Does French cuisine merit Unesco World Heritage stars?

Story here. (I'm partial to French cuisine myself, but I wouldn't eat horse meat or frogs. And I think force-feeding geese to fatten their livers is cruel.)

French cooking may be awfully good, but it's not awfully interesting to international critics these days: "I find Paris restaurants rather provincial," American Vogue's Jeffrey Steingarten has observed.

It isn't that French chefs can't cut the mustard, but they don't extrude foams or macerate molecules in the style of Heston Blumenthal of England or Ferrán Adriá of Spain who vie these days for the title of world's best chef.

What has happened is that la cuisine française has been reduced to heirloom status, and the odd thing is that the French themselves have colluded in the process, led by President Nicolas Sarkozy, who in February announced his wish that it be listed for protection under Unesco's heritage scheme.

The media fuss shows no sign of abating. "Tête de veau and blanquette as heritages like Mont-Saint-Michel or Machu Picchu?" asked a weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, while such leading chefs as Paul Bocuse, Alain Ducasse, Joël Robuchon and Guy Savoy announced their support.

Part of the furor came from a confusion with Unesco's World Heritage list, started in 1972, of "properties having outstanding universal value." The list, now up to 851, includes not only Mont-Saint-Michel and, for that matter, Venice but also lesser-known sites from Butrint in Albania to the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe. Not all the French were thrilled at the thought of having their cuisine co-listed with parts of the Congo basin or an ancient church in Finland.

In fact, it is not among the familiar heritage sites but within Unesco's Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage - which includes oral traditions, performance art, traditional crafts, social practices and "knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe" - that Sarkozy wants French cooking to be enshrined. The convention dates from 2003, entered into force in 2006 and will get around to adopting criteria in June, with the first inscriptions to come in September 2009. Until then, says a Unesco spokesman, the organization can offer no comments about the merit or likelihood of any inscription. . . .