Yogurt has always been considered a health food in the U.S. It promotes digestion, boasts plenty of calcium, and serves as a natural partner to fresh fruit of all kinds. The overly sweetened containers of chocolate mousse flavored or key lime cheesecake flavored yogurts always struck me as laughable, because if you're going to eat yogurt, it should taste like yogurt, not like some chemically flavored reincarnation of a different dessert. If you want cheesecake so badly, why on earth would you buy yogurt?
I make an exception for many things in France. I drink my morning tea from a giant cafe-au-lait style bowl, because it's always amused me that the French drink coffee from the tiniest imaginable espresso cups throughout the day, except in the morning, when they drink it from bowls as big as swimming pools. And I'll happily eat pastries for breakfast, mostly because I'm here for less than a week and it would be stupid to eat cereal when I could be eating pain au chocolate.
I also go gaga over French yogurt, and make an exception to my no-flavored yogurt rule for this coconut stuff I found in a tiny nondescript grocery store. It's just a generic brand, I believe, but it comes in these lovely little glass pots that just slay me. I've threatened to wash them out and pack them in my suitcase to re-use as bud vases or earring holders when I get home. Maybe because everything in the U.S. is now plasticized, the idea of yogurt in glass pots strikes me as retro-chic and completely charming. And I swear, it makes the yogurt taste better.
If I lead a movement to bring glass pots of yogurt to the U.S., will anyone join me? I promise they'll be recyclable...
