Food Inc

For the first time since I started my year as a nanny, while the kids were at school, I turned on the TV. Since then I've had two hours every Tuesday and Thursday which besides a few household chores, I've used to read. Today though, I turned on the tube and tuned into Oprah. I watch her interview Jay Leno whom did not garner any sympathy from me, and then a show about food. Since leaving the states I have given up being a pescatarian for the most part. It was too hard in Chile, where meat isn't so much a staple as there just isn't that much to work with- for variety and because Sylvain's diet was so heavily rooted in meat, it didn't take long for me to cave. In Paris- I believe the culinary goldmine here is just too rich to waste, bring on the pate.

Still a french/Smithie friend of mine and I were riding the metro back from the Shakespeare event and she mentioned that she too was thinking about returning to Chicago- except for the food issue. I was already aware of Abigail's involvement with a farm co-op where she got weekly deliveries of seasonal fruit and veg and how important this food lifestyle was for her. Moreover I had gotten used to paying more for my food here, but something weird happened here, I lost weight. I don't eat less, and my only exercise is our fifth floor walk-up and Saturday swimming- far different from the regular exercise I got in the states. I could be wrong, but I believe that even though I'm eating my way through France, the lack of hormones and antibiotics in the meat here has made a huge difference in my health.

French supermarkets don't often shelve produce, it's there of course, but no one buys it, they get their produce from the weekly farmers markets, and their meat often comes from the butcher. Here you can choose from a much wider variety of meat cuts, but you also have options that Americans just don't have- for one, anti-biotics and hormones are illegal. To some extent factory farming must exist but you can easily buy bio- the French word for organic.

What Abigail said didn't mean much on the train, but as soon as I started watching Oprah, it clicked- I can't buy meat that is hormone and antibiotic free with the same ease and assurance I can here, moreover, lets face it, American's supermarkets stock off season everything, they don't in France. So when you see melon, or berries, you know they are going to be delicious. I am a food lover, but I am not a gardener (yet!) I have no idea when certain things become seasonal except root vegetables (thanks to Thanksgiving) and having grown up in Wisconsin, I know when corn is ready.

This is a pretty big deal for me, I don't eat food with preservatives and I don't have any problem with beefing up my food allowance to make sure I'm getting clean and natural food, without hormones, without antibiotics, without anything messing with it, no thanks, I like my food normal size (you don't realize how obese our produce is until you live in a country where it isn't) and without genetic modification. So as much as the next step of the journey seems to include the US of A, I wonder whether my brief dalliance in meat eating is about to be a memory. I've lived on the coast for so long, I can hardly remember what a drag it is not to have 'fresh" things, fish and fruit de mers will be the hardest to endure, but I know midwest eating lacks the diversity offered elsewhere. Hopefully though, an oven is in the future...