Cuisine Goes Back to College

Alarmed by a waning of France's global prestige in all things culinary, the government is to establish a university of gastronomy.

"Haute cuisine these days is international: you can find great chefs and wine experts everywhere," Renaud Dutreuil, minister for consumer affairs and traditional businesses, told Le Parisien yesterday - acknowledging that, as gourmet tastes become ever more adventurous, many critics now say classic French cooking is crushed by tradition, and that better food can be eaten in Brussels, New York or even London.

"France has to impose itself more visibly as the country of reference for taste," the minister said. "This university, the first of its kind in the world, will aim to do precisely that. It will become a sort of Harvard of taste."

It opens next September at Reims in the Champagne country, and will accept 100 students - "French restaurateurs who hope to improve themselves, Americans in the food-processing business, great chefs from, say, Denmark or Japan" - for training in "arts of the table and French culinary history". Tutors would be historians, sociologists, chefs, biologists, and "great professionals in the trades of taste," the minister said. There would be offshoots for regional gastronomy and viticulture.

"France is renowned for its cuisine, but it lacks a training tool to spread this knowledge across the world," Mr Dutreuil told the paper. "We need ambassadors who will represent our culinary heritage."