Three things the French love

There are three things that the French hold dear to their hearts: the first and foremost is Market Day.

I've talked about this before but now that I have often joined the fray, as it were, I can say without qualms that the French truly enjoy going, once a week, at least, to a designated place where you can be jostled by the rushing crowd, charged twice the normal price for any commodity, sold cheap good from China as if they were made by laborious French craftsmen, and generally made to spend on a Sunday meal what you usually spend for the rest of the week.

No matter where you go in this country, no matter how small the village or how far from the nearest paved road a huddled dozen homes may be, there is a Market Day, which is as inevitable as death and taxes.

The little old lady across the street may lay prostrate with age and infirmities six days a week but on Market Day she will hustle out of bed, put on her support hose, grab her cane and shopping bag and rush like a rugby fullback through the throng in search of dirt encrusted mushrooms and smelly cheese.

It used to be that Market Day was the day when farmers and stock breeders near a town would bring their products--usually bread, cheese, fowls and their byproducts, vegetables, meat from slaughtered animals (rabbits, lambs, and so on)--to sell to town folks. There is still some of that but for the most part you have professional salesmen in special trucks that fold out to become well-lit and well-stocked stores, hustlers with mounds of cheap shoes or shirts or whatever the season calls for; specialists who sell soaps made from fruits and vegetables, or bunches of vanilla roots, or oils extracted from exotic seeds; food from Morocco, China, India, made by immigrants from those countries or Spanish paella, Danish pastry, or Japanese sushi all made by French cooks.

Which brings me to the second thing the French love most: eating at the market.

Now, I know about eating at a "mercado": Mexicans have been eating in the town market for hundreds of years, if not thousands. If you, dear reader, are ever in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, you will see the beautiful representation of Market Day in Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital. Among the hundreds of little figures you will see some sitting down to a meal after having done their shopping for leather sandals and snakeskin belts.

But for the French--at least the modern French--eating in the market on Market Day, is a novelty. And it is such fun for them that they are willing to pay exorbitant prices for six oysters and a cup of bad white wine (a cup is an exaggeration because what they give you resembles the little containers you get from the nurse when they need a urine sample.)

The crowd in the market prefers sitting on rickety plastic chairs and eating with disposable plastic forks over unstable picnic type tables rather than take the damn oysters home to enjoy them with a decent and much less expensive entire bottle of white wine.

Today, after a couple of weeks of the nicest, warmest indian summer days, the curtain finally came down on summer and the rain and cold told us the party was over and that winter would soon be here. But, you could't tell it from the crowd at the market: they hustled and bustled and shoved each other around in order to eat the six oysters and buy dirt encrusted mushrooms.

Which brings me nicely to my third point: a third thing that the French hold dear is freshness! Only surpassed by the Japanese who seem to like eating fish while the poor things are still squirming around on the plate, no other country makes such a big deal of "freshness" as do the French.

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that sometime in the past the things brought to market were indeed freshly picked vegetables and fruits, and freshly slaughtered animals. But, the only "fresh" thing I saw in the market today was the mud on the cèpes, those huge, brown mushrooms that bloom in the autumn midst the shady, humid woods. Although, according to my wife, that's a good sign. (Go figure.)

A lot of the prepared food looked pretty warmed over and the fish and meat on the counters looked like they had been in the fridge for a while. The tangerines were so fresh they were still green and the green peppers had been around so long they were turning red.

There are many things I like about France; there are many of its traditions which I like and admire. But, Market Day is not one of them. Not because of what it is but because of what modern life has made of it: the commercialization of a great tradition to the detriment of small producers and the gain of greedy merchants.

There are places, to be sure, where Market Day is still what it was meant to be. In smaller towns and villages that are not "profitable" for the roving bands of greedy merchants and hustlers of bad goods, local farmers do bring their products to the market. I remember a market day in Vic en Bigorre with farmers bringing in their live rabbits and chickens, a fellow that made and bottled fruit liqueurs; and in Gimont on a Sunday buying from a local lady a "barquette" of cherry tomatoes for one euro which are the best cherry tomatoes I have ever had.

I should start a petition on Change.org to get cities to change the name "Market Day" to "Cheap Crap at Expensive Prices Day." Market Day should be an "appellation contrôlée"and should be reserved for markets that welcome local producers of authentic and good fare.