06/08/2026
Very true. The secret is in the wine. A table is not properly set unless it has wine and wine glasses.
In 1991, a CBS News segment accidentally gave millions of women permission to do something they were already doing.
The story was called "The French Paradox." A correspondent named Morley Safer stood in front of a French bistro and asked the question that had been quietly baffling American researchers for years: how is it that the French eat butter, cream, cheese, and red meat at every meal — and still have some of the lowest rates of heart disease in the developed world?
The answer, the researchers believed, was wine. Specifically, red wine. Specifically, a compound in red wine called resveratrol, found in grape skins, which appeared to have a protective effect on cardiovascular health. The French weren't just eating differently. They were drinking differently. A glass of wine with lunch. A glass with dinner. Not as an event. Not as a reward. Just as part of the meal, the way water was part of the meal, unremarkable and expected.
The segment aired on a Sunday night. By Monday morning, red wine sales in the United States had jumped 44 percent.
Forty-four percent. In one weekend. Because a man in a blazer stood outside a French restaurant and told America that what the French were doing might actually be good for you.
Now, the science has gotten more complicated since then — as science tends to do when the news is good. Some researchers pulled back on the resveratrol claims. Others doubled down. Studies came out in favor. Studies came out against. The honest answer, if you ask a cardiologist today, is that the relationship between moderate wine consumption and heart health is real but nuanced, that a glass or two with food appears to be different from drinking in other patterns, and that the Mediterranean lifestyle as a whole — the olive oil, the vegetables, the sitting down and actually eating your meals slowly with other people — probably matters as much as what's in the glass.
But here's what nobody disputes: the French have been eating well, drinking wine, and sitting at bistro tables in no particular hurry for several centuries now. They did not invent the concept of enjoying your food. They simply never abandoned it.
The lesson was never really about resveratrol. It was about the glass of wine at dinner being a small, deliberate act of pleasure in the middle of an ordinary day. About the meal being something you sit down for rather than something you eat standing over a sink. About the idea that enjoying your life is not in conflict with living it well — that those two things are, in fact, the same thing.
Morley Safer probably didn't intend to start a philosophical movement. He was just reporting a story.
But somewhere between the bistro and the broadcast, a lot of women quietly nodded and thought: yes. I already knew that. I just needed someone to say it on television.
