The Michelin Guide’s tiresome sustainability award

The Michelin Red Guide is a marketing device to sell tyres by selling pastries. The guide was invented in 1900 by Michelin, the French tyre company, which is now the second-largest tyre company in the world. The guide initially covered restaurants in France, then spread to Belgium, the Alps, Germany, north Africa, Britain and, eventually, the USA and Japan. It began to award stars – the golden number is three – for restaurants in 1926, copying Baedeker’s and Murray’s guides and it insinuated the idea that French food is the best in the world. The Guardian quoted someone calling the Red Guide, ‘a tool of Gallic cultural imperialism’.

One Michelin inspector – the Frenchman Pascal Remy – wrote about a book about it. It was called The Inspector Sits Down at the Table. He describes the job as lonely, underpaid drudgery, and I believe him.