This article by Mort Rosenblum originally appeared in GlobalPost. For the original article, click here.

PARIS, France — During the 1970s, I dropped in on Monsieur Turpin, a storied Parisian greengrocer and pheasant plucker. His walrus mustache bristled with indignation.

“Those people,” he said, nodding toward two young Americans chewing on baguettes as they passed. “They are walking while they eat.”

Alas, poor Turpin. Today, even the Louvre Museum has a food court for ambulatory grazing. Soon it will include those ubiquitous golden arches. A Big Mona with fries?

What began slowly in the 1970s is now a galloping, likely irreversible, scourge. France is losing its fabled affinity for good food.

In the country where four centuries ago Francois Vatel fell on his sword because the turbot was late for a royal banquet, frozen fish sticks are all the rage.

A glance down any supermarket aisle is evidence enough, with such ersatz food as thin cellophane-wrapped slices of bright yellow processed cheese.

That feeding frenzy of Julia Child lore inspired Americans — first in the 1960s, then again this year — to revive classic French recipes, but here a dwindling number of people bother to simmer a simple sauce.

Turpin used to wake at 4 a.m. to select each tomato he would sell off the trucks at Les Halles, Paris’ then-central food market. He taught me why the family dinner table is the heart of everything French.

Back then I began amassing old volumes and soon realized French food could be hazardous. If my shelves ever give way, I’ll be smashed flatter than a mallet-pounded escalope de veau.

Back in the 1500s, Catherine de Medici brought forks from Italy. Thus armed, French nobles hired cooks to put flatware to good use.

After the Revolution, jobless chefs opened eateries for common folk. Marie-Antoine Careme elevated good cooking to haute cuisine. Later, Auguste Escoffier codified it.

Perusing the books, I found Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s classic remark, underlined in red: “The discovery of a new dish means more to humankind than the discovery of a new star.”

I lingered over a 1937 equivalent of Cooking for Dummies by a Cordon Bleu master named Henri-Paul Pellaprat: “La Cuisine Froide, Simple et Pratique” (”Cold Food, Simple and Convenient”).

Opening photos show how to debone a chicken; stuff it with pork, fowl bits, ham, lard and truffles; truss it with surgical knots; and wrap it in a towel for the oven.

Others show the construction of chicken a la Neva in a not-quite-firm gelee and sauce Chaufroid (don’t ask). Nuclear fusion is more simple et pratique.

It is not over yet. Local markets still thrive. Imaginative young restaurateurs add new dishes to the old stalwarts at prices that don’t require a second mortgage.

Down Calorie Alley, side roads along the A6 autoroute from Paris through Lyon, a galaxy of several dozen Michelin stars cluster at flower-splashed inns and posh palaces.

More on food in France by GlobalPost:
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But even in small backwaters, the new trend is clear. What with jobs and new styles of life, young mothers tend toward packaged plats and le fast food.

When McDonald’s first opened on the Champs-Elysees 30 years ago, a friend of mine heard a French first-timer ask for a Big Mac and add: “Not too well done, please.”

Now that particular McDo is the world’s busiest, one of more than 1,000 across the country. For years, France has been one of the chain’s fastest-growing markets.

In the small Provence city of Draguignan (where two McDos jam at lunch), I talked with Lucie Martin, who spent decades cooking school lunches in the nearby village of Ampus.

“You should see the disgusting garbage they feed the kids,” Lucie said. “It breaks your heart.”
She used to spend hours each day slicing real potatoes for her memorable gratin dauphinois and finding fresh vegetables as the seasons changed.

“Now it’s all flakes and powders from a conglomerate,” she said. “They use fish gravy for meat dishes and meat gravy for fish. There’s no taste so it doesn’t matter.”

Sodexho, the multibillion-dollar company that supplies industrial near-food to schools and institutions in 80 countries, is as French as Michelin or Paul Bocuse.

At the Draguignan market, I queried the usual suspects to see if the Julia Child phenomenon in America might have triggered some sort of renaissance.

Yves Vanweddingen, the brainy goat-cheese guy with an ex-wife from Ohio, pondered the question. “Child,” he said, “like the English word for kid? Never heard of her.”

His customers are aging, and even his own family hustles through meals that were once savored.

“Women have always worked in France,” Yves said, “but they used to work at home and could find time to stir a pot. No longer. Even among those who have time, few care.”

Whether in Provence or Paris, a fresh generation of can-opener kids is trading in a rich culinary heritage for sandwiches and snack food.

Among my favorite old tomes is the collected letters of Madame de Sevigny, the 17th century grande dame who went through goose quills and gigapots of ink at a furious pace.

La Sevigny was at Vatel’s last party. His body was still warm, she reported, when purveyors rushed in with the delayed seafood after a nightlong ride from the coast.

She details the menu of a Christmas dinner for 10 she put together at the Hotel Carnavalet in Paris.

Starters included soups and courts-bouillons, sliced smoked meats and sausages, pork tongues, warm pates and plates of fried this-and-that.

After roasted partridge and pheasant came amusing little larks, thrushes and ortolans. These last are delicate buntings, now nearly extinct. Diners put napkins over their heads to mask the crunching and spitting.

(As Francois Mitterrand neared death in 1996, his last meal with friends featured endangered ortolans; indulgent gendarmes standing guard looked the other way.)

Salmon, trout and carp appeared in elaborate forms along with fresh-water shrimps nestled among crabs in their shells. The desserts go on for pages more.

Most likely, Madame Sevigny did not ask if anyone wanted fries with that.

Top photo:
A member of France’s young Gaullists (RPR political party) (L) tries to distribute samples of French Roquefort blue cheese to customers outside the McDonald’s hamburger franchise on the Champs Elysees July 30. Mal Langsdon/REUTERS

– Tom Abate covers the technology sector for GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. The views are his own. —

When Iranian protesters used internet services like Twitter to gain global attention they also reminded the world that oppressive regimes continue to buy or build technologies to enforce censorship.

Clothilde Le Coz, director of internet research for Reporters Without Borders, says Iran is second only to China in the extent and sophistication of its efforts to stifle dissent online.

“The Iranian government said last year that it was blocking 5 million websites,” Le Coz said in a telephone interview. “They brag about what they can do, perhaps to intimidate their opponents.”

The complicity of Western companies in Iranian censorship was brought into focus when the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran’s ability to monitor online protests “was provided at least in part” by Nokia Siemens Networks, a jointly owned subsidiary of the two European tech firms.

Hoping to limit the damage to its reputation, the European telecommunications firm issued a statement explaining that it had only provided Iran the ability to tap wireless phone calls — a function called “lawful intercept” that it is also legally required to sell as a crime-fighting tool in Europe and the United States.

“Nokia Siemens Networks has not provided any deep packet inspection, web censorship or internet filtering capability to Iran,” the company said.

Iran, already subject to a U.S.-imposed trade embargo, apparently considers internet censorship so critical that it has developed its own web monitoring tools.

“Iran now employs domestically produced technology for identifying and blocking objectionable websites, reducing its reliance on Western filtering technologies,” according to a recent report from the Open Net Initiative, an academic consortium that tracks internet censorship.

The report added: “With the emergence of this domestic technical capacity, Iran joins China as the only countries that aggressively filter the internet using their own technology.”

The fact that so much material leaked out over the internet despite Iran’s efforts to squelch the flow shows the difficulties of censoring a medium that evolves so quickly, said Nart Villeneuve, a research fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk Center for International Studies, which is part of the Open Net Initiative.

For instance, the relatively new messaging service, Twitter.com, delivered more than 2 million brief reports from inside Iran during an 18-day period, according to one post-election analysis. Villeneuve said Iranian authorities tried to stop the message flow by blocking access to Twitter.com, but many Iranians knew how to evade such measures by relaying their “tweets” through unblocked proxy servers.

Villeneuve said some nations, notably Burma and Nepal, have simply cut themselves off from the internet during periods of civil unrest to deny protesters a world audience, but international actors like Iran and China seem reluctant to go to such extremes, preferring selective censorship instead.

This suggests that the continuing battle between free speech and censorship will involve Western companies whenever they do business with repressive regimes. A total embargo on countries that don’t adhere to Western norms is unlikely and perhaps unwise. As Nokia Siemens Networks spokesman Ben Roome noted in an email to GlobalPost, the number of Iranian cellphone subscribers went from 12 million to 53 million in a two-year period. “Would people in Iran be better off without access to telecommunications?” he asks rhetorically.

Activist groups hope to force Western tech companies to avoid supporting censorship. Reporters Without Borders used the Iranian crisis to focus renewed attention on the Global Online Freedom Act, a proposal that asks the U.S. Congress to impose fines on American companies that make or modify technologies that aid internet censorship.

Meanwhile, Iran’s efforts to develop its own filtering technologies suggest that whatever Western nations and companies do, repressive governments want to enjoy the benefits of technology while minimizing challenges to their authority — even when their tactics seem downright foolish.

For instance, the Open Net Initiative report notes that in 2006, the Iranian government told its internet service providers not to offer home access faster than 128 kilobytes. Whether this was to discourage the downloading of porn or the uploading of protest images, according to the report, the policy makes Iran “the only country in the world to have instituted an explicit cap on internet access speeds for households.”

(Pictured above: An Internet user tries to log onto social networking site Facebook in Tehran May 25, 2009. The Farsi text reads “Dear Customer, access to this site is not possible. In the event that this site has been mistakenly filtered please email filter@dci.ir with the name of the domain and any other necessary explanation.” REUTERS/Morteza Nikoubaz)

Click here for the full article.

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David L. Stern covers the former Soviet Union and the Black Sea region for GlobalPost, where this article originally ran.

KIEV, Ukraine  — Was Kyrgyzstan’s decision last week not to evict American forces from a strategic air base the result of the “Obama Effect” — President Barack Obama’s reputed benign influence on how other nations now view the United States — or evidence of the new president’s hardball negotiating tactics?

The answer holds implications for the American leader’s first meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, when he is in Moscow July 6 to 8. Depending on whether the Kyrgyz reversal was made with or without the Kremlin’s blessing, the base issue could be a sign of how U.S.-Russian relations will develop over the next four years.

Bishkek announced that an arrangement was reached last week to allow U.S. forces to remain at Manas air base, where they staff a major re-fueling and transport hub for operations in nearby Afghanistan. Parliament, in which all but a few seats are occupied by President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s ruling party, quickly ratified the new agreement.

Rumors of a deal had been swirling around Washington and Bishkek for more than a month, but U.S. and Kyrgyz officials maintained a strict silence that allowed no official confirmation of the back-channel negotiations. Only three weeks ago, Foreign Minister Kadyrbek Sarbayev said that the decision to eject the Americans by August still stood.

Under the new agreement, Washington’s annual rent for using Manas will be upped from $17.5 million to $60 million. In addition, the U.S. will pay some $36 million to renovate Manas International Airport, where the base is located, just outside the capital, and tens of millions more to combat drug trafficking and terrorism, and to promote economic growth. Some news reports placed the total amount of the new package at about $180 million per year. When the U.S. first opened Manas in 2001, its rent was just $2 million.

It is still unclear, however, if the base’s core functions will in any way change. A Russian foreign ministry statement indicated that cargo through Kyrgyzstan would be limited to “non-lethal” goods. Kyrgyz and U.S. officials made no mention of this, however.

Last year more than 6,300 flights took off from the base, while some 189,000 troops passed through and more than 200 million pounds of fuel were used.

But a question remains: Namely, were the Russians aware of the negotiations, or were they kept out of the loop?

The Kremlin appeared to have a vested interest in Bishkek’s original action. President Bakiev made his announcement that he was evicting the Americans just after talks in Moscow where the Russians had promised the Kyrgyz some $2 billion in aid. Many observers believed Russia, which runs an air base of its own in Kyrgyzstan, used financial enticements to achieve its long-stated goal of closing Manas, though both sides denied this.

Moscow immediately put a positive spin on the U-turn. President Medvedev said that he welcomed the decision, while the Russian foreign ministry said Kyrgyzstan was acting in its rights as a “sovereign nation.”

Not everybody was so sanguine, however. An unnamed senior Russian diplomat told Russia’s Kommersant newspaper that the Kyrgyz had played a “dirty trick” and Moscow would carry out an “adequate response.”

Konstantin Zatulin, a Duma deputy with close ties to the Kremlin and foreign policy establishment, nevertheless believes that Moscow did give its blessing to the negotiations. “Obama’s arrival played a substantive, important role <in the Kremlin’s position>. He created the ground for a new Russian-American relationship.”

Others do not doubt that some Russian officials are dissatisfied, but in the end their opinions matter little. “We have only two ‘senior diplomats’ — Putin and Medvedev,” said Aleksei Malashenko, a Eurasia expert at the Carnegie Center in Moscow, referring to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

If the Russians were on board, some experts wonder if they received anything for their acquiescence — an American concession to abandon an anti-missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, for example. This, however, would be a risky move, as it could be interpreted as a betrayal of the two countries that pushed for the shield, Poland and the Czech Republic.

But others say that the Russians were in fact not informed until the last minute. This raises the question of what measures they will take next. Just prior to the decision to kick the Americans out, Kyrgyzstan experienced a debilitating cyber-attack which some experts subscribed to the Kremlin.

On the other hand, the Americans may have simply handed the Russians a fait accompli, which Moscow, on the eve of its first summit with the new president, will have to accept.

“My sense is that they are as mad as hell,” said Stephen Blank, a professor of national securities studies at the U.S. Army War College. “They thought they had it locked up and we beat them.”

For full article on GlobalPost, click here.