waste mindset.
"What remains after the war is more of a state of mind
than culinary practices," he said. Rambourg agreed: "You
know the value of food when you don't have any."
The French were forced to get creative with what they had. In France's south-eastern Ardèche department,
Clément Faugier rebranded its sweetened chestnut paste
as Génovitine, a name whose medical consonance made
it easier to market as a fortifier and even prescribe. In the
coastal Camargue region, local samphire suddenly stood
in for green beans. Morse's great-grandfather foraged for
wild mushrooms in the nearby Vosges mountains, and in
cities, those with balconies planted their window boxes
with carrots or leeks. Paris' public Jardin des Tuileries
was even transformed into collective kitchen gardens.
According to Rambourg, this subsistence mindset "would
affect the entire generation that lived through the war,
and our parents, because they were the children of our
grandparents, who knew the war."
As the need for these subsistence methods dissipated,
French cuisine underwent another period of change. In
1963, the country welcomed its first Carrefour
hypermarket, and large-scale supermarkets soon
supplanted small shops. According to Grenard, this was
partly due to "suspicion" following corruption during the
German occupation, when some grocers inflated prices
far past the norm, just because they could . "At the end of
the war, consumers held real rancour against small
shopkeepers," said Grenard. "In a supermarket, the
prices are fixed."
Fast-forward eight decades, and some locals, now
motivated by climate change are turning back to small,
local grocers, such as the locavore Terroir d'Avenir shops
dotting Paris. Others are reaching into the nation's past to
resuscitate techniques like canning, preserving and
foraging that saved many French residents during the
war, according to Grenard. "The people that got by the
best were the ones who had reserves."
Today, filling the larder with foraged food has become
popular once again. In Kaysersberg, Alsace, chef Jérôme
Jaegle of Alchémille puts this ancestral knowledge
centre-stage by offering wild harvesting workshops
culminating in a multi-course meal. And in Milly-la-Forêt,
just outside Paris, François Thévenon highlights the
foraging techniques he learned from his grandmother
with classes teaching others how to seek out these edible
plants themselves.
"After the war", he explained, "people wanted to reassure
themselves that they wouldn't lack anything anymore."
They turned, he said, to overconsumption, specifically of
meat, which even his foraging grandmother ate every
day, at every meal.
"You often hear when you ask older folk why they no
longer eat wild plants, that it's because they don't have
to," Thévenon said, who forages for wild plants because
he believes it's good for his health and that of the planet.
According to Apollonia, the war didn't only change how
France eats. "It probably changed the way the world
eats," she asserted. Today, the techniques and
philosophies that helped the French survive are slowly
coming back to life.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20250605-how-world-war-two-chang
ed-the-french-diet
