French tells us when to eat better than English does

Not a mistranslation, just bad timing

When I work at the shop where I work, as you do, I regularly encounter a misunderstanding between me and the administrative staff. I repeatedly have to tell them that, as a freelancer who is not on their official payroll, I take my lunch when I want to, subject to operational requirements. They still occasionally enter my shift as, for instance 9.45 a.m. to 12.15 p.m., with a new shift starting on the same day at 12.30 p.m. until 6.15 p.m. The reason they do this is because they are obliged to fix a 15-minute break for payrolled employees under the employment laws. And, because I’m a freelancer, I don’t fall under the employment laws: my contract is a contract for services, not a contract of service. Hence, I take my lunch when I blooming well want to.

Now, that said, the company is flexible: whilst employees formally have a fixed break time for lunch, they arrange when they will take it with the duty manager, and no social inspectorate is any the wiser. What the fixed scheduling does is establish beyond question the worker’s right to that 15-minute, unpaid break.

One reason why I resist the lunch break in my own schedule is that I enjoy none of the benefits that an employee gets. Therefore I don’t think I should be subject to the restrictions that are likewise imposed on employees. They stop working for those 15 minutes because they are unpaid. But I’m not going to stop working for 15 minutes just to stand there twiddling my thumbs waiting for the official restart of work activity. That’s plain silly.

In addition, 15 minutes is time for a sandwich, if you happen to have one, or a cigarette, if you happen to smoke, and a cup of tea, if you happen to drink tea. But it’s not really the time needed for a proper sit-down meal, and it’s a proper sit-down meal that my digestive system likes the best. So, I eschew the 15-minute break and instead accept the (paid) 10-minute tea break that all staff are accorded, in order to do what that break is intended for, which is drink some tea. When I get home at night, I sit down to have my dinner, and that suits me just fine, because I am ready for it by then.

The point is this: when I work at the shop where I work, as one does, I lose weight. I have it to lose, but apart from the eating regimen I impose on myself, it is a very physical job. One is standing the entire time, and walking from one end of the shop to the other, carrying cases of produce, bottles of beer, slabs of tins of soup and the like. And, because of that, the work is far more akin to work on a farm than in an office. There is one more aspect to working in the shop that differs from my translation work, however: the shop is never boring. It can be physically tiring, but translation is actually fairly boring, and that has an important effect on one other thing: how much I eat.

When desk work is tedious, I would tend to perk myself up with treats: cakes, biscuits, chocolate bars. The yearning for such things has waned of late. The supermarket where I shopped yesterday had Easter hens in milk chocolate, half price at the check-out, and I saw they were only two euros fifty. I did wonder how they could ever have justified charging five euros for them, but I swithered at whether to buy one as a pick-me-up. “If you need to hesitate,” said the charming cashier, “then you know you want it.” I smiled at her and said, “You’ve got the same gift of the gab that I use with my own customers,” and promptly bought one.

The morals of this story are twofold. The first is that keeping physically on the move is good for my ageing joints and reduces my tummy a little bit. It’s not quite farm work, since we’re always inside and not out in the healthy fresh air, but the physicality of the work is a boon (and it means, into the bargain, that the work I do is unlikely to be taken over by artificial intelligence any time soon). The second moral concerns eating habits. Two of the products that our shop sells are breakfast cereals and orange juice. And these are classically eaten at what we call breakfast time. The word breakfast has a simple etymology: it is the meal with which one breaks one’s fast, a fast being a period during which one doesn’t eat, as those who have just observed Ramadan will know.

During the Middle Ages, it was common to go to bed at sundown and to rise in the middle of the night to have something to eat, before retiring again until daybreak. That was the rhythm of life in those days: it was a rhythm that kept pace with the length of the day and the seasons. People in those times would be astounded at the idea of working during the hours of darkness by some artificial light. It would discombobulate them, feel unnatural. As unnatural as it feels to you to go to bed at 8 p.m. and then rise at 1 a.m. for a meal to then return to bed and sleep on till 6 a.m. We know about the old-fashioned pattern of sleep because of written records, but also because of modern French.

The French word for breakfast was not initially the word we know today: petit-déjeuner. No, the words break and fast translate into French as dé- (or de-) and jeûner, which is the verb for fasting. Nowadays, it is their midday meal that the French call déjeuner. Here’s one being eaten on some grass:

Image: Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Edouard Manet (1832-1883), completed in 1863.

Manet’s painting gave rise to numerous other, similarly composed paintings and even to films, but the title obscures one simple fact, which is highlighted in a conundrum that is familiar to the world of translation: the breakfast example.

The underlying philosophy of translation is that one should translate the sense of the source text’s words, rather than their mathematical equivalents, so that le lever du soleil is translated as daybreak, rather than the rising of the sun (which is instead a house in New Orleans). We take a substance-over-form approach, even though a form-over-substance approach can tell us about the origins of language. In London, breakfast comprises a pot of tea and toast and marmalade, or bacon and eggs. In Paris it is a pot of coffee, with a croissant and jam. No food element is the same in both meals, so can you translate the word breakfast simply as petit-déjeuner? Are they not different things?

This is not so pedantic as one might think. In Belgium there is a fiscal technique known as les revenus définitivement taxés, or RDT, which gets rendered as definitively taxed income. When I was working for a tax firm, this income, from dividends held abroad, could be repatriated subject to a corporation tax charge on 5 per cent of the dividend amount, so that 95 per cent was exempted (provided it was taxed in the source jurisdiction). The tax was levied on the non-exempted portion of income. But other countries operate a reduced or exempted rate of tax on the initial amount of the dividend, and that is known as the participation exemption. Despite the strikingly similar effects of the two techniques, we could not translate RDT as participation exemption (unless in accordance with the terminology of a double taxation treaty).

In the end, breakfast gets translated as petit-déjeuner because of one simple criterion: it is the first meal of the new day (what in English is called the morrow). The problem arises not due to what is eaten for breakfast, however, but rather when breakfast is eaten. Because, as I said, in centuries past, people already broke their fast in the middle of the night. That meant that they arose on the morrow and launched themselves into their work day, only breaking their fast at the midday hour. In other words, déjeuner (without the addition of petit) is the correct translation of breakfast. The petit-déjeuner was originally the meal that was had in the middle of the night. So, what did people have for breakfast as we know it today, at daybreak? The answer is strikingly obvious: nothing. In times past, there simply was no meal after waking up.

Breakfast is a meal that has been invented in the industrial age to cater for the movements and exigencies of our modern industrialised society. In much the same way as industry has regimented our lives by wrenching it out of the natural rhythms that govern our moods, sentiments, bodily functions and work rhythms, so it has also wrenched us out of our natural rhythm of eating and sleeping. Breakfast caters for the fact we rise in the dark in winter, or work on into the night time. It caters for our unnatural lifestyle, in which the clock is the supreme slave master. And it has been sold to us by W. K. and J. H. Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan. They processed cereals such as maize, rice and oats to puff them up and dry them as a ready-made bowl of nutrition. Their problem (as is amply demonstrated in the black comedy The Road To Wellville) is that puffed maize doesn’t actually taste very nice. It is bland and dry. So you need to add two other ingredients in order to get a corn flake over your gullet: milk and sugar. And to finish the meal off, we have orange juice. Pressed from oranges and virtually devoid of the roughage provided by the fruit itself. All bottled orange juice has added sugar, which together with the sugar in the corn flakes (plus the spoonful you add to the flakes to help the medicine go down) is intended—there is no other word for it—to get you hooked, or, more clinically, to get you addicted. Modern industrialised society is addicted to sugar for breakfast: maple syrup and pancakes (see here), sweetened milk shakes, marmalade and jams, “central heating for kids”, as one form of porridge is marketed (my grandmother in Scotland always had salt with her porridge, but she grew up on a farm). All to give you a good start into the day. And a little basic French will tell you: you don’t need it and you never did. It is yet another manipulation by the food industry.

If you’re tempted to slice a banana and strew it over your breakfast cereal, just remember that that is a product of carpet advertising by the Chiquita company from the early 1950s onward, allowing them to broaden their market for the bananas they produced with slave labour in Central and South America. In 1928, the Chiquita company, under its old name of United Fruit, paid the Colombian army to massacre 2,000 of its own workers who were striking for better conditions. So it was that, after securing the labour needed to produce cheap bananas, they had to flog the things to American housewives, if necessary by getting little boys to stuff them in little girls’ mouths.

This recent article on the RTBF website gives further insight into the wisdom that no one needs to fill up on cereals and sugar in order to go and sit at an office desk, where, within an hour or two, you’ll likely be munching at a Danish pastry. It’s not will power people need in order to stay fit. It’s French comprehension.