Day 150
Today at the grocery store we saw a man buy one potato. From the way he was dressed and the other pricey items in his basket, it’s likely he could have afforded more than one. The one potato became a subject of conversation on the way home of how the French value freshness. We buy a loaf of bread to last all week or a bag of potatoes or onions to just have around in case we need one. The French buy bread, cheese, meat, and even potatoes and onions for the next meal. When tomorrow comes, they will do it again.
We were beaten into submission to adopt the French idea of freshness, by our lovely French fridge. On the outside, it is the size of an American fridge, but on the inside, it it unmistakably French. Since we are still accustomed to buying in weekly American quotas, we put things in the fridge and things went bad and got moldy quicker than we were accustomed to. We thought there was a freon problem and called our apartment’s owner. He came and checked it with a thermometer, and declared it a perfectly healthy and happy french fridge. The unspoken diagnosis, we were going about this thing all wrong. After moldy this and smelly that, we finally conceded. Fresh not fridge, ok, we get it. We would buy mostly what we could eat in a day or two. It has been both a surprisingly difficult habit to adopt, but wonderful at the same time. The spontaneity has shifted from having an abundance of food hanging around the house to dig into, to deciding daily what everyone’s taste buds are in the mood for. It’s a different kind of thoughtful eating.
Our daily routine is now to walk to the bakery to get our daily baguette and chocolate madeleines for breakfast. Then we walk down to the Carrefour and decide what we will eat for the day and buy that. A couple of times a week we visit the local neighborhood butcher and we go to a larger market somewhere in the city on weekends.
I like how produce often has a small stem or leaves attached as if to say, I’m so fresh I’m still wearing my leaves.
In addition to the freshness component of keeping fridge contents to a bare minimum, there is the sidewalk bistro influence. The French love their cafes and bistros. I also sense a higher degree of spontaneity with meals and their planning. Why have a lot of food going bad in your cool-ish fridge when at any moment you may go out on a whim with friends, family, or just you and the pooch? There are so many local bistros where people enjoy a leisurely meal with the company of others. I’ve been guilty of too often using mealtime as a way of shoveling food into the family so we can rush off to the next activity. The French have maintained the importance of meal time being a valuable daily time of enjoyment, connecting with those we care about, being more thoughtful of how to nourish our bodies, and slowing down to savor one of the unique aspects of our human experience. I wonder what else I can learn from French appliances.