A Profonde Crisis

[John Whiting]

Nigel Wilmott's report on his walking tour of France didn't appear in our edition of the Guardian, but fortunately it's on their website. It makes the changes in the French countryside (and local eating) much more obvious than what is seen by those of us (including me) who traverse the country on four wheels.

Maybe because of size and geography, motorways came late to France. Now it is making up for it with a vengeance. And with the new autoroutes and bypasses come the hotel chains: Campanile, Aurore, Formule 1, Ibis, Mercure, Kyriad - as often as not on the outskirts of town in new "commercial centres", sucking out the business from small auberges and hotels for miles around. At the extreme, it means a sizeable town like Melun, south-east of Paris, has no hotels at all left in the city centre.

The CAP is effecting an equal change in the private sphere. The first impression is the staggering scale of renewal in rural France. Every house seems either new or recently extended and refurbished. But behind the fences and grand gates and gardens planted with cartesian precision, social change is underway. If the CAP was designed to support and maintain the rural way of life, it long ago stopped doing it. It seems the only thing stopping prairies on a US scale are the existence of long-established permanent settlements and the protected woodlands and forests.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,474...-110633,00.html

[Jonathan Day]

Wilmott's credibility took a dive when I read this bit about peas:

But still the fields can stretch to the skyline in the gently undulating terrain. Wheat (mainly), barley - on one absurd occasion rhubarb; and most surprisingly peas. Everywhere. The French don't even eat them except in vegetable salad. What can they be for but to bag up and freeze to flog across the channel.

Petits pois not eaten in France except in "vegetable salad"? Could Wilmott have taken a wrong turn on his walking tour and ended up in some other European country? Lithuania perhaps?

[John Whiting]

Maybe he was thinking of gros pois rather than petit pois.

However, such a lapse shouldn't blind us to his wider and more perceptive observations.

[wgallois]

While this article makes some good points, my general impression is that it describes little that is really new and that its conclusions are very debatable ones.

Its premise that there is a 'sense of place and regional diversity, central to the traditional sense of French identity', which is now being lost, could be contradicted outright, or challenged by asserting that this diminishment of regionality took place at some earlier point. It was after all the early administrations of the Third Republic which did their best to complete Napoleon I's project to centralize France, with the imposition of French as a single national language in all forms of government, promoted by a newly comprehensive schooling system delivered only through the medium of French. Before the 1870s, as Bourdieu argued in 'Ce que parler veut dire', there was no meaningful French identity, but rather a series of discrete regional cultures within the political boundaries of France.

Alternatively, one might counter-balance Wilmott's assertions regarding the loss of regional diversity by observing that such diversity would now seem to be being promoted in a far more active way in France than has ever before been the case. This can be seen in the state's new tolerance towards regional languages such as Breton, the move towards self-government in Corsica, and the impact of EU policies on the protection of regional cultures (and the principle of subsidiarity more generally).

This is not to deny that France and French food have not been undergoing the effects of modernization and urbanization observed in Wilmott's article, but these processes have been underway for quite some time. One might, I think, develop a case that French regionality is pretty robust and that there are reasons for feeling optimistic about the continuance of terroir-driven cuisines and wines.

[John Whiting]

A very good analysis, I think, written from a larger perspective. Wilmott seems to have written deliberately out of his experience on the road as an "eyewitness" report, with little reference to history.

My own experience of meandering about France by car suggests that the areas where local customs and cuisine are thriving are those that are inherently picturesque and thus attract tourists who are interested in the local hospitality as well. Wilmott starts his journey in one of the least attractive parts of France, where one is unlikely to linger except from necessity. These are the places where the food and lodging chains are able to offer the reliable, the predictable and the anonymous.

[Jonathan Day]

It is something of a bad news / good news story. Unquestionably la France profonde is not what it was. When I first joined eGullet, I posted a note about a barge trip up the Charente, on which we found one village after another reduced to economic ashes, as people had moved out and shops had succumbed to the grands surfaces of Carrefour and the like. This presented a big challenge since my wife and I had three children, a nanny, and two somewhat frail grandparents to feed, and our only means of transport was the barge or bicycles. I once cycled into a village, desperate to buy bread and milk, only to find it deserted except for a drunk who complained that the town once had three bars, and now had none.

The village where we now spend a lot of time, Mougins, has recently lost the best artisanal butcher/ charcutier/ traiteur that I have ever found, anywhere. He had a heart attack and does not have the strength to reopen the shop. In general, independent or artisanal butchers seem to be vanishing, at least in that part of France.

There is good news, however. A number of the big chains in France, e.g. Intermarche and Leclerc, are in some form mutuals or cooperatives, and they have tended to be more sympathetic to local producers and products, forcing even investor-owned Auchan and Carrefour to do some of the same. Independent bakeries seem to be flourishing, in part because unlike the butchers they seem to have established some local or even wider economies of scale. Examples of this would be Le Petrin Ribeirou, which specialises in levain (naturally leavened) breads; or, more upscale, Paul or Poilane, which have crossed the channel to the UK. All of these places do all of the work (dough, rising, baking, etc.) on premises, and the product is good.

The restaurants certainly nod to the importance of terroir and sometimes even manage to deliver on it. Ditto for the winemakers. And as wgallois points out, there is a renewed interest in local dialects: you can go from Menton to Marseille and pick up university language courses and authors publishing in a range of local dialects: Mentonnais, Nicois, Provencal, etc. Chains like Logis de France have helped indpendent hotel operators achieve some economies of scale, yet preserve their character; and similar networks are springing up at many price ranges. Accor are not without competition.

A cynic might say that the remnants of "real" France are unnaturally preserved, a Disneyfied restoration of something that was once completely organic. Perhaps. But it is better than doing without.

I have to admit that I found Wilmott's article disappointing and just a bit cynical. Setting aside sloppy editing, it didn't really offer any new news. Yes, the forces of globalisation continue to work, though fortunately it hasn't unfolded in anything like the way the pundits predicted even 5 years ago. Yes, information and communication technology costs have led to all sorts of changes, and it's now tougher for small independent shops to compete with the bigger ones. But we knew that, and some of the changes are going to happen whether or not the French national government or local governments intervene.

As a gastronomic tourist, I could see a case for pickling la France profonde in an economy of the 1950s or 1960s. It would make some aspects of tourism far more pleasant, whether carried out by car, train, bicycle, boat or on foot. But I doubt that many of the French themselves would care to live in this world.

[Bux]

Whatever his conclusions, the article was not exactly news. A good part of it could have been fictionalized by extrapolating from many of the posts I, as well as others, have made here on eGullet. I've surely mentioned the charming place in Gascony my wife wanted us to rent for a few weeks or a month. She enticed me with the idea that I could booze with the locals at a cafe in the town and practice my French. The pity was, as lovely as our landlady might have been, all of the local food merchants in town had closed after the opening of a supermarket off a highway out of town. Consequently, with little traffic in town, the cafe closed as well. Shopping would have been by car.

What a pity for the tourists that France, it's life and economy, are connected to the international grid. When I was a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, USA, my father trafficked in produce. From time to time I would accompany him on visits to local farms in NYC. The closest one was just inside the Brooklyn-Queens border. I have memories of sweet fresh tomatoes I picked in the field and ate standing among the tomato vines as tall as I was. It's long gone as are most of the farms in Nassau county two counties away from Brooklyn. My aunt and uncle bought into a new community that was never a town and would never be one, but had replaced one of my favorite farms in Nassau country. The world is a different place, more surprising than that France has changed, is that Spain has changed so much less. So I enjoy some things there that remind me of what I've lost in France, but that too will change soon and the counntryside of Spain has always been less rich in the amenities Wilmott needed.

As Jonathan mentions, one of the upsides is that the large hypermarches I've visited in France, have space for artisanal products, ham that is sliced to order and local artisanal cheeses that will never make it to the US, but which may also be doomed in France, by EU decree. Mort Rosenblum spelled it out with a better evenness in A Goose in Toulouse.

[John Whiting]

Mort Rosenblum spelled it out with a better evenness in A Goose in Toulouse.

A fine, even useful book. What comes out of all this is that there are still very good traditional bistros scattered across the country, but you can no longer assume that one will magically materialize exactly where you want it.

In a couple of weeks I'm about to experiment with a whole new way of exploring France (at least for me). I've acquired and restored a classic VW Westfalia campervan, vintage 1981. I've also joined a French club called France Passion which publishes a guide to French auberges and vineyards that offer free overnight parking on their property, together with recommendations of local bistros and restaurants. Some of these farms even offer meals in situ, prepared from their own produce. They seem to have no commercial incentive ( the spaces being free); just a desire to perpetuate a certain tradition. When I return, I'll start a new thread with a report of our experiences, whether positive or negative.