In the 1970s we got nouvelle cuisine, in which a lot of the old rules were kicked over. And then we had cuisine minceur, which people mixed up with nouvelle cuisine but was actually fancy diet cooking.

Julia Child is distinguishing two late-20th-century French culinary movements that were often conflated in popular discussion. “Nouvelle cuisine” signaled a break from classical French orthodoxy—lighter sauces, shorter cooking times, more emphasis on freshness, plating, and chefly invention. “Cuisine minceur,” by contrast, was explicitly tied to slimming and health-minded restraint: a refined, technique-driven form of diet cooking. Child’s point is partly historical (sequencing and definitions) and partly critical: culinary innovation should not be reduced to mere calorie-cutting, and the public’s tendency to lump trends together obscures what each movement was trying to achieve.