When I went down to the ground floor to exchange insurance info with the wheelchair-bound woman who lives there following our flood this summer, she asked if I had tried the chickens of the man with the strange combination meat-and-produce stall at our market. I confessed that I hadn’t, and she explained that I must because in addition to being a local farmer (like the very popular stall three times the size at the market’s entrance) he doesn’t use pesticides (unlike said much larger stall’s farmers). Can’t be bothered to get certified as organic, but he has a little farm, raises chickens, rabbits, and whatever produce is in season right then, and then sells it at quite reasonable prices.
She told me that she has always had a knack for finding “good” addresses–she’s given me three excellent bread recommendations to date–like she was born under a lucky star. “That’s one hell of a star,” I say, because she’s lived in the U.S., Italy, and a scattering of other countries, and it must be nice to always be drawn right away to the places locals would tell you about after 3 years.
So now I buy one of the man’s chickens every Friday, and when I turn the carcass into stock there’s this smell in the house like you wouldn’t believe. Which is, I’m sure, partly because he leaves the organs, so they go in (some Friday I’ll get brave and ask him to leave the neck, too, but not yet–and not the whole head. “Even French people don’t often keep the neck,” the woman in line behind me explained when I nervously told the farmer that I was American, and therefore squeamish. “For an American it’s impressive to be buying a chicken this way at all!”).
There’s just one drawback to this farmer, my neighbor warned me: he only sells produce in-season. “So no tomatoes yet,” she sighed.
This confused me profoundly. By the time we had this conversation, I had watched tomatoes’ progress through Italy and Spain and into Provence, and then heirloom varieties had started sneaking into the giant local farm stall that, apparently, uses pesticides. They even had some cheap kinds coming in behind those; how was it NOT “tomato season”?
Apparently she meant genuinely native plants at the peak of their season, because they just came in last week: green around the stem (but I hear they redden off the vine, and selling them all-red is often a chemically-aided ploy), and huge. But the point is: there are whole new levels of snobbery to “local” that I had no idea about. I thought I was doing pretty well buying produce almost exclusively from France, but then you get these farmer-sellers who only have stuff from the region right outside of Paris. And then there’s an even prouder group who only sells organically-grown native Ile-de-France produce at its peak. This guy…he has potatoes and onions all year (a few varieties of each), and probably salad greens, too. And his spinach started coming in, and beautiful radishes like little semi-precious gems, and I get a bunch of each of those most weeks, too. Zucchini are thriving, and of course he has a basket of eggs from his chickens. But then he has these little treasures that you can hope for rather than rely on: plums one week the size of shooter marbles, teeny-tiny blackberries, these lovely crisp apples with just a little blush on their green.
Even now in early fall I need more variety–peppers, beets, garlic, and fennel from our pesticide-using friends–and I’d imagine that in the winter the selection will be discouragingly bleak. But everything I get from him–it’s like moving to France all over again, now that our palates have gotten familiar with regular French produce.
Then the woman from the ground floor appeared at our door with a smiling aide pushing her chair and a baguette + a slice of country bread from the third of her three bakery recommendations (to die for) and I realized: she’s trying to be friends. I had told her about my theory, about how living abroad is a shared experience that transcends other experiences, and she apparently agrees. So, although I’ve been putting it off for nearly a week now between one crisis and another (we did send our notice letter to our landlord; my leg just freaking HURTS now; I gassed the dogs by shutting them in the kitchen & starting the oven’s self-clean (30 minutes with the window wide open–they were sleepy all day after but we were SO lucky)), I’m going to bake her some cookies. I can’t compete with brilliant addresses, but I can use my carefully-hoarded brown sugar, vanilla extract, and chocolate morsels to make at least one thing that I know she can’t get here. And I’ll go and bring them, and tell her how at least the flour is organic since that seems to be of interest to her, but I suppose if cookies aren’t her thing she can always pass them off to her aides, and spread the joy.