Surprisingly, though, it is quite easy to get served, even in this chaos. You just have to be assertive à la parisienne.** At fruit or vegetable stalls, you fill a plastic bag with cherries, bananas or tomatoes and then hold out the bag at the end of your arm, waving it under the seller’s nose. Eventually, he will weigh it and ask for the money. Fish, cheese and chicken sellers have more organized queues, while smaller stalls may have no one waiting.
The fringe of the market is fascinating, too. There are always some semi-legal stalls selling books, socks, flowers and more herbs, and the street is lined with the traders’ vans, all of them covered in graffiti. The clever traders get a tagger to paint every square centimetre of their van, so at least it looks tidier than the ones that are spider’s-webbed with scrawly, illegible signatures and arrondissement numbers.
By 2 p.m., the market is winding down but the activity is still frenetic—now, green-suited cleaners are spraying the ground, shovelling cardboard boxes into a giant crusher and stacking wooden crates for collection. Poor people will be picking through the mounds of discarded food for fishtails, chicken feet, bruised pears, snapped and browned celery, or a tray of strawberries already turning into Roquefort.
For six or seven hours, twice a week, it is pure Ventre de Paris, just as Zola described it. And the best thing, surely, is that on market days, the streets of this poor neighbourhood are invaded by an army of people pulling home their shopping trolleys, crammed with fresh fish and seasonal fruit and veg. It’s easy to imagine the scene in their households on market day—a bored teenager gets up from the couch, wanders into the kitchen and rummages through the food cupboards.
‘Mum,’ he or she moans, ‘why haven’t we got any Pringles?’
To which the mother replies, ‘Shut up and eat an orange.’
No wonder they stay slim.
‘Bacteria aren’t dangerous’
It can be unnerving to watch all the food-fondling that goes on at a market, even more so to walk past a closed restaurant early in the morning and see boxes of lettuces, sacks of potatoes and trays of tomatoes sitting on the doorstep, left there by a delivery man who couldn’t wait for the restaurateur to turn up. Surely, you think, the veg is going to need an extra scrub to make sure it is free of all the dirt that can come its way while it is lying in such a vulnerable place? And even then, would it really be a good idea to eat it?
To get an official view of the dangers of contamination from passing dogs, rats and inconsiderate humans, I went to visit Professor Gilles Brücker, just before he retired from his post as director of the Institut de Veille Sanitaire, France’s health-monitoring institute. His role, he told me, was to tell the government how dangerous a particular flu virus might be, or outline the measures necessary to combat an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease, and keep tabs on the general state of the nation’s health. A very healthy-looking doctor, he seemed totally at ease with the state of Parisian hygiene. As soon as I began to question Paris’s hands-on relationship with food, he flew to its defence.
‘You’ve got to get out of this phobia about touching food,’ he said. ‘People say that everything we touch is contaminated, and that everything that is contaminated is dangerous, but it’s just not true.’
I had always thought that ‘contaminated’ was a slightly negative quality in food, but apparently not. Surely, I asked, he wasn’t suggesting that bugs like e-coli and salmonella might be good for the human body?
‘Of course not,’ he said, ‘but they are extreme cases. There are plenty of other types of bacteria that are not dangerous.’
‘So it’s OK to touch food and pass on bacteria that we might have on our fingers?’
‘In some cases, yes. Cohabiting with bacteria is absolutely indispensable. The diversity of life is a fundamental part of our survival.’
I tried to explain my own reservations about the diversity of life that might end up on a baguette after it had been fondled by a boulangère who just touched a coin that someone had picked up out of the gutter. He conceded that this might not always be very hygienic, but was scornful of the idea that it was always dangerous.
‘In many cases,’ he said, ‘touching a baguette like that would just be a perfectly acceptable exchange of everyday bacteria.’
So it’s official. The body needs bacteria to survive, and Paris is a good place to come and stock up after living far too long in a sterile, plastic-bag and rubber-glove environment.
Little did I know that I was destined to put this theory to the test.
Give us this day our daily baguette
The baguette is far more than a vector for germ exchanges. It is also the most sensual, and most publicly fondled, Parisian food. An obvious phallic symbol, surely it can be no coincidence that the word is just one letter away from braguette, the flies on a pair of trousers.
‘Just going to buy some nice pigs’ feet for dinner.’ This photo was taken outside a Parisian charcuterie back in 1970, but today only the headscarf would be different.
The baguette is also a good indicator of a restaurant or café’s quality of food.*** If they serve up baskets of fresh baguette with the meals, it’s an excellent sign—it means they probably use the nearest boulangerie, and go to fetch fresh bread whenever they run out. Personally, I snub restaurants that use mini-baguette rolls, which are almost certainly bought in bulk and always seem to be undercooked. They’re often stingily served, too, and you’re lucky if you get a refill after your first ration of one roll per diner. No, the best eating places bring a basket of freshly sliced baguette to your table when your food is served, and will refill it on demand, or even
