Fast Food.

The French proudly frown upon the admittedly disgusting phenomenon known as fast food, even as thousands of them line up from one end of the Champs Élysées to the other for a simple Big Mac. This underground obsession with fast food even makes its way into the countryside, where the French can be found waiting in line for greasy fries and a shake anywhere they cross paths with the famous golden arches.

But it’s the more literal meaning of “fast food” that surprises me on a daily basis; i.e., the speed with which my French friends and colleagues consume their normal, non-“fast food” meals.

Before moving to France, I had long heard of the extended mealtimes enjoyed by French workers. Back in California, I was used to lunches that would take me eleven minutes flat – three minutes to get from my office to street level, two minutes to the sandwich shop, one minute in line, two minutes back to the building and three minutes back to my desk. The act of actually buying the food never even included coming to a full stop. I would enter the sandwich shop, get in a fast-moving line, grab a sandwich, breeze through the register and grab my change all in one single, fluid motion, just like the “California stops” we do behind the wheel. By the time I sat back down at my desk, I had already finished my entire meal and “wasted” very little time. When I learned about my French colleagues’ daily lunches of between ninety minutes and two hours, I longed for my arrival in Paris.

So I was prepared to lay back and take my time. I was ready for however many courses they wanted to feed me – appetizer, main course, yogurt, cheese, dessert and so on. I knew that portions would be small by super-sized American standards, but since lunch is deemed the main meal of the day, I knew it would be more than adequate. So I was ready to take my time and enjoy my meals.

At my first lunch, I was shocked to see the speed at which my French coworkers consumed all of those courses. After I finished my appetizer, I was just starting my main course when I realized that my coworkers were already finishing off their desserts. Then my poor coworkers got the pleasure of staring at me for half an hour as I picked through the rest of my food, making me look like I was either exceedingly slow or somehow eating twice as much food as anyone else.

Over time, I learned to adapt during these lunches with my coworkers. Each day at lunch, I was a nervous wreck. I would sit down, knowing that by the time I picked up my fork, my coworkers would have already finished a course or two. Where were they putting it all? I mean literally, where does it go? Do they have some secret food-consumption orifice that I haven’t noticed? And wherever it’s going, how does it get there so quickly? Sometimes I would be so amazed by the sheer velocity of food consumption that I would freeze up like a deer in headlights, only putting me further behind in the food race.

After a few weeks, I was almost able to hold my own, which actually made it even more frustrating for me. As long as I couldn’t quite work up the same overzealous gobbling action, I was always just one half-course behind the laggards of the bunch. I would find myself confronted with a table-full of coworkers who had finished eating while I still had half a millefeuilles staring up at me. That might not sound like much, but it’s 500 sheets of delectable wonderfulness that should be appreciated. But not then, not with a half-dozen pairs of eyes watching my every bite, my every quiver, my every hesitation. Appreciating food would have to wait for the weekend. I had a pastry that needed to be stuffed somewhere. Urgently.

I won’t tell you what happened to that millefeuilles. But it wasn’t pretty.

Those of you not eating with French coworkers on a regular basis are probably thinking (i) huh, I’ve never heard that French eat quickly and (ii) if they eat so fast, how does lunch take two hours?

On that first point, you’re just going to have to trust me (and there’s always the outside chance that my coworkers are coincidentally all of some strange subset of the French species that eats faster than the rest; i.e., maybe it’s just them and not France). But on the second issue, I can explain: if you’re wondering what the French do with the rest of their two-hour “lunch hour”, it all comes down to one thing – coffee.

After eating the meal, the entire lunch party relaxes for an extended coffee break, which can take what seems like an eternity. In corporate cafeterias, this is often even in a separate room, involving getting up, going to that room, ordering coffees, and finding seats all over again.

So after wolfing down an eighteen-course meal in 7.3 minutes flat, you have the opposite dilemma – how to slowly and gradually drink a thimble-sized cup of coffee in an hour.

I’ve got this mastered, so listen up: first, spend an inordinate amount of time stirring the coffee even if you didn’t put any sugar in it; second, fiddle with it endlessly, as if it is too hot to actually drink; and third, when you do drink it, take it in small sips, as if it were your last canteen of clean water on a thousand-mile camel caravan trek across the Sahara.

Guard it. Covet it. Savor it.

And then reluctantly go back to work.