“Freedom fries” and “native victuals”: Why American politicians are so weird about French food

Twenty years ago, after former president George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” and an invasion of Iraq was proposed,  France’s president Jacques Chirac ruled out sending French troops to the country without approval by the U.N. Security Council.

Some Americans accused France of betrayal and retreat. Neal Rowland took it a step further and printed new menus for his Beaufort, North Carolina restaurant named Cubbies. On it, he changed “French fries” to “Freedom fries.” In an interview with The Washington Times, Rowland explained that he “got the idea from similar protest action against Germany during World War I, when sauerkraut was renamed ‘liberty cabbage’ and frankfurters became ‘hot dogs.'”

This wasn’t entirely accurate, as the usage of the term hot dog predated the World War by about 30 years, but the sentiment was enough to capture the attention of Republican U.S. Representatives Bob Ney and Walter B. Jones, who directed three Congressional cafeterias to similarly alter their menus in 2003. 

In a statement at the time, Ney accused France of “sitting on the sidelines” while “brave men and women in the American military are putting their lives on the line.” 

“Over the years, France has enjoyed all of the benefits of an alliance with the United States, and all our nation has received in return is a trade deficit and a cry for help when their appeasement efforts fail,” he continued. “This action today is a small but symbolic effort to show the strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions of our so-called ally, France.”

When reached for a statement at the time, a spokesperson for the French Embassy first wondered aloud if the situation was even “worth a comment.” 

“We are working these days on very, very serious issues of war and peace, life or death,” they finally said. “We are not working on potatoes.” 

“Freedom fries,” which the New York Times classified at the time as “so incredibly stupid,” were not a wholly unpredictable development. From our country’s inception, America’s politicians have always had a complicated relationship with France — and thereby French cuisine. 

In his book “A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America,” author James McWilliams writes: 

The development of a unique American cuisine began with an angry rejection of English culture and, afterward, a polite refusal of French food. It wouldn’t have been unexpected if, after the Revolutionary War, Americans had taken a step toward adopting the relatively fancified cooking tradition of the French. There were plenty of reasons to do so. The Americans and French had been loyal allies during the Revolution; Jefferson had become an inveterate Francophile during the war; and the French were gearing up to fight a revolution of their own based on principles adopted from the Americans.

This, of course, didn’t happen. 

According to McWilliams, the more Americans learned about French food, in fact, the more they came to misunderstand and dislike it. This sentiment was crystalized during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. Jefferson was a renowned Francophile and, while spending time in Paris as the Minister to France from 1784 to 1789, grew to really love French cooking. 

However, as White House historian Lina Mann notes, French chefs were very expensive to employ and, as Jefferson’s costs regularly outpaced his income, he needed to find a more budget-friendly solution, “While Jefferson may have been short on cash, he did have an abundant supply of readily available enslaved labor, bound to serve him for life,” Mann wrote. “To save money, Jefferson employed French chefs to train several enslaved members of the Monticello community in the delicate art of French cookery.”  

McWilliams writes that Patrick Henry — the Virginia-born Founding Father who famously uttered “Give me liberty, or give me death!” — criticized Jefferson’s preoccupation with French cuisine to be “effete affectation that made him ‘abjure his native victuals.'” 

This is a line of criticism that was extended to Martin Van Buren years later; his opponent for the presidency, William Henry Harrison, accused Van Buren of living like a king in the White House, saying that he slept in the same kind of bed as the king of France and ate French food on gold dishes while the rest of the country struggled financially. 

“The American rejection of French food was, two historians of American food write, ‘by no means the only demonstration in American history of the curious fact that in America it is politically disadvantageous to be known as a gourmet, as though there were something unmanly in being discriminating about, or even attentive to, what one eats,'” McWilliams wrote. 

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In part, that is how we stumbled into the pervasive cultural ideal of the American “meat and potatoes man” and, by extension, the idea of “meat and potato issues” within the political realm — of which “freedom fries” arguably was not. 

In 2006, the Congressional cafeterias quietly reverted their menus back to put the “French” back in “French fry.” Neither Reps. Jones nor Ney publicly commented on the shift. When reached by The Washington Times at the time, a spokeswoman for Ney simply said, “We don’t have a comment for your story.”