A PHILOSOPHER and a food critic have started the first free gastronomic university in France in an attempt to bring haute cuisine to “the victims of globalisation”.

The founders of the Popular University of Taste have persuaded some of the country’s most illustrious chefs to give cooking lessons to an audience that they hope will consist largely of unemployed factory workers.

Using vegetables grown on an allotment, the chefs will show how to make refined dishes in what supporters say is an attempt to close the gastronomic fracture that is splitting France down the middle. Their aim is to combat the notion that la grande cuisine is reserved for the middle and upper classes, while the poor eat fatty food that induces obesity and illness.

“Although these lessons are open to everyone, they are not really meant for bourgeois women who want to show off to their boyfriends,” said Marc de Champérard, one of the most influential food critics in France, who co-founded the university with Michel Onfray, the philosopher.

“They are meant for those who have been excluded and marginalised by liberalism and globalisation.”

The university will be inaugurated in Argentan, a small impoverished town in Normandy with an unemployment rate of 17 per cent after a series of factory closures.

The first lesson will be delivered by Jean-François Piège, chef at the luxury Crillon Hotel in Paris, who will talk about the cardoon. Other teachers include Éric Fréchon, of the celebrated Bristol Hotel, whose subject will be the Jerusalem artichoke.

Didier Elena, of the Château Les Crayères in the Champagne region of eastern France, who was named Chef of the Year in France, will focus on the cabbage.

On Friday, he was preparing a recipe for cabbage cake made with a vegetable stock that he transformed into a thick cream. Cabbage leaves and crispy bacon were then placed around the cream to make a cake. “We spend all our time in our restaurants surrounded by luxury and it’s good to get out of them and into real life,” he said.

If the university is a success, M de Champérard and M Onfray hope to set up similar institutions in other towns.

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