French changing their ways – at last
VISIBILITY was down to a few yards as I wandered into the barn where Vincent and Francois were weighing onions into sacks.
“Bit foggy,” I remarked somewhat unnecessarily.
“Just heat haze” said Vincent as he tipped in another 10 kilos, tied the neck and added the sack to the growing pile.
Well obviously. That was why the houses on the far side of the bay had disappeared from view and why the heat haze horn was sounding so mournfully out in the bay every 20 seconds or so.
But that’s the problem with Bretons: they will never accept that their weather is as bad as other people think. Even when it is. My attempt to challenge his version of events was interrupted, though, as another car scrunched into the yard and the driver got out to be welcomed by the excited yapping of Lily and Rosie and made his way into the barn to start negotiating for a large vegetable order.
Like hundreds of other French farmers, Vincent and his two sons have realised – like many here before them – that direct selling is the future and have adopted the new way of doing things with enthusiasm.
Under normal circumstances it’s easier to turn a supertanker than get a French farmer to alter his modus operandi which is the same one that his grandfather and his father followed to run the business. Tradition, custom and ritual have been the foundations on which thousands of family farms have been based unquestioningly while innovation and modernisation have been subjects to be talked about scornfully rather than considered seriously.
(Sometimes modernisation has had unexpected results: in the ’30s a Breton farmers’ collective decided finally to move with the times and invest in its first tractor. It duly arrived from Paris on a railway truck at which point it was realised no one had a clue how to drive it. It had to be hitched up to a horse and towed away.)
But attitudes are starting to change. It’s taken time but the French farmers have finally realised that the supermarkets are never going to pay them enough to turn a decent profit and provide for muchneeded investment (the latest calculation suggested something like 15 billion euros was needed to replace the sector’s creaking machinery and equipment and modernise outmoded buildings) and that demonstrations, blockades and civil disobedience were not bringing about any improvements but were threatening to lose them the support of the strike-wearied French consumer.
So they have decided finally to embrace a new way of doing things, including direct selling. And Vincent and Francois are among hundreds who have discovered that it can be not merely a lucrative but enjoyable – given the face-to-face contact with the shoppers – departure from the old ways.
Meanwhile, as on this side of the Channel, consumers made wary by a succession of food scares and keen to buy local and traceable have welcomed the chance to talk to the people who actually grow the food they eat – as well as the obvious savings they can make.
Without the middle men taking their various cuts the prized Roscoff onions Vincent and his sons grow are returning him far better profits. They cost the consumer just one euro a kilo in the barn, a remarkable bargain considering they are so heavy on labour; in accordance with strict EU production rules they have to be both planted and harvested by hand. Fields of them. Half a mile away the supermarket is charging three and a half times that for an artfully strung kilo. In Paris – where eating five helpings of fruit and veg a day is now becoming almost prohibitively expensive – the price is seven euros the kilo.
“We had some Parisians in last week and they couldn’t believe what we were charging,” said Vincent.
“They loaded their car to the roof; they were almost stuffing them into their pockets and their socks.”
Not that an upsurge in direct selling is the only evidence that French farmers have finally concluded that it’s time to start innovating and experimenting. Now that the gilets jaunes movement – which turned Paris and other cities into no-go zones for tourists every weekend with protests against fuel taxes which were impacting unfairly on rural areas – has clearly run out of steam, taking with it any hope of a massive injection of state cash for the farming sector, farmers are instead scanning the horizon for opportunities. And discovering them.
Often the sort offered by climate change. Vines are being planted in the chalky cider country of Normandy (spurred in part, probably, by the success of the expanding English wine industry) so that the days when any wine produced north of the mouth of the Loire was only fit for use as battery acid are clearly numbered.
In Brittany the success of tea plantations in Cornwall has inspired a similar development, though with a twist: the leaves aren’t merely being picked for tea but for use as a salad ingredient. And while France has for generations had access to homegrown rice produced down in the Camargue, the first paddy fields are now being laid out in Brittany, too.
Yet not all food producers are so upbeat as Vincent. Foie gras producers, based mainly in the south-west, are ruefully contemplating unsold stocks which are proving impossible to shift.
The industry had only just got back to something like full production after the devastating slaughter programme necessitated by avian flu three years ago. But then lockdown led to an equally devastating slump in demand from hotels and restaurants. And although the hospitality industry is slowly getting back on its feet and the clients are returning, sales are still lagging well behind production.
A few years ago the answer would have been simple: a massive discounting operation to take advantage of the traditional upsurge in demand in midwinter when foie gras is an almost essential ingredient for every household’s Christmas and New Year feasting.
But it’s no longer that easy. Among the new laws introduced soon after President Macron arrived was one designed to protect producer prices by placing severe constraints on discounting and special offers by supermarkets, so selling at giveaway prices to get rid of surplus stocks is no longer an option. Added to that of course, the continuing pandemic is further restricting the amount of home entertaining (and foie gras consumption) the French are undertaking.
The log-jam is feeding back up the system with talk already of specialist avian abattoirs having to close and jobs being lost. Which will no doubt be greeted with joy by the animal rights’ movement for which foie gras is the favourite whipping boy.
Producers are attempting to counter the negative publicity they regularly receive by staging open days on their farms and inviting consumers in so they can get a more accurate idea of how the production process operates than that luridly portrayed in anti-foie gras propaganda.
The chief controversy surrounds the process of ‘gavage’ – the forcefeeding of the birds which replicates their natural habit of gorging themselves to build up fat and therefore energy stores ahead of long migratory flights.
Having toured a foie gras farm and watched the process I have no hesitation in saying that I can eat foie gras with a clear conscience on those few occasions when it appears affordably on the menu in a French restaurant. The birds line up placidly for their extra rations and the feeding takes five seconds. Do the maths. Five seconds three times a day for three weeks. A total of just over five minutes.
How, precisely, does that compare with the weeks of confinement suffered by indoor-reared supermarket chickens, particularly those – as the latest shocking revelations have demonstrated – too weak to stand and left lying in filthy conditions in rearing units in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire?