Spraying shit on the town hall has to be the best performative protest against bureaucratic bullshit ever conceived. The French farmers are in round 3 against the government of Gabriel Atal and the bright young thing PM is scrambling to defuse the situation ahead of Macron, never a popular figure in the countryside, making his cow-admiring, cheese tasting appearance at the annual Agricultural Salon in Paris this weekend. France loves a good protest and also love their farmers. The food and wine of France are at the heart of its self-image of being paradise on earth, the very essence of the good life. They parade their local produce as part of the ‘patrimoine’ and have been fierce in the protection of the various ‘pays’ and ‘produits’. There are 114 different protected types of agricultural produce under the AOP scheme in France, plus 363 registered protected wine designations. The obvious problem is that all of the protections mean nothing if the supermarkets are doing their best to drive price down and the incredible concentration of their purchasing power – the top 6 supermarkets are French owned and have revenues of €180 billion. Milk is bought at a marginal price that keeps farmer’s in penury and forced to use whatever production enhancers they can to keep alive, regardless of the long term damage to the cows. Several publicized suicides of farmers has reinforced the public support for the farmers and even with their protests blocking roads with what the Spanish are calling ‘tractorados’, as the protests spread to Spain, Czechia and Greece against what are seen as overly bureaucratic and complicated oversight and rules emanating from Brussels.
What is putting a hair up the ass of the farmers is that these rules which are costly and frustrating do not apply elsewhere. So the target for their ire is the import of foods from outside of EU, milk from New Zealand seems a ridiculous example yet finds its way into European dairy products. French farmers did an inspired version of a trolley run this week by going into French major supermarkets, loading up in front of the cameras with products either masquerading as ‘French’ produce, or imported where the local version cannot be made for similar pricing; walking through the doors, without paying, and then donating it to the food banks that are a part of everyday life for many people in the rural farming dominant communities.
Attal and other officials were supposedly surprised by “the scale and fury of the protests” . I was impressed. We had tractors ambling along the major freeways in and out of Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux and most major cities, 3 abreast, at 5km an hour. Dumping of manure, hay bales and that staple of farm equipment, the old car tire, outside local offices of the government that are involved in any way with administering the EU’s farm policy. There is a speed camera on the way to Macon in a rural part of the department, and it often gets spray-painted but it got tired two weeks ago, and they have either not bothered to remove them or they keep them topped up. Surveys in France showed 90% plus support for the farmers, after all in principle they only want French produce as it’s the best and anything that threatens that gets an easy thumbs down.
In a familiar routine now this has been going on now for 4 weeks, protests, disruption, and widespread support, Attal and other ministers urgently travel hither and nither meeting with the local Farmer’s Union guys. Every time one is interviewed on TV we get yet another example of regional dialects living on, I can barely understand them and I think the urbane Gabriel struggles too. Having survived his brush with the blue-overalled ‘Bobs’ with tractors and wellies, he dashes back to Paris and prepares another round of concessions. One early give was the repeal of the 16, yes 16, different regimes involved with preserving and controlling hedgerows. This week brought increased checks on food producers claiming their products are made in France and heightened legal action taken against those that did not conform. Attal promised there would be “product by product” checks on foods produced outside the EU containing pesticides banned across the continent to ensure they were stopped. Which is all well and good, but you cannot help but wonder why did it take 4 weeks of mass protest to get that to happen? The original protests were about the byzantine pension rules for Farmers and the pending removal of the agricultural fuel subsidiaries. Those got rolled back, but the issue is less about which little ‘give’ the government acquiesces to next but the ongoing fight underneath across the European Union.
We have an existential threat to European peace and harmony sitting in his bunker under Moscow at the end of a 30’ long table, probably at this very moment lecturing some poor lackey on the history of the Kievan Rus, or at least his own personal take on it. His Ukraine adventure cranked up energy prices to the point that inflation took off. Everyone got squeezed. Everyone was supposed to make sacrifices, but it seems the large corporations, especially the supermarkets, didn’t get that memo. While they record soaring profits, paying dividends and obscene bonuses to each other for ‘job well done’ the farmers and the ordinary person struggles with higher costs for fuel, food and rent. At the same time we have very lofty and admirable goals to right the years of ecological wrongs with rules to reduce loss of hedgerows, biodiversity, over dependence on monocultures and overuse of pesticides. However, no-one wants to price that in and so as the pithy adage goes, the shit flows downhill and the farmer is supposed to deal with the consequences, but the supermarkets can still make their profits and the ordinary person does not want to pay €0.20 more for a liter of milk or butter to keep the farmer from bankruptcy or in extremis, suicide. So yes, I guess I understand why they are spraying shit at government offices.
Lyon this week has been mild again and although the schools are off for ski week the only snow is at high elevations and the smaller, low level elevation places in the Jura and the Alps Maritime are fields of unwelcoming brown rather than glistening pristine white snow. It is the snow season so the restaurants and media are talking up the winter dishes like Choux Croute, Fondu, Tartiflette and other various holy alliances of cheese, pork and potatoes.
Saturday was St Modeste’s feast day but again no special dish in his honor. St Modeste is, it transpires, one of those fortunate chaps who was considered a generally good sort as Bishop of Trier and was rewarded with sainthood for being a best in class confessor. So he actually died in his bed in 489, no miracles, visions of the bleeding pumping heart or public beheading following several days torture for him. He got the honor as more of a local nomination process that people put forward their local martyrs and their very best confessors. After being canonized locally, all it took was some local big wig to persuade the Pope to support it, perhaps while on pilgrimage to Rome, or Avignon. Having a local saint was always good for tourism and trade with people coming to see whatever relics remained at the patron church, so the big-wig would return happy, some fiscal lubrication of the process may have been necessary, but it seemed to work for these what are called Pre-Congregational Saints. All good things come to an end, and Rome and the Pope stopped the local ‘Vote for your local Saint’ efforts in the 11th century. By that point I think they were afraid the title of Saint was being devalued as there were mushrooming cases of miracles, no shortage of martyrs and by that time there were confessors nearly everywhere. So St. Modeste is really an old style saint, and in full Lent no real feasting to be had anyway.
Friday night we went to “Le Cochon Qui Boit” tucked away in the narrow streets between the hillside below Croix-Rousse, ‘Les Pentes’ and the Saone. The Drinking Pig is a bright small space in a typical Lyonnais Canut-style building run by two guys who trained at Tetedoie, the expensive Mich one star up on the hill of Fourviere. The food was very veggie led, a fabulous Jerusalem Artichoke bisque as an amuse-bouche signalled their intent. The wines are all natural as is the trend now. Natural wines all have labels that are bright-colored, and the names pun their way to taking what was traditionally very cheap wine from non-fashionable appellations into something cool and sells at 3 times the price of their traditional neighbors. The first white I tried was a Gros Plant Nantais which was crisp with a hint of the fruit from the Melon de Bourgogne grape it was partly blended from. More succesful than the Jura white that followed, a grassy yellow Chardonnay which only just made it on to the side of pleasurable. The Carignan from Languedoc was lighter than I expected but a great compliment to the Pigeonneau fermier de Bresse, petit épeautre et blettes. Filleted breast of roast pigeon, served with spelt, chard and a cabbage parcel stuffed with all the inside bits of the bird made into a deep red rich sausage. The dessert was insanely good. Describing it as butternut squash three ways does it a disservice, one caramelized round of roast squash sat in a nutty foam and was topped with a quenelle of butternut ice-cream wrapped in a stripe of chestnut puree. I always feel a bit uneasy taking pictures of plates as it is so clichéd, but here is the pigeon dish. In conclusion, this particular pig was well-fed and did his best to join in the drinking.
Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy 