Catherine Garçon and her family share the table but not the courses.
By SUSAN DOMINUS
The delivery box that carries a three-day sampling of meals from the weight-loss company Jenny Craig is tantalizingly large. Inside is a plastic-foam box containing a supply of what looks like candy: seven mysteriously labeled Anytime Bars and another treat known as a Yogurt Dream Bar. Jenny Craig would appear to be the Willy Wonka of weight-loss regimes, promising the magic of sweets that make you thin; the package also holds a brownie and a puff-pastry twist and a bag of chips. Finally, there are meals, packaged in sky blue: among them, French toast and an egg scramble and macaroni and cheese.
That is the Jenny Craig of America; then there is the Jenny Craig of France, where Nestlé, which purchased the company in 2006, started marketing its product two years ago. The French Jenny Craig box is smaller, its interior container more elegant. Instead of white foam, the packaging is brightly patterned, like a chic shopping bag. Inside, there are dishes like boeuf bourguignon and velouté de tomates. The meals seem more grown-up and sophisticated than the American versions, so many of which seem chosen to evoke childhood favorites.
Selling an American-style weight-loss program to France would seem an absurd business proposition: from a French point of view, Americans might appear better equipped to give pointers on how to gain weight than how to lose it. The obesity rate in the United States is around 35 percent, compared with 14.5 percent in France. But the rate of increase in France has been worrying: in 1997, the obesity rate in France was only 8.5 percent. The government has initiated a series of antiobesity measures meant to restore traditional healthy eating habits (including last year a near ban on ketchup in school cafeterias). France’s obesity concerns still pale in comparison with this country’s. “We will never catch up to America,” Erick Moreau, the director of Jenny Craig in Europe, assured me. Nonetheless, French women do get fat, increasingly so, and so do men — 38 percent of the adult population there is now considered overweight. Jenny Craig in France currently has 4,000 active members, and many more have tried the service, Moreau says.
Jenny Craig is not the first weight-loss plan popular in America to make inroads in France. Weight Watchers, which first landed there in the ’70s, now has 1,800 weekly meetings. But Weight Watchers is a more natural transplant to a country proud of its cuisine: it does not dictate what clients eat, merely how much of it. Jenny Craig, on the other hand, with its individual microwaveable portions and heavy reliance (at least in the early phases) on prescribed, packaged foods, is not an obvious easy sell in a food culture based on fresh food from the market and communal meals. Jenny Craig’s approach to that challenge is to try to persuade clients that the plan is not a departure from French culture but a return to its fundamental values. To sell this novelty to the French requires convincing them that they are in fact resisting rather than succumbing to the inexorable influence of American eating habits — that the American scourge of obesity can still be neutralized by the power of French tradition, even if that tradition comes in the form of vacuum-sealed, shelf-stabilized products.
Valérie Bignon, the director of corporate communications for Nestlé France, is a long, lean line of a woman, well suited to the impeccably tailored black jacket and pencil skirt she was wearing the day we met at her bright, airy office in Paris. To understand the role of Jenny Craig in France and how it was adapted for the French consumer, Bignon explained, you must first understand the merits of French culinary tradition. This statement is usually, I have learned in France, a gateway to a conversation about all that is wrong with the American culinary tradition.
“The solution to America’s weight problem lies in what I call the French food model, a model that is very social, as opposed to the individualist approach of the Americans,” Bignon began. “If I were the minister of health in America, and I was in charge of the battle against obesity, the most powerful, brilliant thing I could do would be to communicate this message: let’s not worry too much about what’s on the table. I’d say let’s concern ourselves with sitting at the table together and preparing a meal.”
Eating a full meal together at the table — a first, light dish, then a cooked meat or fish with starch and a vegetable, followed by cheese or yogurt and possibly fruit — provides enough sustenance, she suggested, to stave off that bête noire of American eating habits, snacking. She explained how the presence of others also ensures the social reinforcement of healthy dining habits, like helping yourself to only so much, and it builds the habit of discipline and moderation, as diners wait for all to be seated and served before beginning the meal.
“You know what I find totally crazy?” Bignon asked, momentarily sidetracked. “Le Self. You know this system? It’s American. You take a plate, there’s a line, you take some salad. . . .” She was referring to what we call self-serve, an option so neutral to me that Bignon might as well have been decrying the rise of the photocopy machine. “In school cafeterias, there used to be a gentleman who made the meal and a madame who served it, and everyone ate together at the table, as they do at home,” she said. “But Americans hit on this system that is fast, it’s cheap, you take what you want — and now it’s everywhere in France!” she said. “I am anti-Self. It’s bad for rapport, and it’s bad for health — it’s too individualistic.”
Her comment provided an appropriate moment to return to Jenny Craig. In France, as in the United States, Jenny Craig provides dishes in individual portions. Consumers are instructed to supplement those meals with dairy products and fresh fruits and vegetables. Nonetheless, the idea that these microwaveable dishes built for one could fit into traditional French meals, which are built on the foundation of communal dining — with each person, including small children, eating the same thing — seemed counterintuitive. In France, the French social anthropologist Claude Fischler theorizes, a meal is considered a kind of communion, an intimate sharing of experience. In the States, he argues, it represents a contract, a negotiation over aversions, allergies and dietary needs.
“Jenny Craig is part of the evolution,” Bignon explained. “You have your Jenny Craig meal, but at the table, with the others. You don’t have the stress of making your own comparable meal or eating quickly in the kitchen to hide that you are on a diet. No, you heat it up and have your meal with everyone else.” I was intrigued by the notion that for French women, Jenny Craig might offer an alternative to hiding your diet food in the kitchen. The Web site for Jenny Craig in France prominently features one young blonde woman whispering in the ear of another. “My secret is Jenny Craig,” she tells her friend, who looks fascinated and a little bit thrilled.
“It is not looked upon highly, in France, to be on a diet,” Bignon said. “Because, in principle, it’s not really necessary.” This sentiment surprised me, given that the company she worked for had purchased a diet company for $600 million. She explained to me how easy losing weight should be: “The main course is passed around on a big plate, and you take what you want. So if a French woman takes from the meat dish at all, she takes just a little. It is rather easy to do her diet without mentioning it to anyone.” Bignon also serves on the advisory board of the corporate foundation for Nestlé France, a program interested, she explained, in “reviving the French culture of nourishment.” She seemed torn between defending her country’s food culture and promoting a product that offers a defense against the results of its erosion so far.
After our conversation, we went to a fine restaurant, where Bignon continued to critique American individualism, linking it to the declining health of our nation, both literally and figuratively. She took a piece of bread but ate only a little; by the end of the meal, her squab still had much of its meat on its tiny bones. “I’m not someone with a big appetite,” she said with a smile. When we left the restaurant, Bignon paused on the corner. She tilted her face toward the sun to bask in its warmth, then lighted a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
At Jenny Craig’s European headquarters in La Baule, a wealthy seaside community in Brittany, Erick Moreau offered me a choice of Jenny Craig lunches. I chose hachis parmentier, seasoned ground beef smothered by a layer of mashed potatoes. Like the Jenny Craig meals in America, it was food I would finish without protest but never crave.
Before working on Jenny Craig, Moreau started a Nestlé business delivering nutritious packaged meals to people requiring home care. His work at Jenny Craig has required marketing finesse of a different kind. “We really wanted to avoid the idea that we imported U.S. solutions,” he said. The dishes naturally had to be French, but even the Web site’s exercise videos had to have what he called “European ambience.” The fitness clips are set in a modern apartment where some furniture with good lines has been pushed out of the way. A track coach well known in France walks a woman through some low-key exercises, like arm swings and biceps curls with water bottles for weights. There is much talk of breathing. Although gyms have proliferated in the last 10 years in France, rigorous exercise is still not considered a requirement of responsible adulthood the way it is here. “In the U.S., there’s more, ‘Yes, you can!’ ” Moreau said. “We wanted the exercise to be something to take pleasure in, like food.”
As is true in the United States, Jenny Craig clients in France are expected to meet, by phone or in person, once a week with a Jenny Craig consultant. In France, however, the consultants are all dietitians, whereas the American model relies on laypeople trained in the Jenny Craig technique. If the French take their food seriously, they also see dieting as a serious affair, something that could be hazardous to your health without appropriate supervision. The word “diet” has negative enough associations in France that Weight Watchers recently came up with a new marketing campaign there: “Stop the diets. Relearn how to eat.”
To understand the most essential difference between Jenny Craig in France and Jenny Craig in America, you need look no further than the three-inch chocolate-covered peanut-butter-flavored Anytime Bar. The high-fiber Anytime Bar, billed as a nutritious snack, is not offered in the French plan. In France, the phrase “nutritious snack” is oxymoronic.
“We eat three times a day, ideally no more,” Patrick Serog, a doctor who is the nutritional consultant for Jenny Craig in France, told me. This idea has been driven home by recent books like “Bringing up Bébé” and “French Kids Eat Everything,” memoirs of French child-rearing customs that are irresistible to American parents inclined toward self-flagellation. But increasing numbers of French people do, in fact, snack, which partly explains why they do, in fact, get fat. Last year, a study found that 61 percent of the French snack at least two out of three days and on food that constituted 20 percent of their daily calories. In 2005, France’s sweet and savory snack market was found to be growing at a steady rate of 3 percent a year; a Department of Agriculture report advised U.S. manufacturers that in France “strong growth opportunities do exist for breakfast bars, nuts, chips/crisps and extruded snacks” (extruded being the technical term for shaped snacks, like Cheetos).
By tradition, however, adult snacking is off limits. This is partly for philosophical reasons: snacks are usually consumed on the go, and alone, not together around a table. But frequent snacking is also considered a health hazard, which became clear as I spoke to Serog, who helped Jenny Craig plan its menus.
The French formula for Jenny Craig, Serog explained to me when I met him at the Nestlé office in Paris, does allow for one snack: a small cereal bar, which dieters might enjoy at 4 p.m., like le goûter, the snack that French children have when they arrive home from school. But there are no choices — no chips or pretzels — lest Jenny Craig be responsible for instilling bad American habits. There are also no pseudo-rich desserts offered anywhere on the French Web site for Jenny Craig. “In France, dessert is fruit,” Serog said. “Cake is for special occasions.”
In France, where food is eaten on a schedule, the Anytime Bar would be considered a call to culinary anarchy. Eating three times a day “allows the body to organize itself,” Serog asserted. “The Anytime Bar — the body is organized so brilliantly! Why would you. . . .” He trailed off, momentarily baffled. “With such a thing, the body has no more signposts. It cannot regulate.” He shook his head. He put his forefinger up to his temple and twisted it to indicate exactly how crazy this seems to him.
In the United States, by comparison, the plan calls for six food experiences a day. “The healthy way to lose weight is three meals a day and three snacks a day — you’ll see that in most standard healthy programs,” says Dana Fiser, the chief executive of Jenny Craig.
What we eat and how much we eat is clearly a cultural construct, but when it comes to weight loss, you might think the solution would be universal. In 2010, the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association deemed the Jenny Craig diet, with its six food intakes a day, an effective weight-management program. The study found that at the end of the second year of the diet, 60 percent of the users had managed to keep off at least 5 percent of their weight. (Critics pointed out that the J.A.M.A. study relied on clients who were given food and counseling free for the duration of those two years, a value of some $6,000 dollars, and therefore lived in something of a frictionless food universe.) Still, no diet has proved fail-safe in the long term. A 2007 study in American Psychology pointed out that one-third to two-thirds of dieters eventually regained more weight than the amount they lost on their diets.
In the absence of any surefire method of weight loss, the French would naturally stick to tradition: no snacking. “You have to resolve the weight-loss side with the culture we’re dealing with,” Fiser said, “and we know the French are very different.”
If it seems impractical that Jenny Craig would market its product in France, the country with the highest percentage of underweight people in Western Europe, consider this: People who live in a country where there is a high premium on being thin might just be people who will buy diet plans.
Catherine Garçon, a client of Jenny Craig’s in La Baule, showed up for an appointment with her counselor the same day I was visiting. Garçon, who works as an emergency-room nurse two days a week, told me that she had gained almost 15 pounds in recent years, starting when she took on a second job as an elected official working for her town. The extra weight was hardly obvious. In jeans, tall boots and a leather jacket, Garçon, who is 41, wore clothing well and had arranged her hair in a loose chignon, so that she looked like a contemporary Brigitte Bardot.
Garçon confessed to me some of the weaknesses that led her to try Jenny Craig: when her children ate their chocolate bars and brioche at 4, she sometimes indulged in a chocolate bar, too. She was having trouble finding time, between the kids and two jobs, to exercise. And she could never refuse a glass of Champagne when she was socializing.
Two days later, Garçon had me over for dinner with her family, so I could enjoy a French meal in the home of a Jenny Craig client. Garçon arrived home from town hall a few minutes after 6:30, took off her jacket and headed directly into the kitchen after kissing her two sons, who are 9 and 14. She started chopping an endive salad and heating up a small tabletop grill. From a bag, she grabbed several slices of supermarket bread; out of plastic, she took several slices of square cheese that looked a lot like American cheese but had a French marketing twist: it was called Croque Monsieur cheese, for the traditional French sandwich. She slathered butter onto the bread, then layered on the ham and cheese.
Her husband, Sylvain, arrived and pulled up a stool to the kitchen counter, unwinding as his wife prepared the meal. “You don’t take enough time for yourself,” Sylvain told his wife, as they discussed why she had been exercising so much less since she had started her second job. Although he, too, works long hours running a heating-repair business, he said he felt less guilty than his wife in carving out time for exercise, rather than spending more time with the children. French women apparently gain weight for some of the same reasons American women do: not enough time to exercise, not enough time to cook perfectly healthy meals. Also, guilt, a high-calorie emotion.
A plate of radishes went on the kitchen island, where they would all eat dinner. Each boy quickly consumed two little croque-monsieur. Garçon peeled back the wrap on her Jenny Craig dish, thon basquaise et son blé — tuna with vegetables and barley — and put it in the microwave. After the croque-monsieur came the cheese course; the radishes remained untouched. “This was always hard for me to resist,” Garçon said, looking sadly at the round of Reblochon. “I could never just have a little.” The boys and their father enjoyed more cheese and bread, then yogurts, then high-quality dark chocolate, which they broke off in chunks and wolfed. The meal was intensely French; it was also high in fat and relied heavily on processed food. Garçon’s microwaved tuna did not seem out of place, but not because it was served as part of the flow of a traditional French meal. It seemed to fit with the meal because the meal itself was both French and the antithesis of its idealized form.
During the presentation at Jenny Craig headquarters, a phrase appeared on the screen, an internal message for the diet counselors: “Keep a positive mind-set!” The sentiment did not strike me as terribly French, and Moreau assured me it was not. “The French are the most pessimistic people in the world,” he said, citing a Gallup poll that was much discussed in France. The American Jenny Craig Web site urges dieters to “See What Success Tastes Like” and encourages them to “Feel Like New. Feel Like You.” The French Web site is devoid of self-esteem-boosting sentiment, its motto more logic-based, almost Cartesian in construct: “I did the Jenny Craig solution. It works!” Mariah Carey tells them. “Why not you?”
Elaborate diet plans with chirpy self-help axioms are as American as gluten-free apple pie, part of a culture in which food is both the enemy and the cure. We overeat, we diet, we overeat some more — and Nestlé is apparently betting that even the French will succumb to that same vicious cycle, needing American remedies for American habits.
Moreau had mentioned that the French are not only the most pessimistic people in the world but also the most depressed, at least as measured by consumption of antidepressants. I asked him why he thought the French were so down.
“Because we are French,” he replied.
Or maybe they just need a snack.
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