Perspective

civilised hours. The market is the size of Monaco, with two train stations, so you need to be on a bus tour to get around it all in one morning. The tour starts at the fish market where the snapping claws of lobsters and grinning catfish should wake you up. You’ll need to be fairly alert to stomach the meat section where butchers wield huge knives as they chop up whole animals – this is France, nothing is omitted. The delicatessen, where you can see wholesale caviar and champagne being shipped out comes as a bit of a relief before you are back in the olfactory overload of a never-ending cheese cellar.

But it is the fruit and vegetable pavilion that takes your breath away. The smell moves from mint and thyme to pineapples, strawberries and of course mountains of fresh garlic. There is a rainbow of colour, even beetroots and radishes come in four or five different colours, rather than the dull monochrome we are used to in the supermarket.

Luckily the bistros all use Rungis to source fresh ingredients. Mathieu Cacos of Le Bichat in the 18th arrondissement serves “Buddha bowls” of raw vegetables with rice and your choice of protein from sustainable fish, high welfare meat or vegan. The most popular is vegan.

“We are not purists,” he says. ‘It’s up to the customer to choose but we want to give them good choices that do not harm the environment.

“Our grandparents all had a sense of

Clockwise from main, a man arranges cheeses at Rungis Market; Le Bichat’s colourful ‘Buddha bowls’; cooked meats hang at Rungis Market

where their food comes from and we just want to bring that back.”

The French have always had this attitude, they invented the word ‘terroir’ to describe how a sense of place gives a food taste through its climate, its soil and even its human culture. So in a way, the modern fashion for asking where food is from is just a return to traditional French cooking – and of course in Paris they do it the best. n