Name: Frites surgelées.
I beg your pardon? Sorry, that’s frozen chips to you non-French-speakers.
Age: Plus de 75 ans.
Stop this, and why are you speaking in French anyway? Because frozen chips are undergoing a spectacular boom in France, where farmers are so desperate to meet the demand for ice-cold potato products that they’re ripping up other crops to plant even more spuds.
Mon dieu! See, now you’re doing it!
So which uncouth country are they selling all these frozen chips to? It’s going to be the UK, isn’t it? Nope: it’s the French themselves, who are said to have developed an insatiable appetite for the snack.
But this is France! Home of bouillabaisse and boeuf bourgignon! Surely these gastronomic elites don’t eat such rubbish? It seems the French are actually rather keen on la malbouffe (junk food) these days. There’s been roughly a 25% rise in the French frozen chip market over recent years, according to La Voix du Nord, and they’re not just munching on the stylish, slender French fry but the thick-cut British oven chip too.
Scandaleux! It’s apparently being driven by French youth, who can’t be bothered faffing around in the kitchen. “Young generations no longer peel much,” is how Ward Claerbout, the legal and external affairs director for the Belgian frozen chip giant Agristo, puts it.
It’s all the fault of those pesky young people again, I see. Isn’t everything? But the rapid expansion is also being blamed on Dutch and Belgian farmers who, unable to buy land in their own countries, are snapping up territory in northern France. Apparently, in Chip Valley, fields worth €15,000 a hectare three years ago are now exchanging hands for almost double that.
Sorry, in where? Oh yes, Chip Valley – or La Vallée de la Frite as it’s become known. It’s the new Silicon Valley. Only for, erm, chips.
And just as lucrative? According to a report in the Times, the global market in frozen potato products is expected to grow from $7.27bn in 2023 to $89.51bn in 2029!
People are going to be eating more than 12 times as many chips in six years’ time?! That’s not going to help the obesity crisis. Relax, the Times got their sums wrong: the actual 2023 figure is $67.27bn, so we will be eating a lot more chips, but not participating in a global edition of Man v Food.
Do say: “Got any McCains to go with this duck à l’orange?”
Don’t say: “Je préfère le riz.”
