How much food packaging is too much? Two French commercials duke it out over this question with pretty goofy results. In the first video, a commercial for European Waste Reduction Week (site in French) aims to persuade consumers to make conscious packaging decisions at the supermarket and features a man being stalked by a giant monster made out of packaging waste. The second commercial, from Elipso Packaging, basically responds by saying: "Dirty hippies." Videos below. (They're in French, but you'll be all right.)

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In the segment "Tip of the Hat / Wag of the Finger" Stephen Colbert tipped his hat to the Louvre for embracing American culture and installing a McDonald's:

McDonald's will fit perfectly with the French culture, because after all, what is a French mime but a mute, humorless Ronald McDonald? And if that's not enough to convince the French, we'll offer their kids the "Ennui Meal"... Think of all the new visitors they'll get with masterworks like the Grimace de Milo or the McLisa.

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Photo composite: Eat Me Daily

Sacrebleu! A McDonald's restaurant and McCafé are going to open in the Louvre museum next month (more specifically in the underground approach to the Louvre, known as the Carrousel du Louvre). The plans are for a "quality" McCafé and a McDonald's restaurant, likely the fancy kind that serve macarons. An art historian working at the museum told The Telegraph: "This is the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy and very unpleasant odours in the context of a museum."

OK, we issue a challenge: the first person to send in a photograph of themselves, with a Big Mac (or a Royale with cheese or whatever they call it these days) and fries, in front of the Mona Lisa, we'll PayPal you $30. Update: David Lebovitz makes the argument that nobody wants dollars anymore, so we'll sweeten the deal and make it €30 (which is ~$44 US).

Photos via adsoftheworld.com

Out of France come these ads for McDonalds' McCafe's macarons by TBWA, Paris, France in which they look just like mini-burgers. Sort of a reminder to the public, saying, "Hey, even if you're not a fan of the burgers, you could always stop in for a pretty good macaron." But before everyone goes "yuck!," apparently the macarons from McDonalds are not entirely bad. In Michael Steinberger's Au Revoir to All That (buy at Amazon) — see the related excerpt on Slate — he finds out that McDonalds gets their macarons "from Holder, the company that owns Ladurée," the renowned luxury cakes and pastries brand based in Paris that's famous for their macarons.

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Photo: AP

Due to agricultural runoff of fertilizers and human and animal waste, combined with global warming, reports of toxic algae are on the rise. This is pretty devastating: On July 28, Vincent Petit, a 28-year-old researcher in a state-run virology lab, was riding his horse on the Saint-Michel-en-Greves beach in Brittany, when the two were sucked into a toxic algae ooze. Petit was conscious long enough to witness the horse die within 30 seconds until he himself passed out, only to be rescued by bystanders. From the AP's story:

Harmless while in water, the algae form dangerous gases — notably hydrogen sulfide, with its characteristic rotten-egg smell — when they wash up on land and decay. A white crust forms and traps the gases, which are released when stepped on or otherwise disturbed. Over time, putrefied algae turns sand into a black silt muck, sometimes containing pockets of poison gas.

According to the BBC: "Despite its small population of 3m people living on just 5% of the country's agricultural land, Britanny is home to 60% of France's pig farms, 45% of its poultry farms and 30% of its dairy farms. Following public outcry and bad press, Prime Minister Francois Fillon announced that the French government would pay for cleaning the beaches in Brittany.

But wait, there’s more! She also has been offered a musical deal (which is, of course, where the big money is) produced by the Paris actor and director Jackie-Georges Canal, a comic book version of the book will be published, and she has been offered a second book deal! Oh yeah, and the original book she wrote is an international best seller, which has now been published in sixteen languages.

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Orangina posters, Bernard Villemot. Left: 1953. Right: 1964. Images via orangina.eu

Commonly referred to as one of the best French artists of the past 50 years, Bernard Villemot (1911-1989) is most recognized for his (now) vintage print advertisements for the likes of the Red Cross, Air France, Bally's shoes, Perrier, and Orangina, the French carbonated citrus beverage. For almost four decades, starting in 1953, Villemot designed some remarkable posters for Orangina. Herein, a survey:

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Steinberger used to like France. He remembers amazing meals and describes them in ways that belie his economics-writing background. He writes about the dinner where he "swapped [his] wife for a duck liver" — an entire lobe used in an evolved version of baeckeofe, an Alsatian stew, which was "bathed in a truffled bouillon." But this sort of pure food erotica — what a good portion of a book about French food should be, one would think — does not last. Sternberger experiences the unthinkable: A bland meal at a famed former two-Michelin star restaurant, recently demoted down to one. Cue the foreboding music: it turns out this is not an anomaly, it's happening all over the place. So what happened to the Eden of edibles, the promised land of potables? Steinberger vows to investigate.

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Photograph from laposte.fr

Here's a series of ten stamps from France celebrating chocolate — but more than just looking like blocks of chocolate, they're scented like chocolate. The stamps, issued by La Poste, the French mail service, trace the history of chocolate over ten frames, from Central America to the royal courts to becoming an everyday treat. David Lebovitz got some, and he writes, "lifting it up to my face, sure enough, the stamps smelled like pure, dark chocolate."

Photograph from freshplaza.com.

Coming in behind saffron, macadamia nuts, beluga caviar, and white truffles, the fifth most expensive food in the world isn't some exotic fish or endangered tropical fruit: it's a rare variety of potato. Grown in France on the Isle of Noirmoutier, the La Bonnotte potato sometimes achieves a market price of an astounding €500/kilo (US $300/lb).

The potato (which nearly went extinct between WWI and WWII, but was rescued thanks to some truly dedicated tuberphiles) is prized for its complex flavor — it's subtly briny, thanks in part to algae and seaweed added to the soil, and seawater in the air — but its price is driven so high thanks largely to its infinitesimally short growing season, which lasts all the way from May 1 to May 10. Too fragile to be cultivated by machine, the potatoes have to be pulled out of the ground by hand, with just about 20,000 kilograms harvested each year.

Once the residents of Noirmoutier are done with their annual hand-harvest of the tuber, they throw it its own festival — the potato is so beloved by its fans that it even has its own website. Color us skeptical that a humble potato could be worth the equivalent of our monthly rent, but we'll believe it when we taste it.

—Paula

I went into this review with more than a little bias in favor of David Lebovitz. A former Chez Panisse pastry chef turned cookbook author, he's responsible for my favorite dessert cookbook of all time, Room for Dessert. (The book is, tragically, out of print, and used copies run about $50 a pop online.) But that book, and most of Lebovitz's others, are recipe collections — a wildly different animal than the book that's on the table now. The most recent addition to the Lebovitz oeuvre is an essay collection called The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City (buy on Amazon), and here the focus isn't on Lebovitz's skills at tempering chocolate or concocting ice cream flavors — it's about whether or not the man can tell a story.

If you're a reader of his wildly popular blog, you already know that the answer is yes: wry, dry, curious, self-deprecating but all-knowing — Lebovitz might be a top-notch pastry chef, but his true métier is telling us, in the most interesting way imaginable, about how his day is going. An expat living in Paris, he takes particular joy in giving vicarious guided tours of the absurdities (and, okay, the delights) of Paris's draconian social fabric.

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Danish chef Thorsten Schmidt’s ice cream flavoured with oak trees from his region (garnished with fir tree shavings) on Eric Benqué’s Burgundy oak dish

The first annual "Paris des Chefs" (website) was held on January 26th at the Maison et Objet trade show, a one-day event that brought together food and design, including chefs such as Pierre Gagnaire and Michel Troisgros.

Wallpaper reports the event "featured nine different creative pairings, combining a chef with a designer, artist, architect, photographer or filmmaker." Luc Dubanchet of the French Omnivore Magazine described it as "imagining food as part of our daily life, showing how it fits into our life as much as literature, as much as photography, as much as architecture." Wallpaper has a slideshow.

The French offal industry, which produces 230,000 tonnes of food a year, has witnessed a 15 per cent rise in sales since the investment bank Lehman Brothers went out of business. French butchers have seen a 2.6 per cent fall in beef sales.

“It’s not that people have become a lot poorer in this country, but they think they’re poorer because of all the talk of the crisis,” said Mr Arnoult, whose family has been selling les produits tripiers since the 1870s. “So they are looking to reduce the food budget and they are eating more offal.”

"We would prefer to recall the product to avoid explosions in people's kitchens," said a spokesman. "They could go off like a small bomb, wounding consumers or causing damage to kitchens.