An 8,000-Mile Grocery Run
Descended, as my father informs me, from an illustrious line of Dutch muck farmers, my palate was genetically pre-conditioned to accept dishes like hutspot, a steamed mush of root vegetables and onions. For generations, my immigrant forebears cultivated deep suspicions against flavor and texture as proxies for temptation and sin, suspicions reflecting the sober gray winters of their new homes in West Michigan, suspicions which followed a precedent set in the motherland just like the weather. Mustard might have graced these kitchens, but garlic and other exotica were dubious. The one seasoning of choice was salt, applied in quantity. Babette never alighted upon those temperate shores, won the lottery, and used the surfeit to blossom our sense of taste—our people shunned gambling and did their own housework unlike the decadent Jutes.
We were not always satisfied with our cuisine. My great-grandfather would reportedly come in from a hard day in the orchards, look at his dinner plate, and ask his poor wife, “Do I eat it, or did I eat it?” Alcohol might have helped, but in the milieu of middlebrow American Protestantism, these particular Dutch immigrants came to consider alcohol akin to dancing—it was rare, badly done, and uncouth. My teetotaling grandfather would be scandalized by my proud wine cellar. One wonders what he made of St. Paul advising Timothy to take wine with his meals for digestive health, not to mention Christ’s own vinification. (For me the revelation occurred fifteen years ago among my own generous parents and siblings over Christmas dinner, when I encountered my first real fine Bordeaux. “Oh, I’d never spend over $100 on a beverage,” I used to opine. “That’s immoral.” And then I had a sip of what violin music tastes like. So who am I to say how one should spend hard-earned money on a Friday evening’s entertainment? Live concerts for thee, a quartet of friends and magnum of Chateau Cantemerle—translation: blackbird song—for me.)
Meat figures into this evolving “traditional” Dutch American cuisine, in masses calculated to redress the deficits suffered from the Siege of Leiden up through the Great Depression. Gravy and other beige foods typify the color scheme. The post-war era saw us branching into “ethnic” preparations such as Franco-American™ spaghetti supplemented with ground beef and frozen corn, mixed. Our feast days tend to be an embarrassment of dishes, climaxing in heroic gut-busting spreads at Thanksgiving and Christmas, the consumption of which demonstrates the twin industrial virtues of volume and speed. Granted, things have gotten better over the last generation—we’ve all benefited from Julia Child dividing her domain among the Food Network, Netflix, and YouTube. But even now (with some notable exceptions such as tacos and barbeque), our quotidian fare fares worse. Interested in tidy yards, an unrelenting work ethic, and a deranged youth sports culture? We’ve got you covered. Interested in lunch? You get thirty minutes to microwave some dreary leftovers in plastic or to chomp down a crappy sandwich.
It all leaves the thoughtful eater longing for something more—an idea of food perhaps planted in one’s epochal memory. Like many Michiganders, I was once ten and enamored of firearms. I would leer at the guns featured in old JCPenney catalogs as though peeping at lads’ mags. At that bubbling pubescent age I had somehow sprouted the germ of a notion very deep in my psyche that we are supposed to harvest food from the land around us. In my mind’s eye I was already bearded, virile—the direct heir of Nimrod, the mighty hunter of Genesis, or of even more mystical prehistoric figures traversing bleak expanses in pursuit of exciting proteins like cave bear and giant ground sloth. I girded up my loins and asked my father if I could get into hunting. He replied, “We’re not really gun people.” Given his deep pescaphobia, fishing was also out of the question. Fine. I’d be a gatherer.
As it turns out, procuring food in contemporary America is easy: WalMart, Food Lion, Kroger, Hyvee, Rainbow, Giant, Safeway, H-E-B, Publix, Wegmans, and around my stomping grounds, Meijer. For the more moneyed demographic, Whole Foods. For red families, Sam’s Club. For purple-blue families, Costco. For podcast enthusiasts, Trader Joe’s. But like sphincters, our shopping carts all tend to be embarrassing upon examination, which reflects our uncomfortable relationship both with our bodies and with food. Despite the sustained evangelism of the “real food” movement, many (most?) Americans simply don’t have the energy to care about eating well every day, and this apathy inures us to mediocrity. To point, I suspect those of us who shop at Trader Joe’s are mainly looking for socially acceptable versions of hot pockets.
We’re all gullible to some degree, believing our shopping experiences to be worth the price of our dignity. How many thousands of us having herded ourselves, sheeplike, into those huge overstocked gray boxes on a Saturday morning simultaneously “discover” the same pre-packed “charcuterie” and “great-value” Cotes du Rhone? I’ve seen more compelling foodstuffs and wine shelves in any number of small-town French mini-marts, whose scale and style evoke far less of the abattoir. It isn’t all bad, though. The best sub-$20 bottle of wine I’ve had recently is a Vacqueras I found at my local grocer, a subsidiary of the formerly named—I’m not making this up—Spartan Foods Corporation. I bought a case, ignoring the stink eye from the gray-haired checkout clerk. Barring these rare and welcome God-winks, I’ll declare at my own peril that our typical grocery stores are serviceable at best, the cuboid cornucopia called Costco grows cliché, and even Trader Joe’s is overrated. Here I stand. I can do no other.
Do any of us labor under the illusion that American foodways have become remotely healthy? Despite our bizarre multibillion dollar “diet food” industry and paradoxical wastefulness, we still operate under a scarcity mindset, a mindset that requires thoughtfulness and experience to break free from, a mindset normalizing walk-in pantries, a mindset that occasionally whispers bring tupperware to the all-you-can-eat buffet. Many years ago I attended a conference in Houston with two physician friends. One day we broke away for lunch at a bottomless Korean barbeque. Three hours later the owner, visibly shaken, asked us to leave. Satisfied with our victory, we gazed at each other like gorged lions during the Great Wildebeest Migration.
The shame of it all is that while we’re digging our graves with our teeth, as Steven Maturin might point out, our everyday food options aren’t very interesting. Therefore, as the inimitable Jeeves informs me, it has long fallen to the French to refine our food culture. Food culture begins with compelling food—food not typically on hand in the American provinces but potentially available on the coasts. For many of us in the middle it means traveling at least to California or New York. But why not continue ad fontes? If our stone age predecessors could cross the tundra for mastodon, surely we could fly the family across the pond for a few necessaries.
It’s obvious from the first morning you land and haul yourself bleary-eyed into Paris. The day begins, sustains itself, and ends with bread. Some poor souls are truly diet restricted and, regrettably, they will have a hard time eating in France. France—a generous land, where bread baked fresh every morning is ubiquitous, even in the smallest hamlets. America, a land of narcissists, has produced a subspecies of activist devoted to community participation in their own personal scruples—who might conceivably relax when all edibles come labeled with an ethics lesson, nutrients like animal fat and wheat are designated “toxins” by the FDA, and humor is finally dead. A Calvinist upbringing confers robust immunity to certain external sources of guilt, and I will never give up bread, meat, and full butter unless someone can convince me that they jeopardize my spiritual health.
Given the available products, though, I shouldn’t judge too harshly. As a nation we’ve been sold out on bread and have become unwitting participants in the charade. Any half-stale baton of white bread presumes to call itself “French Bread,” or worse, a “Baguette.” Who cares if the crust seems as fake as tan-in-a-can painted onto a tight unyielding crumb? These loaves are intended to be re-armed as foil-wrapped soggy torpedoes of garlic bread for church potlucks. “Wow, this could feed an army!” we exclaim, forgetting that this materiel better resembles naval ordnance threatening to sink our gluten tolerance like the Lusitania.
Give us this day our daily bread, we pray, and we mean it—producing good bread takes dedication. The French have chosen to wake up and do it every day across their country, and it becomes evident that the foundation of their entire food culture rests on doing the basics, like bread, with excellence. Thanks to French law, baguettes may only comprise four fresh ingredients (flour, water, salt, and yeast—no prefabricated frozen dough) mixed, proofed, and baked on site the morning they are sold. And thanks to strict regulation they’re cheap, less than €1.50 apiece. Perhaps the best loaf I’ve ever eaten, a pain de campagne from Maison Lissajoux in Sarlat, sells for around €2.50. It all seems like an elaborate arrangement reflecting a half-truth, like our relatively low gasoline prices or the deeply held myth of rugged individualism. As in America, liberté hums along in the superficial conscience while an inscrutable matrix of incentives and regulation really runs the engine. Égalité might well translate to great food available to people at all financial levels, with fraternité meaning you will collectively subsidize it. From where I’m eating, these choices taste a lot better than a tank of premium unleaded.
Speaking of octane, I did not shop for coffee. Breakfast, like nearly everything edible, is more interesting over there, but it is usually washed down with a cup of bitter brown fluid that the French call café. Like many before me, I cannot fathom why the most formidable culinary culture in the universe won’t serve me a great cup of coffee. They seem to have willfully ignored the twenty-year-old memo on freshly roasted single-origin beans ground and steeped to order. Café is bad, and they compensate with pod-based instant espresso machines which look and sound cool, like the French. Appearances cover a multitude of sins, as they say. I’m sure there is a labyrinthine explanation for all of this that makes sense to the Gallic mind and which will remain an enigma to the American.
Is it the enigma that hooks us? We tend to be easily impressed with continental culture, its perceived sophistication. In our insecurity we assume their snobbery, and we meet it with inverse snobbery seasoned with ridicule. We often conflate French cuisine with haute cuisine. In reality, much of their food is simple but authentic and of high quality. The French, my wine merchant friend assures me, don’t fuss like we do over wine—rather, it is used. It’s a palate-cleanser, the beverage washing a meal down. Working to overcome my own prejudices, I’m willing to extend charity to a people who at some point were driven in extremis to eat snails (less rubbery than calamari, mild yet rich, with an occasional curious gritty crunch but otherwise inoffensive), and I’m willing to honor a people who elevate the stuff of deprivation to the stuff of legend. Obviously, the sheer gifts of their land outweigh any historical poverty, and for centuries now the French have excelled in their protean proteins.
On the way to our lunch joint-cum-meat run we stopped at Font de Gaume, one of the few publicly accessible sites displaying polychromatic paleolithic cave art. The guide whispered to us like a French Bob Ross and filtered a flashlight onto the cave wall through his trembling fingers to simulate a campfire. In measured tones he revealed (voila!) the ancient and evocative figures: les bisons, les rennes, les chevaux (bison, reindeer, horses). I thought, “Cool. A 20,000-year-old shopping list.”
Many animal products like sides of bison, raw oysters, or freshly sliced andouillette (very, very strong pork intestine sausage) don’t travel well, so we were mostly going for the canned, cured, and/or potted meats which are unique to the place, abundant, and flavorful. We proceeded to Le Bareil, a farm restaurant in the middle of the Perigord, where we enjoyed a simple two-hour country lunch (mild noodle broth, slabs of pork terrine, duck confit with pommes de terre sarladaise, duck with sauce aux cepes et chanterelles, wine, breads, tartes, cheeses with various confitures). We pulled back the veil on their workaday food culture. The half-drunk man behind me, a regular, sang a melancholy tune “Ah, Pierre…Pierre…” and the waiter said, “See you tomorrow.” A burly construction crew came in and laughed and lingered over their meal. An old man with a book took spoonfuls of soft creamy cheese with quince confiture and bread and he cut his vin de table with water. Throughout the service the waiter didn’t give deux merdes that we were American and made no attempt at English (my wife Sarah’s commendable French carried the day). We picked up a can of their pork terrine and jars of rillettes and jams (all locally made, about €15 total.) The waiter yawned as she rang us up. Was it snobbery, or was she just offering us her product without a shred of pretense?
This being the Perigord, we next drove to an artisanal foie gras farm. Back home, one or two colleagues disapproved when I told them we would do this, their objections based primarily on documentaries sponsored by PETA. We dismounted to investigate and walked from the gravel lot to an open grassy field. The geese resembled Michiganders emerging from the winter gavage, moving slowly, satisfied but somewhat melancholic, clearly unfit to fly south. I don’t particularly care for foie qua foie, and I’m not in a position to judge the welfare of those particular animals, but if we were on the same flight I’d want fitter seatmates.
We went to Cahors (town) to pick up some Cahors (wine). Our walk around town was pleasant, and we happily stumbled into an impromptu organ recital in the cathedral. After this we encountered one of the disadvantages of the typical two-to-three-hour French lunch break. Shops don’t reopen until two or two-thirty p.m., and sometimes not at all. I had cased one particular shop prior to travel, and I looked forward to securing a few key bottles for the cellar back home. The door was locked and the lights dark, but the sign read ouvert a 14h30. Based on my calculations, this meant it should be open at two-thirty. I checked my watch—two forty-five. So far so good. Sarah phoned the store and asked in her commendable French if we could shop today. The shopkeeper said no, they weren’t open today. One sign of zenlike maturity is to not even bother asking “why” in these situations. There is no “why,” because the French do or do not as they see fit. I might have said a swear word.
We went to Rocamadour (town) and to a nearby goat farm to pick up some Rocamadour (cheese). The clerk at the counter asked, “Would you like the creamy one? It’s much stronger…”
Oui, s’il vous plaît. Give us the strong creamy stuff. Someone once wrote that the West Michigan Dutch are good at two things: being boring and getting good deals on stuff. Therefore, I’m qualified to report that at €6.50 for six cheeses, Rocamadour represents the highest-yield flavor-to-price ratio of the trip. Like a pure spreadable ivory goo derived from goat barn floor, this cheese shouldn’t seem delicious, but something profound drives one back for more. Rocamadour does not belong in a suitcase, so we ate it up with bread and glasses of Monbazillac every night.
The Paris-bound train glides from verdant countryside straight through a grim ring of suburbs orbiting the city whose impeccable stone facades defy scrutiny. No country is an unspoiled epicurean garden. Behold the suburbs. Through the quick windows and down the alleys you glimpse decay, and only a fool finds the ugly romantic. Like a second son of a second son entering the third month of the Grand Tour, I start to remember duties back home and the thrill of the foreign abates. Having driven around France for a while, I’ve already noted (and once entered) their American-scale big box stores and hectares of parking lots. I’m morally certain that an average E.Leclerc (the French “hypermarket” chain) dwarfs any Walmart. After five minutes inside I had to leave—the cognitive dissonance of American excess en français threatened to trigger epilepsy. I guess the French vote with their feet just like Americans and appreciate having cubic miles of stuff available in one loud fluorescent hangar.
I have no right to begrudge the French for choosing these practicalities (suburbs, megastores), so why begrudge Americans? Is it because in our consumerism we’ve more fully sacrificed a spirit of curiosity to the god of comfort? I assume the byzantine French regulatory system facilitates a sort of negotiated ceasefire between the national chain and the local shop, between the new suburb and the old village. I wonder how deliberate and onerous the protections must be to preserve the traditional products. Will the French public eventually tire of it all in the usual American way and abandon independent and historical producers to fight a rearguard action for survival against the galactic corporate empire?
We were brought by car from Gare d’Austerlitz to our hotel strategically located near the Eiffel Tower and La Grande Epicerie on Rue de Passy—perhaps the most beautiful grocery store I’ve ever seen. On the way our sophisticated Parisian driver cut around an indecisive Audi, whose driver then tailed us and honked for a solid minute until the next stop. We then witnessed what would become for us a touchstone—a breathtaking performance of French indignation. The driver leapt out in the rain, stormed bodily up to our driver, opened his door and savaged him, “How dare you????” “Madame, je…” he replied, but he was instantly buried under her avalanche of profanity. When she relented and thundered back to her car he apologized to us. Sarah grinned. “C’est okay!” I replied, thinking, “Someone should advise her not to do that if she visits Chicago.”
Our last day we shopped for gifts at La Grande Epicerie—grand cru honey, chocolates, macarons… We strolled along the shops on Rue de l’Annonciation, cafés, a creperie, a fromagerie, a boucherie selling tripe, past a particular corner housing the elegant meringue shop Aux Merveilleux de Fred. The window display worked. I stopped, and a local who inexplicably pegged me as an American sincerely recommended I try one as my last taste of France. An American woman happened to be standing halfway in the door, weighing the options, unable to commit, so I did what any sophisticated Parisian would do. I cut around her. An unseen elderly Parisienne immediately rolled in on my right flank and headed me off, scolding me, “Mais monsieur! La femme était devant vous…” I raised my hands and surrendered, making my clumsy obedience, “Je suis désolé, madame! Je ne…uh…Désolé!” Chastened, I received my meringues—perfect little mounds, sweet and light, like echoes of bread, as if I were eating a dearly bought transmutation of grace.
We packed all our carry-ons and the wine suitcase with Tetris-like efficiency, padding our breakable jars in clean socks. All was undone at airport security. Yes, rillettes are a fatty pastelike substance but still considered a solid. Chief among these perversions of air travel is my own uncharitable view of other travelers, which when coupled with economy seating tends toward the demonic. In this case, Sarah and I had a row of three seats to ourselves. The window seat remained gratefully open until the last possible moment, apparently after the cabin door was shut, when the final passenger waddled down the aisle toward us. We stood and removed ourselves to make way. Our new neighbor apologized, inhaled, squeezed into the window seat, requested a seatbelt extender, and then expanded, warm bulk spilling over the armrest a little into Sarah’s lap.
Nine hours later the plane had completed its loud taxi and disgorged us into O’Hare. Chicago grease differs categorically from French grease, and so I followed the lead of famed Michigander, writer, and gourmand Jim Harrison, and set about re-establishing my native gut microbiome with a jumbo Chicago-style hot dog. The kids opted for McDonald’s and were universally underwhelmed by the gray meatlike discs and limp fries (“I wish we could have a baguette and some saucisson!” God bless ‘em.)
Two days after our return I yielded to the pornographic urge to look if my groceries were buyable online. Within ten minutes I had found a way to order and ship much of what we lovingly bought and lugged back—jars of rillettes de canard, pate de terrine de porc, saucisse hache porc, huile de noix, gateau au noix, noix au chocolat, the flights of various honeys, other assorted treats… My thesis seems to fall apart. Why go through the expense and hassle of shopping in person when everything is available in half a dozen clicks? I don’t know. It feels good when you can remember a person and place while using a product. Maybe such convenience finalizes the drawn-out divorce between buyer and maker. Too much convenience also seems unhealthy. The key to the so-called French Paradox is obvious to anyone staying on floor two or above in a traditional Paris hotel (steep stair climbing required) or even shopping for daily supplies. I’ve seen many French pensioners lug forty-pound grocery trolleys over the rain-glazed pavements on foot. If my health app is to be believed, I averaged 13,500 steps, 5.5 miles, and 30 floors every day over the course of our food tour. Ultimately, though, I suppose any effort to go somewhere for something different is an effort to live more fully.
But I’ve had enough for now. I imagine that some wizened New Yorker stepping out from her local boulangerie would have thrown her arms up at this point, exclaiming, “You can’t argue taste!” were it not for the $8 authentic baguettes tucked under them. I agree. Aesthetics, like college sports or poetry, are best left to the professionals. Yet I’m left with the nagging Puritan urge to bind the loose strands of longing and satisfaction, of privilege and access, into a square moral. In this quiet falling action I recall several friends laboring among the world’s poorest, and I try to sate my conscience—we’re seeking the genuine, we’re improving our citizenship, we’re cultivating humility… Like my impatient attempts at photography, like our short-term travel, in fact like any of our most committed acts of connoisseurship, a moral fails to deliver its own sense of completion and smells like another device for self-justification, the odor of its inadequacy nearly masked by the aroma of religiosity. Some of us are just willing to go to great lengths to secure the perfect memory of a perfection we’ve been clamoring for since Eden. And despite our current overabundance—or maybe because of it—good food remains a prime mover in these efforts, a reason to travel, and nourishment for the journey home.
