Letter From America.(Brief Article)(Column)

Tell me," a successful French chef asked me yesterday, "Is it true that Americans eat at least one meal a day in their cars?"

I am in Paris this month, taking a respite from my crazy Los Angeles life, but here we are talking about America. I responded as best I could. We like our drive-throughs, yes, but not quite (I hope) once a day. We're an automobile culture, I explained. To us, cars symbolize freedom and vitality. And we're always in a hurry to see and do things. Eating in the car just seems natural.

Our chef still seemed troubled. The French often zero in on this particular American habit when trying to figure us out. It's bewildering why anyone would choose to drive and eat at the same time, when both of those things are so pleasurable by themselves. It seems almost decadent to them, and vaguely unhygienic.

"But would it not be possible," he said after a moment, "to stop the car, get out, eat and then get back in the car and continue driving?"

"I guess so," I said.

He nodded. "Yes, I think that would be better. For the appetite. And for the health."

It's important to bear in mind, as the dollar-franc exchange rate hits summer-vacation-splurge levels, that we seem just as weird to them as they do to us. Weirder, actually. Imagine, if you can, the jarring, disconnected impression you'd get if your three sources of information about the United States came from extravagant television shows, the International Herald Tribune and overweight tourists. On television, rapacious young people with pearl-white teeth and fantastic bodies purr erotically at each other to the hoots and applause of a studio audience. The Herald Tribune, a distillation of the deep thoughts of the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post, is so reliably snooty about America that it's hard for the French not to suspect some kind of trick. I mean, what kind of country publishes a newspaper for its citizens abroad whose sole editorial thrust is to remind those citizens that their country sucks? And to top it all off, right there at a table in the corner cafe is an actual, living American, who resembles neither the hardbodies on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" nor the simpering apologists of the Herald Tribune, but who is pointing to the andouillettes on his plate and asking the waiter, "Now what the mother-of-pearl is that?"