"Qu'ils mangent de la brioche, " said MarieAntoinnette: "Let them eat cake". The apocryphal phrase was intended to convey the queen's naive assumption that the poor of Paris had a range of consumables to choose from which, famously was not the case. Where choice does exist in these matters, however, as often as not it is dictated by the weather. It has been discovered, for example, that the sales of bread are directly related to temperature: perhaps, surprisingly they fall off as the temperature rises day by day, and climb again as the weather becomes cooler.
Many weatherfood relationships are rather obvious. When the sun is shining no one wants to eat a chocolate bar, but sales of beers and largers flourish at the expense of the stronger and less thirst quenching stouts and heavy ales. Photographic films and picnic goods are also in demand in sunny weather and it will come as no surprise to learn that salads, mayonnaise and other dressings, are consumed in larger quantities during a hot, sunny spell than during a rainy period. More interesting, however, is the fact that the peak in sales of salad ingredients almost invariably comes on very suddenly; there is an almost instant switch to summer eating habits after the first weekend of the year to be accompanied by good sunny weather, with the entire nation seeming to migrate collectively to the garden to eat barbecues and salads. At the other end of the summer, the change back to winter foods is usually much more gradual.
During rainy periods we drink more coffee than we usually do, while in sunny weather we tend to drink more tea. Sandwich bars, too, apparently find that beef sandwiches are popular in cold weather, but that chicken takes off figuratively speaking - when the temperature begins to rise. Canned soups and spaghetti, on the other hand, are winter items.
But in some cases our habits can be related very precisely to particular weather elements. Ice cream sales, for example, are found to be directly related to temperature to a much greater extent than they are to the presence or absence of sunshine. With soft drinks the relationship is more subtle; the sales of minerals soar when the temperature reaches about 5 C, but above that threshold, further increases in sales are more closely related to recorded hours of sunshine. At a more basic level, motorway caterers in the UK have discovered that the consumption of hot meals at their outlets drops suddenly by about 70 per cent as soon as the temperature touches the magic figure of 20 C.