Paris bulletin 1 2014

When I am out and about in the streets of Paris around lunchtime, I can’t help but wonder just how many pigs – let alone chickens, bullocks and turkeys – are eaten here every day. You only have to look at the piles of ham and gruyère baguettes, the tempting terrines of pâté in the traiteur shop windows, the heaps of jambon fumé and charcuterie, to realise that this city must get through hundreds of herds of swine every working day of the week.

So that leads me to wonder where exactly are all these poor beasts being cut down, eviscerated and bled, before being turned into sausages, hams and pâtés? By no means all of them in Paris. Those with a ‘produit du terroir’ label on them will have gone under the cosh somewhere else in France and arrived in the city already altered beyond all recognition from the four-legged beasts they were.

Once upon a time livestock killed inside the Paris boundaries would have met their end in the grand abattoir of la Villette but that has long since shed its gory image, ‘relooked’ itself as a temple of culture and modernity. Maybe I think, the abattoirs have been pushed even further out to the periphery of the city: ‘out of sight, out of mind’, until you sink your teeth into one of those delicious, well-filled baguettes that Paris still does better than most other capitals.

It turns out that this is not quite the case. The 18^th and 19^th arrondissements do indeed have more than their fair share: four in all, but some of the others are in what are usually thought of as the more bourgeois arrondissements: the 8^th for example (99 rue du Faubourg St Honoré), the 11^th (91 rue de la Roquette) and the 6^th (31 avenue du Maine).

The French have always been a nation of carnivores and it’s rare to find people gripped by the kind of sentimentality about the animal world that is so common in the UK. Still, reading about the methods employed by these abattoirs to do away with ‘les porcins’, to strip them of their bristles (in what are called échaudoirs, which as the name suggests, are vats full of hot water. 62 degs C is required – hotter than that and the skin tears, colder and the bristles stay in) and render them ‘fit for human consumption’, you really do wonder how any of us continue to eat meat at all. And that’s before you tangle with the horrors of slit throats and the slow bleeding to death required by the Islamic and Orthodox Jewish methods of slaughter.

Paris is like all capital cities these days – you want any kind of food from any part of the globe, any plant or creature of the natural (or unnatural) world, and you can find it. Being conservative as well as carnivorous however, it’s taking a while for the ordinary French man and woman to make the leap to insect-eating. New York may have its retail outlets selling locusts, crickets and meal worms by the kilo for immediate human consumption but there isn’t yet an equivalent in Paris. What the city does have – within walking distance of my own flat – is a restaurant which specialises in entomophagy, the fancy word for eating insects. If you decide to give it a try you’ll need to leave aside your ‘I’m OK with fish if it doesn’t look like fish’ wimpishness – these insects arrive at your table complete with feelers, eyes and brittle – oh so brittle! – legs. They sit proudly atop your lettuce leaves and your slice of foie gras as if they are about to pounce.

                                              

               

                                             

The name of the restaurant is ‘le Festin Nu’, the French title of William Burroughs’ cult novel ‘Naked Lunch’, published for the first time in Paris in 1959, and famous for its experimental, hallucinatory style (he wrote it while doing every kind of known drug at the time), and its scatological content. Eat there and you will be eating in ‘l’enfant terrible’ of the restaurant world – at least that’s what I assume the name is supposed to convey. (10 rue de la Fontaine du But, Paris 18ème).

Generally speaking we are a long way yet in France from the extraordinary fetishization of food that UK viewers suffer (or enjoy) almost nightly on British television but, leaving the insects to one side, there are worrying signs that France is beginning to follow a similar trend.

Le snacking, le lunch, le fast food – they’ve become familiar concepts to the ordinary punter. They were joined a little while back, for the higher end of the eating public by le Fooding, a movement with its own widely-read publication which, in the words of one of its proponents (or do I mean prophets?), aims to

“liberate cuisine from the traditional codes and conventions that confine it and give contemporary eaters a true taste of the times. Through opening this “freer channel in the gastronomic universe” le Fooding emphasizes “the appetite for novelty and quality, rejection of boredom, love of fun, the ordinary, the sincere....”

A true taste of the times? If you ask a few of the people I see rummaging in the bins round here, one or two of the woman queuing up for free groceries from the relais du coeur on the rue du Département, they’d probably tell you that the taste of the times for their families is two-day old bread, last week’s mince and past-their-sell-by-date yoghurts.