Lunching in France. It’s Not Really About Food.

In France, eating is a sacred activity that is never muddled with other endeavors such as walking, working or checking the Internet. In France, you sit down with other people to eat. And once seated you talk. And you talk. And you talk. In fact, conversation and not food might be the real love affair of the French.

Eating lunch can get in the way of work in the States. Americans grab a sandwich to eat alone, or chow down at their desks in order to economize on time. In the US, if you take a full hour to eat every day, you are seen as either very lucky or very lazy. In France, however, the social lunch trumps work most days.

The French generally eat somewhere between 12 and 2 p.m. Linking a major part of these lunch hours is the almighty French conversation. This is a different beast than its American counterpart and it behooves the unwary traveler to study it before launching in.

The worst thing you could do as a work traveler is to venture forth to eat alone. In France, the very point of eating is to socialize. The French are not discriminatory about whom they eat with and value participation in this social event.

Once seated with French colleagues, avoid all personal topics of conversation. The French generally don’t want to hear about your personal life, and will tell you very little about their own. Conversation rarely turns to private family matters, political affiliations or weekend activities. Instead, the French choose general topics. A French lunch conversation might analyze the fabrication of olive oil, the lack of gun control in the US or the best restaurants in town.

The next difference is that the French conversation topic has a tendency to stick around while getting intellectual. In the US, conversation topics change like the direction of a bouncy ball. One topic leads to the next, and by the end of a thirty-minute lunch break we’ve bounced through 10 different topics. In France, you tease a topic apart with a fine-tooth comb, slowly pulling out and examining certain threads. This can seem overly controlled to the American taste. However, the French can make interesting conversation out of topics many Americans would consider banal and pass right over. Topics should be chosen with great consideration. Do you really want to be talking about a subject you just mentioned 30 minutes from now?

The ingredients to the French conversation? Time, a wide knowledge base and determination to keep discussion going. The results of this combination are plentiful.