Liver and fat and guts – delicious!

CHERENCE, FRANCE — Arrival is usually defined as reaching a destination, but of course it’s more than that, it’s the moment when you have shed enough of where you came from to be present at the place you’ve reached. This offloading of layers takes time, like peeling an onion.

My French arrival this year was time-consuming. Iran, which is another story, had me. But the moment came, and when it came, it was not the dawn swooping of starlings, the softness of the dusk light through the sycamores, or the chiming of a village bell that delivered me to “la douce France,” but the sight of glistening guts.

The guts in question were being coaxed by a hand — ungloved — from the belly of a four-pound sea bass — unfarmed — at the market in the Norman town of Vernon, which has one stand devoted solely to watercress. The fish, iridescent, its gills bright scarlet, was fresh from the waters off Dieppe.

My friend Marcel Bossy, who had made the pre-dawn drive from the coast with his glossy load, had his hand deep in the fish. He was laughing about something as the guts slithered onto a scale-coated chopping board.

My 11-year-old daughter, Adele, covered her eyes, but I was riveted. Marcel’s wife, Sandrine, also laughing — something ribald between them — was gutting firm mackerel with swift incisions and finger movements, when one dropped to the ground. She scooped the fish up and resumed work on it, putting me in mind of Julia Child’s famous statement about a miss-flipped potato pancake: “You can always pick it up.”

Since Child, in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” and in her groundbreaking 1960’s television show “The French Chef,” brought Gallic secrets to riveted Americans, the shameless gutting and picking-up of real food in ungloved hands has given way to the hurried-hermetic-hygienic U.S. fever of plastic gloves, processed foods and precooked meals.

Those fish guts delivered me to France because, although this country has its share of fast-food outlets, it has preserved a relationship to food distinguished from the American in three essential respects: fear, time and “terroir.”

If Americans want their fish pre-filleted, their chicken breasts excised from surrounding bone and conveniently packed, their offal kept from view and the table, and any hand that touches a slice of ham or lox sealed inside a glove, it is because fear of the innards that will not speak their name, the guts that reek of life, and the germs we all carry has become rampant.

By contrast, the French don’t believe what they’re eating is genuine unless they’ve seen gritty proof of provenance. They like the alchemy of the peasant hand that does the pâté grip.

American anxiety is related to the American perception of time, which is always short in a land that prizes efficiency above all. Precooked meals — food divorced from its origins, food without guts — is faster to prepare and therefore attractive.

I bought a couple of the female ducklings the French call “canettes” the other day. It took 15 minutes for the cutting-off of head, feet and wing-tips; for the innards to be removed; for the placing in the cleansed insides of the liver, kidneys and neck; for singeing over a gas burner; and for discussion as to whether I wanted the plump ducks trussed for rotisserie cooking (I did not.)

Most stores in New York don’t bother selling ducklings — they’re inefficient birds in that the meat-to-size ratio is low — and if they did such protracted preparation would be unthinkable. Time bows at the altar of gastronomy in France. In the United States time is the altar.

The third fundamental difference relates to “terroir,” the untranslatable combination of soil, hearth and tradition that links most French people to a particular place. France sees American mobility with a sacred immobility; attachments trump restlessness.

These are attachments of the gut, which brings us back to why the French take such pleasure in those hands at work cleansing a sea bass or a duckling, and why a stand selling watercress (with the unique taste of a particular patch of soil) is viable.

The French Paradox, so-called, is really the French self-evidence. Change your relationship to fear, time and place, and you change your metabolism. This has less to do with the specific foods eaten, or the specific wine drunk (although of course they count) than it has to do with how food is approached.

According to the 2009 C.I.A. World Factbook, the estimated average life expectancy in France is 80.98 (84.33 for women and 77.79 for men), against 78.11 for the United States (80.69 for women and 75.65 for men.) France ranks 9th in the world; America ranks 50th. There’s something to be said for ungloved hands picking mackerel from the ground.

The American healthcare debate is skewed. It should be devoting more time to changing U.S. culinary and eating habits in ways that cut the need for expensive care by reducing rampant obesity, to which anxiety, haste and disconnectedness contribute. France has much to teach, guts and all.