French Survey Reveals Lentil Consumption Habits Shifting Toward Plant-Based Diets

Lentils are quietly becoming a staple of the modern French plate, and a new dataset now offers one of the most detailed pictures yet of how people actually cook, store, and eat them. A national online survey conducted in 2022 collected responses from 607 people across France, of whom 556 identified themselves as lentil consumers. Among those consumers, 283 respondents—more than half—reported eating more lentils than they did five years earlier, a striking signal of the accelerating shift toward plant-based proteins in one of Europe’s most meat-oriented food cultures.

The survey, published as a data paper in the Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal, was designed not merely to chart dietary fashion but to feed a much larger scientific machinery: quantitative microbial risk assessment. As legume consumption rises, so does the need to understand how home-cooked lentil meals are prepared, cooled, and stored—practices that directly govern the growth of foodborne pathogens such as Bacillus cereus and Clostridium perfringens, which can survive cooking as spores and multiply in improperly chilled leftovers. Until now, consumer information about legumes prepared at home has been remarkably scarce, leaving risk modellers to rely on assumptions rather than observed behaviour.

The motivation behind the survey is rooted in the broader crisis of the global food system. Agriculture accounts for roughly 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with a large share attributable to livestock, while diets rich in animal protein are consistently linked to elevated risks of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. Scientists, nutritionists, farmers, and consumers have increasingly warned that the current agricultural and food system is approaching a dead end, prompting calls for a dual transition—both in the protein sources people eat and in the agroecological methods used to produce them. Pulses such as lentils, chickpeas, and beans, members of the Fabaceae family, sit at the heart of that transition because their seeds deliver vegetable proteins, dietary fibre and starch, and micronutrients including vitamins and trace minerals.

Market data reinforce the sense that this shift is structural rather than temporary. According to Nielsen figures cited in the source study, flexitarianism—a dietary pattern characterised by reduced consumption of animal proteins—was becoming the primary diet of the French population by 2019. As consumers increasingly turn toward proteins of plant origin and organic foods, lentil consumption is expected to increase significantly in the coming years. Yet this rising popularity collides with an uncomfortable knowledge gap: too little is still known about the potential public health risks, both microbiological and chemical, associated with lentils as they are actually consumed in French kitchens.

To close that gap, researchers built a 21-question survey on Google Forms and circulated it from 5 May to 8 June 2022. The link was distributed through friends and colleagues at INRAE in Rennes and Nantes and at Oniris in Nantes, as well as to students at the University of Avignon, AgroParisTech in Saclay, Toulouse institutions including the Toulouse School of Economics, and agricultural programmes in Angers. The questionnaire covered the types of lentil meals people eat, how often they eat raw, canned, and frozen lentils, their cooking methods and cooking times, whether they split meals across several servings, and how long they store leftovers. Critically, four questions probed leftover practices and their duration, and two focused specifically on how hot meals are cooled before refrigeration—details that are decisive inputs for microbial exposure models.

The resulting dataset is raw and unanalysed, comprising 607 responses in csv format with 30 columns, accompanied by a document listing the questions asked. The data are deposited on data.gouv.fr under a Creative Commons Public Domain Waiver, with additional licensing under the French Etalab Open Licence, making them freely available for reuse by food safety researchers, epidemiologists, and modellers worldwide. The respondents ranged in age from 18 to 91 and came from 12 different French regions, though the sample skewed heavily female, with 442 women, 154 men, and 11 respondents of unknown gender.

That sampling approach carries important caveats. Because the survey was circulated through personal and professional networks and relied on declarative, self-reported answers, the sample is not representative of the general French population. With 556 of 607 respondents identifying as lentil eaters, the dataset will overestimate the proportion of lentil consumers in France. The authors are explicit about this limitation: the data can be used to estimate the types of lentil meals consumed, methods of preparation, and storage durations once cooked, but not to calculate the overall national rate of lentil consumption. For risk assessment purposes, however, that trade-off is often acceptable—modellers need rich detail on how consumers behave, which representative surveys rarely capture at this granularity.

The questionnaire’s structure reveals what food safety scientists consider the critical control points of home legume preparation. Respondents were asked whether they eat ready-to-eat meals such as canned lentils, lentil salad, or frozen lentils in several sittings, and separately whether they do the same with home-cooked hot meals and cold lentil salads. For each category, follow-up questions captured storage duration. Two further questions addressed cooling practices: how cooked meals are cooled down before being placed in the refrigerator, and how long they are left to cool. These variables matter because the interval between cooking and refrigeration is a well-known window for bacterial growth, and consumer habits—such as leaving a large pot of lentils to cool for hours on the counter—can dramatically change microbial exposure estimates.

Privacy and data protection were handled with care throughout the project. Google Forms operates under the same strict privacy and data protection commitments as other Google Cloud enterprise services, with files encrypted in transit and at rest and security settings regularly audited independently. The survey data themselves received additional safeguards, including advanced malware protection, and all participants’ data were fully anonymised before release. Each response includes the respondent’s region, allowing geographic patterns in consumption and storage behaviour to be explored at a national scale.

The significance of this dataset extends well beyond lentils. As France and Europe push toward plant-based diets for climate and health reasons, the consumption of home-prepared legumes is set to grow, and with it the need for refined exposure assessments that reflect real kitchen behaviour rather than worst-case assumptions. By documenting who eats lentils, in what forms, how they are cooked, and how leftovers are handled, the 2022 survey provides the behavioural evidence base that food safety authorities need to evaluate current and future consumption patterns. In a second phase, the researchers intend to plug this information into health risk assessments covering both microbiological and chemical hazards, turning a simple questionnaire about a humble pulse into a tool for safeguarding the protein transition now reshaping the French diet.

Subject of Research: lentil consumption practices in France

Article Title: Data from an online survey on lentil consumption practices in France in 2022

Article References: Yabré, A., & Membré, J.-M. (2022). Data from an online survey on lentil consumption practices in France in 2022. Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal, 3, Article e91025. https://doi.org/10.3897/fmj.3.91025

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/fmj.3.91025

Keywords: lentils, plant-based protein, food safety, France, survey, microbial risk assessment, legumes, dietary transition, leftovers, food storage, flexitarianism, pulses