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A Tale of Two French Markets: Narbonne vs Perpignan
Want to find the soul of a city? Go where the food is.
Everyone knows the heart of any French town is its market.
For a nation with a relationship with food that borders on the obsessive, it’s not surprising. Food in France is not fuel. It’s history, culture, a connection with the steaming kitchens of mothers and grandmothers stretching back into the lionized peasant past.
And it starts with the market.
My ancestors did this, in an entirely different country. Yours did too. For thousands of years, we’ve been doing this, getting together to find food, to swap stories, to laugh and argue and pass the time, half-giddy with the abundance of aromas and colours around us.
The promise of continued life that gleams from the surface of every swelling vegetable, that oozes as myoglobin out of every cut of meat.
We won’t live forever. But this will. In the irradiated post-apocalyptic future, our appendix-and-wisdom-toothless descendants will step past rotted billboards of God-Emperor Musk III to trade shells or peculiarly-shaped rocks for the precious vegetables of a nuclear winter.
