A slightly wacky move is afoot to have French cuisine registered by UNESCO as a World Heritage listing. The original idea of the World Heritage program was to offer recognition and protection to historic and natural sites of global interest, from the Great Barrier Reef, in Australia, to Angkor Wat and the historic center of Prague. France itself has some 30 official sites, glorious monuments like Chartres Cathedral, but no country so far has requested a designation for anything as conceptual as its cuisine. The new initiative (led by L’Institut Europeen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation et l’Universite de Tours) asks the French government to prepare an official dossier and present it to UNESCO.
A good many chefs—among them, Pierre Troisgros, Alain Ducasse, Olivier Roellinger, and Alain Passard—have formed a committee to support the move, explaining in a position paper: "The purpose of our initiative is not to put French cooking under some sort of a bell jar, or to inter it in its glorious past, but rather to defend the essential idea that cooking is a vital element of French identity and to promote its creativity and diversity." No one has yet said exactly what the actual benefits of UNESCO certification would be, but a few brave voices have professed skepticism, including a call-in listener to one of the country’s major radio stations, who found the idea "bizarre and unnecessary, because the truth of how good French cooking can be is found daily in hundreds of restaurants all over the country. In my opinion, this move makes us look not only arrogant but flustered."
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