I didn’t want to spend time alone in Casablanca, but a canceled flight left me with a couple of days there before I was supposed to meet up with a male friend. I was anxious about being alone in an Arab city. Years ago, the one time I spent a few hours walking alone in Egypt, I was nearly raped, saved by the fact that I hit my assailant surprisingly hard and fast and then, praying he couldn’t swim, escaped into the ocean. That’s another story, and while I rationally knew it could have as easily happened in Miami or St. Tropez, I was still scared to be alone in an Arab country. But there I was, and since I didn’t want to simply hole up in a hotel while I waited for my friend, ordering room service, I decided to try to seek out the company of women in Casablanca.

In Morocco, as in many Arab countries, there is a strict division between the public and private — male and female — worlds. The private world, largely unseen and unavailable to travelers, is in the home and the inviolable space each woman carries around with her in the long, shapeless robe she wears, the djellaba. The public world is the world of men. They drive the cabs, greet you in hotels and run the souks, offering you the opportunity to just come in and look, lady, it’s not expensive. As a woman traveler, visiting the public world, you interact only with men. That creates some tension, because while everyone in Morocco seems happy to see a free-spending American tourist, they don’t seem to understand women who walk around, heads uncovered, without the company of their husband or a male relative. Nor do they comprehend women who would wear shorts on the streets in their country — and neither do I.

That isn’t to say that you feel threatened as a woman traveling in Morocco — just a little exposed, no matter how much you cover up. Men will approach you to sell things, to guide you through the labyrinthine medinas, but they are usually put off by a good-humored refusal. Sometimes, on buses or in the street — as happened to me a couple of times on my trip — they will pull hairs out of your head. It wasn’t until I read anthropologist Elizabeth Fernea’s book “A Street in Marrakesh” that I understood that this was not an aggressive act. Blond hair, she explains, is so unusual in Northern Africa that Moroccans think it’s full of “baraka,” or good karma. Pulling a piece of baraka from a stranger’s head is just a good-luck charm, like plucking a four-leaf clover. It isn’t hostile, but it’s a little hard to get used to.

I started planning my days in Casablanca on the flight over. I chatted with the Moroccan flight attendants, asking them where to eat and what to visit in the city, and by the time we were midway through the Atlantic and the movie, we were asking one another about our marriages. They were amazed, in my case, that a marriage of love could end in divorce. One of the women was in an arranged marriage, and quite openly said she hated her husband. Another had refused to comply with her family’s wishes that she have an arranged marriage and, at 32, expected to remain single. A third was waiting, living at home under the protective eye of her father.

By the time we were over the Azores, I made the mistake of inviting these three friendly women to have dinner with me one night in Casa. They exchanged some rapid Arabic among themselves, and finally said that they must invite me. I hadn’t realized that women in Morocco, even in their 30s, don’t just pick up and go out to dinner unaccompanied by men, and that for a Westerner to ask Moroccans to dinner in their hometown is like inviting herself to their house for a meal.

I tried again, explaining that I was a journalist and that in America the custom is for the magazines to always pay to take people out to dinner in other countries. This, of course, wasn’t true, but I was doing my best not to impose on them. Another conversation ensued, apparently with some disagreement. Finally they reached a conclusion: I was in their country, and I would be their guest. Arab hospitality makes no exceptions for expense accounts.

In the morning, I arrived in Casablanca and made my way to the hotel where I had a reservation. The manager seemed surprised to see me. I hung around the lobby long enough to realize I’d been booked into a bordello. Businessmen kept arriving with heavily made-up women, and no one had any bags. Interesting as this scene was, I didn’t like the way I was being eyed. So I consulted my guidebook and hailed a taxi to drive me what turned out to be four blocks, for which the driver tried to charge me 100 dirhams, the equivalent of $10 (never pay more than 15 dirhams for a ride in town). I checked into the four-star hotel (still only $60 a night), no hookers in sight, slept off my jet lag and called my new friends.

When I phoned Aisha’s house, the father and I communicated only well enough to determine “no Aisha.” Khadija wasn’t home, either. I finally connected with Halima, who made plans for me to come to lunch the next day.

I spent the afternoon visiting the spectacular new Hassan II Mosque, built with the best traditional Moroccan craftsmanship that $800 million can buy. I walked to the medina, exploring the narrow ancient streets lined with souks, where cheap Western clothing and household goods were for sale — but not the brass lanterns, kilim carpets, Ali Baba slippers and hookah pipes I expected in Morocco. This was practical Casablanca. I walked around town fairly easily, giving prospective guides a friendly “Non, merci,” and changing directions when I was hassled.

I crossed the street from the medina and entered a cybercafe, traversing from one century to another, so I could leave a message with my friend in Paris, telling him not to meet me at that bordello. I ran into a couple of Americans there, who seemed distraught. When one went out for a cigarette, the other told me that he’d just been in a car accident in which he’d tried to pass a car and was hit; his mother died, his aunt was in the ICU in Casablanca and his wife’s face was disfigured. You always travel to exotic countries in search of the edge, in search of an experience that heightens the preciousness, the temporality, of life, and then you are surprised and dismayed to find it.

That night, too timid to go out to a restaurant alone, I ate at the hotel. Traveler’s tip: If your hotel is called Al-Mounia, and one of the best restaurants in town is called Al-Mounia, don’t assume it’s the restaurant at your hotel.

The next day, I took a taxi to a residential neighborhood, where Halima’s brother met me to accompany me to her house. We entered a bunkerlike apartment building, and Halima greeted me in a light and spare room with long, low couches, a patio-style dining room set and a bedroom filled with stuffed animals. Her friend, another flight attendant, was there, drinking a beer. Halima shot a glance at her, worried that her brother would see the taboo alcohol and she’d get in trouble. Naima hid the beer, and after the brother left, we agreed that if he happened into the room again, we’d say that I’d drunk all the alcohol myself.

Halima and Naima were modern-looking gals; Naima wore a leather jacket and jeans, and Halima had leggings and a long blouse. They said they didn’t usually wear djellabas, although it was a constant fight with their mothers, who covered their heads with veils. They said they wore djellabas only during Ramadan or outside of Casablanca in more traditional towns. We chatted about Naima’s boyfriend, who sounded like a real cretin, and they solicited my advice. I wanted to tell her to ditch him and move to Paris, but settled on saying that she was young and beautiful and shouldn’t have to marry someone she didn’t like just because she was worried, at 28, that she was getting old.

Eventually the maid (in Casablanca, flight attendants have maids) told us the couscous was ready. Usually a treat prepared only on Fridays, Halima had had her make a special one for me. Naima ran over to her apartment and brought back little airplane bottles of wine, warning me again to say I’d drunk them all myself. Luckily for them, I was perfectly capable of saying I’d had six drinks before lunch. We sat at the table and the heavily veiled maid brought in a great round platter piled with couscous and vegetables. Halima asked me if I minded eating Moroccan style, with one big plate in the middle and no forks. Delighted, we all started eating, tunneling our way into the center of the big plate, pouring sauce over the next portion we would eat. The couscous, it turned out, was the best I would eat in Morocco, even at the best restaurants. At the heart of the mound of couscous, under carrots, turnips and pumpkin, was a chicken, which we tore apart with our hands. At the end of the meal, Halima showed me how to make real Moroccan tea, with fresh mint, green tea and boiling water: You steep the leaves and add lots of sugar, then pour it from high into little gilt-edged glasses.

Before I left, I asked Halima for advice on how to spend the rest of my day. “The hammam,” she said, without hesitating. Would I be welcome at the women’s baths? I asked. “Sure,” she said, writing down the name of the place. “Just bring extra panties.”

With that strange advice, I parted, leaving her my address in case she should ever make it to San Francisco. “Inshallah,” she said. “If God wills it.”

Back at my hotel, I asked the man at the reception desk for directions to the hammam. “Hammam?” he asked, bewildered. Why on earth would a woman staying in a luxurious room with hot water gushing from the shower and a tub to fill want to go to the communal baths?

“Hammam,” I insisted, and he shrugged. I gave him the name Ziani, the one Halima had recommended.

“Taxi,” he said.

The taxi driver drove me all over Casablanca before finally stopping at a bar to ask directions. Eventually we pulled into a side street in a residential neighborhood with narrow, whitewashed concrete buildings. I walked up a flight of stairs to where a man in a djellaba looked at me questioningly. I told him, in very bad French, that I would like to visit the hammam. He asked several questions, apparently about treatments, and I shrugged. “Everything,” I finally said. He smiled, wrote out a slip and showed me to the stairs next door.

There, young women in pink lab coats greeted me at the front, and I paid about $18 for “everything,” whatever that was. The attendant handed me a scratchy glove, some black goo wrapped in plastic and an apron, and pointed me to a dressing room. “Leave the pants on,” she said sternly, and repeated it, just in case I didn’t understand and broke decorum.

Wrapped in an apron and wearing my underwear (thinking maybe black lace was a little outri for an Arab bath), I entered the large tiled baths. The attendant motioned me into the steam room, and told me to cover myself with the black goo. Inside, women were sitting on stools in front of marble faucets and cisterns, pouring basins of water over their heads and bodies. Others were rubbing themselves with the black soap or leaning on the tile benches, relaxing. I was happy to see that my underwear wasn’t out of place; some of the women wore much racier G-strings and thongs. They were all pretty immodest anyway, careless about touching themselves in front of other people, nonchalantly lifting up a breast to soap underneath or spreading their legs to soap their inner thighs. It was unlike the little bubble of privacy — and body shame — that surrounds women in Western baths.

One woman pointed at my back, and I understood that she wanted to soap it for me. There was an easy familiarity in the way the women touched one another. They were friendly and tried to speak to me, but I just told them one of the few French phrases I know, which means basically “I’m sorry, I don’t speak any French.” I added that I spoke Italian and Spanish, and their world opened up to me. One woman told me, in Italian, how the black soap was going to make my skin look younger. We talked about how she lives in Italy, but comes to visit her family in Casablanca, and how she must cover up and act like a different person here. After she was called in for her treatment, another woman told me, in Spanish, about her trips to Spain, and we compared places we’d visited while we scrubbed our toes.

The attendant called me into the outer room, and I was motioned to lie down on a big marble slab. A fearsome-looking woman took my scratchy mitt from me and put it on her hand. She motioned me to lie flat and began scraping off several layers of skin with a kind of sadistic fervor. She paid no attention to the way I jumped and squealed when she sandpapered the bottom of my feet, and just motioned me to lie on my side so she could scrape my skin from pinkie to underarm. She applied more of the black soap, scrubbing my whole body pink and nearly raw. I found myself wondering why, if these women are always so covered up, they bother to undergo this pain to make their bare skin look better. But as I rinsed off the soap and recuperated, I realized my skin felt incredibly soft and clean.

I lingered in that room, luxuriously shampooing my hair, offering the Italian-speaking girl some American shampoo, comparing smells, comparing hair, hers thick and heavy, mine lank and fine. We chatted and soaped and made minute ministrations to our bodies. I was curious to see the women’s bodies — one older woman with a tattoo on her chin had a complicated henna tattoo running up and down her legs. Some were fat, and all were soft; no one had the kind of muscular, toned body you see in an American gym. No one seemed to be comparing bodies, as they do in an American bath, where women anxiously glance at one another, checking out who has bigger thighs or tummies. There was something easy, womanly and accepting in that room that you would never find in America.

The attendant led me to another room, where two more meaty women presided over massage tables. The masseuse, fingers pruned from water, gave me a wonderfully competent massage with oil, done not for my pleasure or relaxation but to invigorate the muscles deeply. After the oil, she soaped me entirely, handling me with the kind of intimacy a mother has when she bathes a child. She rinsed me off with the same professional familiarity, touching my breasts and genitals as if they were my knees and toes. Finally, as I sat upright, she pushed me off the table, saying something to me with a toothless grin.

I was directed to the dressing room. The attendant clucked disapprovingly at me for the fact that my hotel towel didn’t entirely cover my body. I went into the relaxation room, where the same women who had just been naked in the baths registered disapproval at my skimpy towel. I went back for my things and put on my long knit travel dress (it doubles as a bathrobe) and lay down with them. They all had the intensity of relaxation that comes only when someone has to go back to the demands of children and husbands they may not like. This was clearly their sanctum, their place of peace.

These baths were rather sophisticated for Morocco. In smaller towns, the baths are at the center of the medina, where one fire serves to heat the bakery and the hammam. They are simpler affairs, a room full of tiles with faucets and buckets and an attendant. I thought that the women at these baths — who spoke so many languages, who seemed so sophisticated — probably were not the women I’d seen on the streets covered from head to toe. But one by one they began dressing, leaving carefully knotted towels on their heads and putting on djellabas.

And under the djellabas? Anything goes. One woman wore matching print pajamas. Another wore colorful leggings and a T-shirt. They were casual and comfortable, wearing whatever the hell they wanted and tossing a djellaba over it. As one woman wrapped a scarf around her head, I admired it, told her it was very beautiful; the scarf had changed, for me, from being a symbol of oppression to being just a lovely piece of fabric. They all walked out of the baths, anonymous. In my long dress and light hair, I was once again exposed. I wished, for a moment, for a djellaba of my own.

When we disembarked at Stromboli — an
island famous for its ever-erupting
volcano — it was lunchtime, and since
there is nothing to do in Italy at lunchtime but eat lunch, I decided to eat
with these guys.

Pasquale said he’d already found out
which was the best restaurant in town,
the pizzeria, Da Luciano, just up the
street from the port. Pasquale and Fabio
greeted the crusty owner effusively, and
asked him where he was from. Luciano
said Napoli, and Pasquale practically
embraced him. “We’re Southern Italians,
from Puglia,” said Fabio. “We’ll feel
right at home.”

They made their way to a table on the
terrace as if they owned the place. I
was glad to be sitting with them, and
not with the long table of Germans next
to us. I figured I’d have a better meal.

Pasquale opened his menu with relish. He
ordered the works: salad, pasta,
swordfish. He asked if anyone was having
wine, and I said maybe, but just a drop,
since I had to climb the volcano. Fabio
frowned. “Today? Why do you have to
climb the volcano today?” I explained
that I had to leave the next day, and
absolutely had to climb the volcano.

“Molly,” said Pasquale. “Don’t act so
German. You need to relax for a day or
two before you can even think about
climbing a volcano.” I spread my arms in
a helpless gesture and ordered a salad,
and then a plate of the pasta
Stromboliana, homemade tagliatelle with
roasted eggplant, capers and fresh
ricotta.

When the waitress arrived with steaming
plates of creamy, fragrant pasta, I
inhaled the earthy aromas of the
eggplant, ricotta and capers. “This
looks delicious,” I said, pouring
everyone another glass of wine.

“Of course,” said Pasquale, already into
his third or fourth bite. “Especially
compared with what you eat in America.”

I told him it’s true, you can’t just
walk into any old restaurant in the
United States and get a good meal the
way you can in Italy, but you can still
eat pretty well if you know where to
look. It’s more of an art in the United
States, I said.

My hometown, San Francisco, has great
food, I went on. In New York, they’ve
turned food into architecture, trying to
make it as tall as possible and
dribbling colorful sauces all over the
plates, but they think nothing of the
taste. In San Francisco, though, we have
good produce, the best ingredients, and
we have Italians, Vietnamese,
Cambodians, Salvadorans, nouvelle
cuisine — it never ends. If you come
visit sometime, I told them, you’ll see.

“No,” said Pasquale, lifting his head up
from his plate. “The food in America is
terrible.” He sliced a flat line in the
air with his hand, discouraging any
argument. “This I know for a fact.”

I said that there are probably almost as
many Italians in the United States as
there are in Italy, so how bad could it
really be?

Fabio stared into my eyes with his
sleepy blue ones. He said one word,
slowly. “Mc-Don-ald’s.”

Pasquale considered that, and waved his
fork at Fabio. “The french fries,” he
said, making a generous, accommodating
gesture towards me, “aren’t so bad.” He
mopped up his remaining pasta sauce with
a corner of crusty bread. “The one thing
I’d really like to eat in America,” he
said, a dreamy look on his face, “is a
hot dog from New York City with
everything on it.” He was clearly
willing to spend 16 hours on a plane
just for that hot dog. Then his gaze
came back into focus. “But pasta?” he
said. “Beh! You don’t have any pasta.”

Most Americans I know eat pasta, I told
him, about four times a week. Everyone
eats pasta all the time. Pasta is the
only thing your average American male
knows how to prepare on his own. It used
to be pancakes and scrambled eggs and
maybe grilled burgers, but these days
guys mainly make pasta. I didn’t go into
the details of what they put on the
pasta, though.

Pasquale was not fooled. Maybe Americans
eat pasta, he said, but they don’t eat
it with real sauce. “You eat pasta with
ketchup on it.” He leaned back, gleeful
at having coming up with the perfect
characterization of what Americans eat.
He nudged Fabio. “Right?”

Fabio nodded slowly. “Could be.”

Pasquale launched into a long tale about
being invited to dinner at a vacation
house in Northern Italy after skiing one
day, and when the English hostess
finally brought a big dish of pasta to
the table, it had absolutely no sauce on
it at all. “Completely naked!” said
Fabio, who likes telling a good story.
When he asked the English signora where
the sauce was, she got up and brought
back a bottle of ketchup. “Ketchup!”
Pasquale was now nearly roaring. “Can
you imagine?” He calmed down a little.
“How hard can it be,” he gestured around
the table, “just to bring in a little
butter, maybe parmigiano, some salt and
pepper? How hard can that be?”

“It’s good that way, with just a little
parmigiano and butter,” Fabio agreed.

Pasquale shook his head vigorously.

The woman he had dinner with, I told
him, was English, not American. For the
sake of argument, I will go along with
the fact that the English have atrocious
eating habits, I said, and in America,
OK, sometimes people will take pasta
sauce from a can, but they will never
use just ketchup. “Well, probably
never,” I added. “Maybe some people. It
is a big country. But truly, truly, that
is exaggerated.”

“Molly,” said Fabio, “how do you make a
tomato sauce?”

Pasquale was delighted: a test!

I paused to consider. All of a sudden I
had absolutely no idea how to make
tomato sauce. There are so many
possibilities, but only one was right. I
bought time. “For pasta, or for a
pizza?” I asked.

Pasquale raised his thick eyebrows. “You
don’t make pizza at home,” he said.

Sometimes I do, I said. It’s hard to get
the crust as thin and crispy as I like
it in most restaurants. There’s really
only one restaurant in San Francisco, a
tiny Florentine place called Pazzia,
that makes pizza absolutely right. A
couple of other places with wood-burning
ovens do passable pizza, but it really
isn’t good at most places; it’s too
thick and cheesy, and they put way too
much stuff on top. They even put
broccoli on top, I said. So I make pizza
at home once in a while, putting a big
flat stone in my oven that absorbs
moisture from the pizza dough to make it
crustier. I like simple pizzas, maybe
mozzarella with fresh oregano, maybe a
tomato sauce with some anchovies and
capers, or just tomato and basil, really
that’s perfect.

Fabio was impressed. Pasquale was
unmoved.

“The sauce, Tia Molly,” he said,
returning to the interrogation.

OK, I said, basic tomato sauce. “You
start with some fresh tomatoes …”

“Fresh tomatoes?” said Fabio.

I nodded and continued: If you aren’t
making a raw, pomodori crudi sauce,
which is best when the tomatoes are
good, especially if it’s a warm day; if
you aren’t, then you drop the tomatoes
in boiling water for a couple of
minutes. After you spoon them out of the
water, you can either run them under
cold water, peel them, squeeze the seeds
out with your fingers and chop them — I
went through the motions with my hands
– or you can push them through a …

I was grasping for the right word in
Italian. “You put them in that metal
thing that goes in a circle that makes
the skin and seeds come off.” Fabio
nodded and told me the word for food
mill, which I promptly forgot. I paused
for a sip of wine and continued.

“Meanwhile, you make a soffritto –
chopped onion sautied in olive oil –
and maybe add a few red pepper flakes to
give it a little bite. You can add a
splash of red wine, too, but it’s not
necessary. It depends. Maybe if you were
adding meat, you’d add some wine. Then
you add the tomato mixture to the
soffritto, stir it around, cook it until
it reduces a bit, add salt and pepper
and chop up some fresh basil to throw in
at the end.”

“Bravo!” said Fabio, with a little clap.

Pasquale looked up from his swordfish,
chewed vigorously and swallowed. He took
a drink of wine and wiped his mouth with
his sleeve. “You forgot the sugar,” he
said, punctuating the air with his
finger, proving he had been right all
along about the ketchup. “You need a
pinch of sugar for the tomatoes!” He
leaned back and adopted an avuncular,
confidential air. “Tomatoes, Molly,” he
said, “are slightly acidic.”

“Zampa,” said Fabio, putting his fork
down. Zampa was Fabio’s nickname for
Pasquale, a shortened version of his
last name, which means “paw” — the part
an Italian dog gestures with to show he
is loyal and trustworthy. “Zampa,” he
said, completely calm, “you can add the
sugar or not, depending on the tomatoes.
Some tomatoes don’t need sugar.”

Pasquale dropped a meaty hand on the
table. “No, you have to have the sugar.
A little bit, but it is absolutely
essential.” He gestured to the owner
across the room to come over and join
us. Luciano sat down heavily at the
table, taking a break. Pasquale praised
the food, the view and the island in
general and finally got around to asking
him if his wife adds a pinch of sugar to
the tomato sauce. The owner gave him the
what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about
gesture, fingers pinched together in
front of his chest, then considered it.
“Sometimes,” he said, “depending on the
tomatoes.”

Fabio was elated. He ordered espresso
and I thought: “Well, maybe I’ll wait
until tomorrow to climb that volcano
after all.”

Baffled, scientists struggled to come up with a few hypotheses: Maybe it was something in the red wine, they said. But while winemakers worldwide celebrated that news, more sober research has suggested that any alcohol — whether Lafite Rothschild, a banana daiquiri or a cold Bud — pretty much has the same nice, relaxing effect. So while a little wine is apt to do you good, the French aren’t so special in having a drink now and then (though the fact that they drink wine moderately and slowly with meals, instead of downing shots at the bar, could make a difference).

After the wine argument, scientists ventured that it must be the olive oil that keeps the French healthy. But this doesn’t explain the butter or brie. Then, voil`, French scientist Serge Renaud (made famous on “60 Minutes” as an expert on the French Paradox) said it’s the foie gras that melts away cholesterol. This, too, is dicey: While people in Toulouse — the fattened force-fed duck-liver-eating area of France — do indeed have one of the lowest rates of heart disease in the developed world, they actually only eat the delicacy about six times a year. And they’re a lot more likely to die of stroke than we are anyway.

Other researchers, perhaps sponsored by the garlic and onion industry, suggested that the French Paradox effect is due to garlic and onions. Claude Fischler, a nutritional sociologist at INSERM, the French equivalent of America’s National Institutes of Health, says all these single hypotheses are more wishful thinking than science.

“The government loves the French Paradox because it sells red wine — Bordeaux wine in particular — it sells French lifestyle and a number of other French products,” he tells me over dinner at an outdoor Paris bistro. “It’s something in the cheese! Something from the fat from ducks! It’s butter! Really, we’re a long way from science here.”

More than anything, Fischler thinks the French Paradox is a kind of cultural Rorschach test. “Americans think it’s unfair, and Francophiles think it’s wonderful.”

Last May, researchers writing in the British Medical Journal came up with the least cheerful hypothesis of all. They argued that it’s just a matter of time before the French — who are in fact eating more hamburgers and french fries these days — catch up with Americans, and begin suffering the same high rates of cardiovascular disease.

These researchers, Malcolm Law and Nicholas Wald (who must have thought up their hypothesis over dry kidney pie, while dreaming of the kind of duck in red wine and honey sauce I had with Claude Fischler), call this the “time lag explanation” for the French Paradox. As far as they are concerned, the McDonaldization (this is a French catch-all term for the importation of fast food and other American cultural horrors) of France will continue at a frantic pace, and it is as inevitable that French men will start keeling over of heart attacks as it is that French women will eventually wear jean shorts and marshmallow tennis shoes on the streets of Paris.

Nutritionists on this side of the Atlantic are just as dour in their predictions. Marion Nestle, chair of New York University’s department of nutrition, says that the wonderful food she found on every street corner in Paris when she lived there in 1983 has changed. “Then you could go into some local bar, and you would be given a little tart, a little salad and a little quiche that would knock your socks off,” she says wistfully. But now, she says, the quality of ingredients, the concern about flavor and the freshness of the food has declined. “Last time I was in Paris, everything seemed bigger, softer and more commercially prepared. If you wanted really high quality food, you had to pay for it.” When she looked at food data in France, she saw that indeed the amount of fat has risen, and the French are snacking more, eating fewer long meals and visiting McDonald’s more often on the sly. She, like Law and Wald, says, “Just wait.”

The French, however, disagree about this time lag hypothesis. Nor do they believe that Parisian women will start wearing Nikes with skirts to work anytime soon. “It’s hilarious!” says Fischler, finishing a fresh ricotta-stuffed tortellini appetizer. “The American attitude is always to look for a silver bullet — it’s the wine, the cheese — or else it has to be nothing, we’ll get worse, we haven’t had time to get the terrible consequences of modern eating.” Instead, says Fischler, the deeply rooted French traditions of eating not only explain the French Paradox, but will insure that it continues, even if it decreases somewhat.

Americans, he says, are always painting the picture in extremes. The French, he continues over a piece of grilled fish, pouring me another glass of that medicinal red wine, have a long-evolved culture of eating that emphasizes pleasure — and order. The French eat comme il faut, “the way it should be done.” They may eat whatever they want, but they eat by strict rules: no snacking, no seconds, no skipping meals, no bolting down food, no heading straight for dessert before first filling up on vegetables, salad and meat. They savor their food and eat smaller portions than Americans do.

They also eat a greater diversity of food, which could have something to do with their health, too. And while traditions are loosening in France — more women are working, and so people are more apt to grab a sandwich at lunch — a recent survey Fischler took showed that while more people will skip the cheese course or the first course once or twice a week, they still don’t skip meals. The French sit down at the table for well-prepared meals, with high-quality foods, and between times they don’t eat. Period.

“In France, we eat in a socially controlled and regulated way, but it’s pleasant,” says Fischler. “Structure is something that constrains you but also supports you.” Fischler and a food-loving University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Paul Rozin, say the fact that the French have lower rates of coronary artery disease and are skinnier than Americans doesn’t have so much to do with what they eat, but how they eat — especially their positive attitudes about food. Talk to a French woman about whether she ever feels guilty about what she eats and she will tell you, as one impossibly young-looking 46-year-old dancer told me, “Absolutely not — I eat exactly what I please.”

Then try to find a woman in the U.S. who will answer the same way. There’s no magic ingredient that keeps French arteries clear, but instead a whole system of eating that allows them to indulge without overdoing it, and without feeling guilty. Fischler and Rozin say that the biggest predictor of health may not be the content of someone’s diet, but how stressed out they are about food, and how relaxed they are about eating. In other words, the more pleasurable it is to eat, the healthier it is for you.

In a study published in the October issue of the journal Appetite, Fischler and Rozin surveyed 1,281 French, American, Japanese and Flemish people about their attitudes toward food. Participants were asked how much they worried about food and the healthiness of their diet, whether they bought low-fat and other diet foods and how much importance they placed on food as a positive force in life. Americans, it turned out, were much more likely than the French to worry about what they eat, buy diet foods and still think of themselves as unhealthy eaters. The French and Belgians were at the other extreme, thinking about food as mainly a great pleasure, and feeling fine about how healthy their diet was. In word association tests, given “chocolate cake,” the French would say “celebration,” and Americans, “guilt.” Given “heavy cream,” the French said “whipped,” while the Americans responded “unhealthy.” Says Rozin, “The French are more inclined to think of food as something you eat and experience, and the Americans are thinking about some sort of chemicals that are getting into your body.”

Americans have the worst of both worlds, Rozin says — they have greater concerns about their diets, and they are much more dissatisfied with what they eat. And that sort of stress, he says, can result in a lot of poor eating habits for Americans — extreme dieting, bingeing, overeating and constantly obsessing about food — which are ultimately unhealthy. The real paradox, Rozin says, isn’t that the French enjoy food and remain thin and heart disease-free. It’s that Americans worry so much about food, do so much more to control their weight and end up so much more dissatisfied with their meals.

American researchers are tentative about Fischler and Rozin’s pleasure hypothesis. Eric Rimm, a nutritional epidemiologist at Harvard, says a pleasurable way of eating may be part of the puzzle. “There is something to eating patterns that makes a difference to overall health,” he says. “It can’t just be the total calories you get at the end of the day.”

Eating slowly, he points out, may make a difference. And then there are psychosocial effects. “In France they eat with large families and social networks, which may be important to peace of mind, which has been linked to coronary disease.” He hesitates. “Maybe there are psychological effects to the way they eat in France, too.”

As the French would say, with just a hint of derision, “Mais oui — but of course.” And then, like Claude Fischler and me, they would finish off a long, perfect meal with a couple little spoonfuls of intensely rich chocolate souffli.

Nevertheless, for most of those 15 years, hardly a piece of animal flesh crossed my lips. Over the course of that time, many people asked me why I became a vegetarian. I came up with vague answers: my health, the environment, the impracticality and heartlessness of killing animals for food when we can survive perfectly well on soy burgers. It was political, it was emotional and it made me special, not to mention slightly morally superior to all those bloodthirsty carnivores out there.

The truth is, I became a vegetarian in college for two reasons. One was that meat was more expensive than lentils, and I was broke, or broke enough to choose to spend my limited budget on other classes of ingestibles. The other was that I was not a lesbian.

This is not to say that all lesbians are carnivores; in fact, there’s probably a higher percentage of vegetarians among lesbians than most other groups. But there was a fair amount of political pressure to be something in those days. Since, as a privileged white girl from suburban Denver, I couldn’t really identify with any oppressed minority group, I was faced with becoming a lesbian in order to prove my political mettle. I had to decide between meat and men, and for better or worse, I became a vegetarian.

The identity stuck, even though the political imperative for my label faded. It wasn’t an identity that ever really fit: My friends thought it odd that such an otherwise hedonistic woman should have that one ascetic streak. It was against my nature, they said. But by then, I’d started to believe the other arguments about vegetarianism.

First was health. There’s a lot of evidence that vegetarians live longer, have lower cholesterol levels and are thinner than meat-eaters. This is somewhat hard to believe, since for the first few years of not eating meat, I was basically a cheesetarian. Try leafing through some of those vegetarian recipe books from the early ’80s: You added three cups of grated cheddar to everything but the granola. Then vegetarianism went through that mathematical phase where you had to figure out which proteins you had to combine with which in order to get a complete protein. Since many nutritionists will tell you people don’t need that much protein anyway, I gave up, going for days and days without so much as contemplating beans or tofu.

For whatever haphazard combination of proteins I ate, being a vegetarian did seem to have a stunning effect on my cholesterol level. This, of course, could be genetic. But when I had a very involved physical exam once at the Cooper Institute for Aerobic Fitness in Dallas, my total cholesterol level was a super-low 135, and my ratio of HDL (good) cholesterol to LDL (evil) was so impressive that the doctor drawled, “Even if you had heart disease, you would be reversing it.” This good news, far from reassuring me that I could well afford a few barbecued ribs now and then, spurred me on in my vegetarianism, mainly because my cholesterol numbers effectively inoculated me against the doctor’s advice that I also needed to lose 15 pounds.

“Why?” I asked. “Don’t you lose weight to lower your cholesterol?”

He couldn’t argue with that. Whether or not most vegetarians are leaner than carnivores, in my case I was happy to more than make up the calories with carbohydrates, which, perhaps not coincidentally, I always craved.

After the health rationale came the animal rights one. Like most vegetarians, I cracked Peter Singer’s philosophical treatise on animal rights, and bought his utilitarian line that if you don’t have to kill animals, and it potentially causes suffering, you shouldn’t do it. (Singer, now at Princeton, has recently come under attack for saying that if a human being’s incapacitated life causes more suffering than good, it is OK to kill him.)

It’s hard to know where to stop with utilitarianism. Do I need a cashmere sweater more than those little shorn goats need to be warm themselves? Do animals really suffer if they have happy, frolicking lives before a quick and painless end? Won’t free-range do?

My animal rights philosophy had a lot of holes from the start. First of all, I excluded fish from the animal kingdom — not only because fish taste delicious grilled with a little butter and garlic, but also because they make it a lot easier to be a vegetarian when you go out to restaurants. Now that’s utilitarian. Besides, as soon as you start spending your time fretting about the arguments that crowd the inner pens of animal rights philosophy — do fish think? — then you know you’re experiencing a real protein deficiency.

I rationalized the fish thing by telling myself I would eat anything I would kill myself. I had been fly-fishing with my dad and figured a few seconds of flopping around was outweighed by the merits of trout almondine. (Notice that I, not the fish, was doing the figuring.) But who was I kidding? If I were hungry enough, I’d kill a cow in a heartbeat. I’d practically kill a cow just for a great pair of shoes.

Which brings me to the leather exception. As long as other people are eating cow, I decided, I might as well recycle the byproducts and diminish the harm by wearing leather jackets and shoes. When everyone stopped eating meat, I’d stop buying leather jackets and shoes. In the meantime, better stock up.

Then there’s the environmental rationale. There is no doubt, as Frances Moore Lappe first pointed out in her 1971 book “Food First,” that there is a huge loss of protein resources going from grain to meat, and that some animals, especially cattle and Americans, use up piggish amounts of water, grain and crop land.

But the problem really isn’t meat, but too much meat — over-grazing, over-fishing and over-consumption. If Americans just ate less meat — like driving cars less often — the problem could be alleviated without giving up meat entirely. That approach has worked for centuries, and continues to work in Europe.

All my deep vegetarian questioning was silenced one day when a friend ordered roasted rosemary chicken for two. I thought I’d try “just a bite,” and then I was ripping into it like a starving hyena. Roasted chicken, I realized, is wonderful. Meat is good.

From a culinary point of view, that’s obvious. Consider that most vegetarians live in America and England, places tourists do not visit for the food. You don’t find vegetarians in France, and rarely in Italy. Enough said.

As for health, if nutritionists are always telling you to “listen to your body,” mine was definitely shouting for more meat. One roasted bird unleashed 15 years’ worth of cravings. All of a sudden I felt like I had a bass note playing in my body to balance out all those soprano carbohydrates. Forget about winning the low-cholesterol Olympics. For the first time in a long time, I felt satisfied.

As a vegetarian, not only had I denied myself something I truly enjoyed, I had been anti-social. How many times had I made a hostess uncomfortable by refusing the main course at a dinner party, lamely saying I’d “eat around it”? How often did my vegetarianism cause other people to go to extra trouble to make something special for me to eat, and why did it never occur to me that that was selfish? How about the time, in a small town in Italy, when the chef had presented me with a plate of very special local sausage, since I was the American guest — and I had refused it, to the mortification of my Italian friends? Or when a then-boyfriend, standing in the meat section of the grocery store, forlornly told a friend, “If only I had a girlfriend who ate meat”? If eating is a socially conscious act, you have to be conscious of the society of your fellow homo sapiens along with the animals. And we humans, as it happens, are omnivores.