AS GLOOM AND DOOM (G&D) CONTINUE...

G&D LOOK LIKE BEING ALL AROUND US for some while to come...so how about a little more of Paris? This post is about food...

A funny thing happened the last evening we were in Paris. After spending a pleasant late afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens, we walked back to our hotel to shower and dress up a little for the next big event: dinner at the corner bistro. Uma was determined to have the steak with pepper sauce I had sampled a day or so earlier. I settled on the breast of chicken. An interesting feature of the menu is that it had little footnotes about areas from which the meats originate; four areas not too far from Paris. Now...this is not an expensive restaurant, just your ordinary local cafe-bar bistro. Well, you say, 'What is funny about that?' OK, I am getting to that... but I bet it would be hard to find such footnotes on the menus of the cafes where you and I ordinarily eat.

The funny thing was the taste of the chicken. It tasted quite a bit like the 'chook' I used to eat back in days before supermarkets. Explanation needed here...the term 'chook' is Australian vernacular for fowl. As a boy, my family ran chooks in the back yard as quite a few folk still do if the local regulations permit. The chooks forage all about and do a great job of keeping local insect populations low. They also gobble up kitchen scraps and grain you spread about in the evenings. In the morning, you go and collect the eggs. When they ceased laying or happened to have become to be a supernumerary rooster, they were killed off and became a feature of Sunday lunch. For a special occasion, if you didn't run chooks or wanted to preserve your layers, you could buy one at the local butcher shop who might also have a rabbit or two for sale as well as the usual range of meats.

The curious thing is: the chicken you buy in the supermarket tastes nothing like those free ranging chooks. I was eating some last night, come to think of it, and it is hard to say just what it tastes like; certainly not like good old fashioned 'chook'.

I confess it was a bit of a shock to rediscover what chicken used to taste like...kind of 'wild'. Now I think of it, the french fries tasted a little strange too; they had a distinct 'potato' flavor! The French of course, above all else, are 'foodies'. They really value the taste of good food.

How about this? In 2006, when I stayed with a French family in Aix-en-Provence, we would start getting dinner ready about 6:30 in the evening and continue through the preparation and eating until almost nine o'clock, talking all the while and working our way through at least four modest courses. We never got to watch TV! Thinking this a little strange, I asked the other students at the language school about their experience. Oddly enough, they reported the same pattern.

I have referred several times to the views of Michael Pollan. He has a great piece in NY Times (October 9: The Food Issue...Farmer in Chief) in the form of a letter to the next President. Maybe, what with the cost of transporting goods, the rising cost of food, and a new emphasis on buying locally, we may one day be once more eating chicken that tastes like 'chook'. Maybe the old fashioned butcher shop will return, along with a local bakery where you can eat bread that tastes like, well...BREAD!

Happy eating!