Forget the cheese course. In the land of slow-roasted duck and vintage Bordeaux, convenience is suddenly key. Yatoo Partoo now has 30 machines around France, selling everything from milk and salad to pastries and wine. Vending machines on subway platforms tempt commuters with cups of cappuccino as well as tomato soup. Prepackaged, ready-to-heat meals–lamb tips over egg noodles, veal cutlet in mushroom sauce–are clogging supermarket shelves. Fleury Michon, a giant maker of premade meals, has begun hawking ready-to-eat dishes in offices, hospitals and hotels. Around Paris customers can also rent DVDs, make business cards, buy clothes and even select works of art–all from computerized machines. Naturally, not everyone is pleased by this development. “It’s just another example of our society’s acceleration and modernization–and not in a good way,” says Jean Lheritier, a spokesman for the French-born slow-food movement.
Others see le fast food as a necessary evil. “With nearly all women working now, and with less and less time to do their shopping and cooking, they have no choice but to do things that save time–even if it means sacrificing taste,” says Agathe Couvreur, codirector of the department of food consumption at the Center for the Study of Social Conditions in Paris. Yatoo Partoo CEO Serge Le Botmel says the average lunch break is now only 34 minutes (down from more than an hour a decade ago). And thanks to the economic slump, more and more French are finding it prohibitively expensive to eat out. Still, old-time foodies aren’t buying the excuses. “The bottom line, I think, is just laziness,” says Le Figaro’s restaurant critic Francois Simon. “Sure, people are busy, but they’re also lazy.”
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of vending-machine consumers are the time-pressed, up-at-all-hours under-35 crowd. Having grown up with fast food, they don’t consider it poor form to grab a sandwich on the run. Inside a Monoprix supermarket in Paris, Edmee Pesnot, a single 27-year-old teacher, tosses a handful of premade salads into her cart, blaming her crazed schedule. The problem, says Alexandre Cammas, food critic for the hip magazine Nova, is not that the food is fast but that it tastes terrible. “I bought some chips from a Yatoo once, and they were practically frozen, because the whole machine has to be kept so cold,” he says. “But what do you do if it’s 4 p.m. and you finally get time for lunch and no restaurants are serving anymore? You turn to a vending machine.” If only they sold fresh goose-liver pate and double-cream Brie.
