"Camille ne mange que des aliments blancs."
Translation:Camille only eats white foods.
18 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I had a colleague like this. He would only eat potatoes, white chicken meat, dumplings, rice, bread... Unusual, and not a very healthy diet. No vegetables.
Is there a difference in connotation between l'aliment and la nourriture, or are they interchangeable?
I can't think of any sentence in which they're not interchangeable, but I don't use my French as much as I should, so it's a little weak. The only real difference I can think of is that "aliment" is a bit more scientific, and is usually used when talking about one food or dish. Whereas "nourriture" would be used to describe a larger variation of foods. Someone may come along and correct me tho :)
The composer Eric Satie claimed to only eat white foods, including eggs, coconuts, shredded bones and cotton salad.
Satie looked weird, wrote weird music and gave his weird music weird names. It's not surprising that his diet was weird, too. (Much of his music is wonderfully beautiful. And weird.)
He wrote a lot of short piano pieces that don't fit into any usual category and gave them odd names like Gnossiennes and Gynopédies.
In my jovial comment, I didn't mean "weird" in a pejorative sense. The oddness of these works is part of their considerable charm. They are certainly beautiful. They are also quite accessible for a modern listener, unlike perhaps Schoenberg's piano music, which I also find beautiful.
Is there a reason why "Camille doesn't eat anything but white foods" would be incorrect?
That translates better as « Camille ne mange rien d'autre que des aliments blancs » or « Camille ne mange rien sauf des aliments blancs » because that construction emphasizes the "not anything/nothing." « Ne ... que » means "only."
No. There are people who only eat white foods. Potatoes, rice, white bread, yogurt, chicken breasts, pork "the other white meat", pasta ...