Food map

Hello everyone!  Tomorrow I'm leaving to spend a long weekend in Toulouse with a friend, so I will probably not blog again until Tuesday.

We're going to visit a small medieval town nearby while I'm there, as well, so I'll have plenty of pictures and posts to entertain you with when I get back.

In the meantime here is a super interesting map of France, especially good for those of you who can read a bit of French. They did a survey to find out which areas of the country eat what: so if you're interested in French cuisine, this is really cool!  It will tell you where they eat particular foods, and where they don't like things.  I'll translate part of the little blurb for an example:

"Thanks to our partner Nielsen the 'Net Journal' created this interactive map with the 10 most over-consumed food products by department [administrative districts of France, similar to counties].  Note: this doesn't pertain to the most consumed products in the departments, but deviations in comparison to the average in France.  In the Maritime-Alps, for example, people buy 106% more fresh pâté than the average.  In the Morbihan [in Brittany], people drink three times more hard cider than the average French person.  And in the Herault they especially love seafood, candies, and olives.

"Deviations from the average are sometimes even more important with products that are eaten relatively less in the rest of France.  Consider for example frozen snails and frogs, which are consumed more than 112% more in the Loire than in the rest of the country.  On the other hand, certain products are consumed at a similar rate in all of France (yogurt, rice, coffee...): these are not visible on this map."

If you look through the map you can often see regional specialties.  For example, as they mentioned, cider is particular to Brittany because it's a specialty of the area.  In Brittany you'll also see over-consumption of sparkling wine, butter, and milk.  In the south near the Mediterranean there is a lot of fresh pâté (a ground meat spread - think foie gras), olives, seafood, chestnut products, and herbs.  In Lorraine, near Germany and Switzerland, they eat a lot of fondue ("fromage fondu" - melted cheese).

Sometimes you can see the food mentality of an area: in the south, for example, you can tell they have a lot of regional delicacies and a strong food culture.  Near Switzerland, however, (especially the Haute-Savoie, number 74), they're more health conscious, consuming a lot of diet products, cereal bars, frozen fruit, and tea infusion.  Every single item on the list for Seine-Maritime (76) is a beverage, only one non-alcoholic: you can guess where their priorities are!  A strange trend in the Paris area shows we consume a lot more baby-specific products than anywhere else (milk fortified for babies, dried of the same, ready-made baby/toddler meals and jarred baby food).  We also drink more non-alcoholic beverages.

If you're interested in food I suggest you take a look even if you think you can't read French; lots of words are similar and I'll give a quick guide of words you might see.

pâte - paste, usually meaning a ground meat spread
fraîche or frais - fresh, sometimes here in the sense of "uncooked"
fruits de mer - seafood
galette de roi - a kind of tart filled with sweet almond paste, traditional for Twelfth Night dinners (thus the meaning "the king's pie)
viande - meat; "conserve de viande" would be conserved, or jellied, meat
amer brun - bitters
pain d'épices - spice bread
surgelé - frozen
saucisses and saucisson - sausages, but the latter is usually more like a salami
poisson - fish
charcuterie - various types of cured meats, usually served as an appetizer
beurre - butter
fume or fumé - smoked
marrons - chestnuts
lait - milk 
volaille - poultry 


Also this is funny.