Walnuts and Meat

Yesterday was our first serious day of picking up walnuts and it heralds the start of six weeks of mentally bonding with my migrant farm worker brethren around the world as I literally feel their pain.

My husband and son set up the “nut factory” in the barn. After we gather the nuts they have to be washed and dried and then sorted through our small assembly line.

The chickens gave me two eggs yesterday. I’m really surprised by their fecundity since a neighbor told me that as the days get shorter, the hens slow down their production. We need to put a light up in their coop to stimulate their egg producing. But so far, they’re doing great without any artificial aids.

In the afternoon, I made vegetable soup. Spinach is now available. Unlike the U.S., the vegetables are only seasonally available here. At first I found that very frustrating. I couldn’t eat what I wanted when I wanted it; but now I don’t mind, and I find that the seasonality adds excitement to my cooking. Can’t tell you how surprised and pleased I was to finally find spinach in the market! So tonight at dinner we’re having spinach in the soup and in the pasta.

I try to buy my produce either at the open market or from one of two vegetable/fruit vendors in our village.

In France, the vendor is required to display the place of origin of the produce. So it’s very easy to buy locally and support your local farmers.

Montana tried to get a similar law passed this year, but it failed in the legislature. Seems like an innocent enough law that would help the bottom line of the Montana producer, but wealthier outside interests must have prevailed.

Yesterday at the supermarche (it was the only game in town as the shops are closed on Mondays here) I noticed that they had green table grapes on special from Italy! Here we are in the middle of grape country, table and wine, and they’re selling white grapes from Italy at 1.50 a kilo . . . no wonder the banker was warning me about going into the vineyard business. I won't be surprised to hear that Jose Bovè is in our village dismantling the supermarche.

My son and I went into town yesterday because my son wasn’t happy that I was making only vegetable soup for dinner. He wanted something more substantial. So we paid a visit to our local foie gras fabricant.

I served the foie gras cold on a plate with three little piles of coarse sea salt, freshly ground pepper, and fruit jam; accompanied by a small glass of Sauterne. A local restaurant serves it in this manner with some spiced cake bread. Foie gras really is a wonderful treat and it’s too bad it’s outlawed in California.

In my opinion, the production of foie gras is more humane than the factory production of pigs and chickens in the U.S. Here in France, the foie gras farms and factories are open to visitors. In the U.S., the meat factories are closed to visitors. So can you guess which systems are more humane to the animals?

Really, if Americans truly cared about the well-being of the animals they eat, they would boycott the monopolistic meat packers and the chicken factories, and insist that their supermarkets and butchers buy their meat from small family farms, where the animals roam freely and are well cared for.

I haven’t met a livestock producer, in the U.S. or here in France, who didn’t emotionally relate to his animals and care about the conditions in which they were being raised.

Here in our village, the award-winning butcher has a chalk board hung outside his shop that lists the name of the producers of the meat he has for sale that day. That’s how intimate the relationship is here between producer and customer.