The high cost of homemade food: a new law handcuffs restaurants in France.

• Author: Linnekin, Baylen

France's restaurants and French cooking are under attack. The enemy comes from within--and wears a white hat.

In July, the country debuted the fait maison law. The first of its kind, the law holds the professed purpose of promoting fresh French cooking, which has been on the wane for years. More than half of the country's restaurant revenue last year came from fast food joints and sandwich shops. One study, carried out by French catering union Synhorcat, claims nearly a third of restaurants and bistros use packaged ingredients to prepare meals. A poll performed for the industry publication L'Hotellerie Restoration last year suggests that the number is much higher.

While France's chefs still have a reputation for producing great eats, even the country's top restaurants no longer dominate the global culinary scene. Only five of the world's top 50 restaurants call France home today. That's down from 14 in 2004. Last year Bloomberg News reported that the tide of "world's capital of gastronomy" had packed up and left Paris for Tokyo.

Despite all this data, nearly three quarters of the French people polled by L'Hotellerie Restoration state that they're happy with restaurant meals there.

The new law requires all restaurants throughout the country to put the word homemade--fait maison--on menus to indicate which food has been prepared from scratch. Food may be labeled as fait maison "only when it's made in-house from fresh ingredients."

That sounds simple, if costly and pointless. In fact, it's annoyingly complex. The mandate requires each menu to state that "homemade dishes are made on site from raw produce" --even those that sell no such dishes. The law further requires that restaurants serving only homemade food display either the words fait maison or the fait maison logo, which appears to have been drawn to resemble a character from South Park's Terrance and Phillip Show.

"If you see the logo next to, say, cabillaud enpapillotte (cod baked in a tinfoil parcel) with carrots braisees (braised carrots), it will mean that a human being on the premises will have put the cod in the foil and braised the carrots," Stephen Clarke wrote in the Telegraph shortly after the fait maison debut.

Inspectors will attempt to enforce the law beginning later this year.

France's chefs are unhappy with the law--in some cases because they think it isn't strict enough. Most frozen foods are exempt, and so, as Clarke notes, your fait maison fish and carrots could have...