Bread

Bread is such a food staple in France, that even when eating a meal which consists mainly of bread, such as the croque monsieur, the French will eat a baguette on the side.
(croque monsieur: a hot ham and cheese--typically emmental or gruyere--grilled sandwich with lots and lots of butter--basically as staple a food to France as pb&j is to the States).

Meg & I spent the weekend at one of my English professor's homes, where we drooled over the cuteness of Maxou, the cat, almost as much as over her 17-month-old son, Hugo, the tiniest little Frenchman I've ever met with the biggest smile I've ever seen from a Frenchman.

After a jaunt to the local piscine, where I found I could barely lift my pinky finger after a mere hour of swimming (it's hard to stay in shape when it's snowing outside and you keep eating bread and cheese with wine every five seconds), we ate a delicious lunch, which included: a salad made almost entirely out of croutons, with baguette bread on the site, and a two croque monsieurs each, with baguette bread on the side.

Normally, when you eat a French lunch (meat, potatoes, cheese, some kind of sauce), you use the baguette bread to mop up the sauce and such left on the plate. Today, there was so much bread--in the salad, on the table, on my plate, crumbs flying everywhere in a frenzy of floury dust--that I found myself finishing off the meal by using that last piece of baguette bread to mop up the bread crumbs off my plate.