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Countries are discovered through their gastronomy, making meals a space in which to decipher not only a person's physiological needs, but also their beliefs, representations, values, and culture. In his famous aphorisms praising the pleasures of the table, Brillat-Savarin has already put forward the idea that “animals feed; man eats.” Aware of the stakes involved in French gastronomy, the Mission Française du Patrimoine et des Cultures Alimentaires (French Mission for Food Heritage and Culture) took on the project of having the French gastronomic meal (RGF) added to the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list. The process involved producing a definition of the RGF, but this did not meet with consensus. The question remains: What is a gastronomic meal? We interviewed 424 French people; in this article, we study and classify their representations of the gastronomic meal in order to better define the concept and its orientations.