She Moved To France For The Food And Eats Frozen Meals Now

She didn’t fly across an ocean to eat beige rectangles from a freezer. But after the paperwork, the language fatigue, the tiny kitchen, and the quiet evenings, that’s exactly where she landed, standing in front of a French freezer aisle wondering when “the dream” is supposed to start.

She had the usual plan.

Markets in the morning. A baguette under one arm. A pot of something slow on the stove. A life where meals feel intentional again.

Then real life showed up.

The closest shop closed at a time that didn’t match her day. The market was only twice a week and required more French than she could manage while tired. Her rental kitchen had one usable counter and a freezer the size of a desk drawer. She cooked once, made a mess, and ate alone in silence.

By week five, the freezer started winning. Not because she stopped caring about food. Because she needed dinner to stop being a daily negotiation.

This is the part Americans rarely hear in the glossy “move to France for the lifestyle” story: France can absolutely deliver the food, but it also delivers friction, and friction changes how people eat. Especially older newcomers living alone.

The fantasy is “French food.” The reality is “French routines.”

Most Americans don’t move to France for a museum. They move for a feeling.

Meals that aren’t rushed. Ingredients that don’t taste engineered. A culture that seems to take eating seriously.

Both things can be true, and still, a newcomer can end up living on frozen meals.

Why?

Because French food culture is not only about ingredients. It’s also about routines: when you shop, when you cook, when you eat, and how you fit into the rhythm of a neighborhood.

If you arrive without that rhythm, everything takes more effort than it should.

You can’t casually replicate the “market life” if:

• you’re still navigating contracts, healthcare registration, and bank issues
• you’re translating packaging word-by-word at 6 pm while hungry
• you don’t yet know which butcher to trust, or what to ask for
• you’re living alone and every meal creates dishes for one

And when every meal feels like work, the freezer becomes the easiest form of relief.

Not forever. But long enough to scare people into thinking they’ve made a mistake.

The truth is simpler: you moved into a different operating system, and your food habits are the first thing to crash.

France is structured around the main meal, and Americans often bet on the wrong one

Americans often assume dinner is the center of the food universe.

In France, the cultural weight can tilt differently depending on region and household, but the pattern many newcomers feel is that lunch is the meal the system supports. Workday lunch culture, set menus, bakeries that feel “ready” earlier in the day, shopping rhythms that favor morning errands.

If you arrive and build your emotional expectations around dinner, you might be trying to cook your “big meal” at the time your brain is most depleted.

That matters more at 62 than at 32.

By evening, a newcomer has already spent a full day doing hard things in a second language: reading letters, making calls, navigating transport, decoding small social cues. Cooking, which used to be comfort, becomes another cognitive task.

So the practical pattern becomes:

• eat something easy at night
• promise you’ll “cook properly tomorrow”
• repeat until the freezer becomes your normal

This is not a moral failure. It’s decision fatigue dressed as appetite.

A frozen meal is not the goal. It’s the stopgap that lets someone function while they learn the new rhythm.

Shopping in France is not “hard,” but it punishes newcomers who don’t have a system

France has an extremely sophisticated retail ecosystem. The variety of formats matters because it changes how you live.

You’re not dealing with one mega-store that solves everything the way many Americans are used to. You’re dealing with a patchwork:

• supermarkets and hypermarkets
• hard discounters
• convenience stores and small city-center formats
• traditional outlets like bakeries and butcher shops
• open-air markets and, increasingly, online options

USDA’s Retail Foods Annual describes exactly this diversity and notes how large retailers have invested in smaller city-center stores over the last decade, with consumers diversifying purchases across several stores. That’s normal to locals. It can be exhausting to newcomers.

For an American retiree living alone, the friction shows up like this:

You need eggs, but you also need laundry detergent, and you also need a pharmacy item, and the store that has each of those is not necessarily the same store.

You can do it. But your first year is full of micro-routes you haven’t memorized yet.

So when she says, “I moved for the food and I’m eating frozen meals,” what she often means is:

“I don’t have a reliable shopping circuit yet, and I’m tired of improvising dinner.”

That’s why frozen food is often a first-year crutch. It collapses the whole shopping problem into one quick stop.

And in France, there’s a very specific reason this crutch is so tempting.

The kitchen you rent in France is often built for real cooking, just not American-style cooking

Americans often arrive with a hidden assumption: if a country is famous for food, the kitchens must be dreamy.

In a lot of French rentals, the kitchen is functional, compact, and designed for a different workflow than many Americans are used to. Less counter space. Less storage. Smaller appliances. A layout that expects you to cook efficiently, not spread out.

Then add the expat reality:

• you don’t have the tools you used at home
• you don’t have the pantry staples you relied on
• you don’t know which substitutions actually work yet

Cooking turns into a constant series of small compromises.

A dish that’s “simple” back home becomes complicated because you can’t find one ingredient, your pan doesn’t fit the burner the way you expect, and the instructions on the package are in French shorthand you don’t understand yet.

Now add the psychology of living alone. Cooking for one in a tiny kitchen can feel bleak. There’s no shared anticipation. No one to help chop. No one to casually eat the leftovers.

So the freezer becomes appealing for a very human reason: it produces a meal without demanding a whole identity performance.

The irony is that her frozen meals might be better than the frozen meals she ate in the U.S. But emotionally, it still feels like failure because it clashes with the story she told herself about France.

Loneliness is the ingredient nobody budgets for, and it changes what “cooking” feels like

This is the part people don’t like to admit out loud.

Cooking is not only about hunger. It’s about meaning.

For many retirees, cooking was a social role. A family anchor. A nightly ritual. A way of caring for others and being cared for in return. When that disappears, the motivation can vanish too.

In the U.S., loneliness can still exist, but people often have familiar social scaffolding: casual neighbors, long-term routines, family within driving distance, and the comfort of speaking without effort.

In France, especially early on, social life can take longer to build. Polite does not automatically become close. Invitations are rarer until you’re known. And if you’re not confident in French, every interaction costs energy.

So she starts doing the math:

• If I cook a full meal, I’ll eat it alone.
• If I buy something frozen, I’ll still eat alone, but I won’t spend an hour proving I’m “living the French dream.”

This is why the freezer aisle becomes a quiet coping mechanism. It’s not laziness. It’s social deprivation management.

And there’s another reason France, specifically, makes that aisle so easy to justify.

Frozen food in France is not shameful. It’s mainstream infrastructure.

Americans often hear “frozen meal” and picture the worst version of American convenience food.

France does not treat frozen as inherently low-status. The country has built an entire retail institution around it.

Picard is the obvious example. As of March 31, 2025, Picard reported 1,195 stores in France, and FY 2025 sales of goods of €1,823.4 million. That is not a niche little expat workaround. That’s a national habit.

This matters because it changes what frozen food means socially.

In France, you can buy frozen and still feel like you’re participating in the food culture, not opting out of it. Frozen vegetables, for example, are widely accepted. A French vegetable industry press dossier noted high trust in frozen vegetables, with 93% of respondents expressing confidence in frozen, and high agreement that frozen vegetables are healthy and preserve vitamins and minerals.

So when she eats frozen meals in France, she might not even be eating “bad food.” She might be eating what millions of French households eat when time, energy, or motivation is low.

The difference is emotional. Americans came for the romance, so frozen feels like surrender. To many locals, it’s just a tool.

The trick is using that tool strategically instead of letting it become your entire diet.

The real fix is not willpower, it’s building a “France-compatible” food system

If she wants to stop living on frozen meals, she doesn’t need a motivational speech.

She needs a system that makes real cooking easier than opening a box.

That system has three parts:

1. One reliable shopping loop
   Not five aspirational shops. One repeatable route that fits her energy.
2. A short list of meals that work in her kitchen
   Not the meals she cooked in the U.S. The meals that fit her counter space, her pans, and her local ingredients.
3. A social anchor tied to food
   Because cooking motivation usually comes back faster when meals connect to people, even lightly.

Wait, that’s not the point.

The point is this: if you want “French food life,” you need to build French food logistics, not just French food ideals.

And you can do that fast, if you stop trying to live like a brochure.

A 7-day reset that gets you back to real French food without burning out

This is what actually works for older Americans living alone, especially in the first year.

Day 1: Pick your base store and commit for two weeks

Choose the nearest supermarket you can tolerate and learn it. Learn where the basics are. Learn which private labels are good. Stop bouncing around hoping the next store will feel like home.

This reduces the daily friction tax immediately.

Day 2: Build a “translation cheat sheet” for ten items you buy weekly

Write down the French words for the items you keep getting wrong: broth, cream types, cuts of chicken, beans, flour, baking powder, rice, tuna.

You’re not learning French in general. You’re learning kitchen French.

Day 3: Choose three meals that are embarrassingly easy and repeat them

Examples that work well in France:

• omelette with salad and bread
• lentils with sausage and carrots
• roast chicken thighs with vegetables
• pasta with canned tomatoes, garlic, and whatever is on sale

You’re building repeatable competence, not culinary greatness.

Day 4: Use frozen as a component, not the meal

This is the step that changes everything.

Frozen vegetables plus real protein plus bread or rice is a normal French weeknight solution. Frozen fish can be the base of a real meal. Frozen is not the enemy if it supports your routine instead of replacing it.

This is how you keep convenience without surrender.

Day 5: Create one “market day” ritual that doesn’t require perfection

Go once. Buy three things. Leave before you’re overwhelmed.

A small success is better than an exhausting performance that makes you avoid the market for a month.

Day 6: Add one food-based social touchpoint

A language exchange café. A weekly cooking class. A neighbor you invite for tea and a pastry. A walking group that ends near a bakery. It doesn’t need to be deep friendship yet.

It just needs to attach food to other humans, because that’s what makes cooking feel worth it again.

Day 7: Decide your freezer policy for winter

If you’re going to keep frozen meals as a safety net, make it intentional:

• two “emergency dinners”
• frozen vegetables and fish as staples
• and one day a week you cook something real, even small

The goal is stability. Stability is what makes the romantic side of France possible later.

Because once your life is not constantly demanding energy, you start noticing the food again.

Not the fantasy version. The real one.