‘Defend the product!’ How the French keep their artisan food culture alive
It’s a Saturday morning in October and Rouen’s Fête du Ventre – the festival of the tummy – is in full swing. The main street, Rue Jeanne d’Arc, is lined with food stalls where red-aproned cheesemongers are proffering cubes of neufchâtel and camembert cheeses, and cloth-capped charcutiers are pulling great cords of black pudding on to their weighing scales. The aroma of grilled scallops, sizzling burgers and pongy fromage fills the air. Around the corner in the Place du Vieux Marché, a samba band is warming up to march through the streets in celebration of this annual food festival, which this year marked its 25th anniversary.
In 2021, Rouen was declared a City of Gastronomy by Unesco in recognition of its commitment to sustainable development, organic agriculture and high-quality food. It’s a badge the city wears with pride, especially this weekend. Market stalls’ awnings and banners are emblazoned with logos and slogans that show how their foods are organic, produced locally and recognised by the government body that protects their geographic origin.
The event is a feast of the senses, and one of many showcases for how deeply the French treasure their gastronomie, despite the ever-encroaching power of global agribusiness and multinational food companies. With myriad systems that ensure that flavours, products, crafts and jobs are protected, there is much that other Europeans can learn about how communities across France celebrate and protect their rich gastronomic culture, from local cooperatives and long-running food festivals to kookier traditions such as the confréries (brotherhoods), a system of guilds in which uniformed, medal-wearing veterans conjure attention-grabbing dishes such as a giant omelette for 2,000 people.
Here in Normandy, cheese is one of the most prized products. “It’s important to defend the terroir,” says cheesemonger Daniel Bourgeois in Rouen’s modernist market hall in Place du Vieux Marché. “The symbol of Normandy is really the cow; it’s not the goat as you find in Poitou-Charentes. It’s the same in Auxerrois or Tarn – all those are goat regions,” he says gesturing towards the small white cheeses on his counter.
For producers in France, the concept of terroir is key; the term – there is no direct equivalent in English – is more commonly associated with wine and refers to the specific combination of conditions in which a product grows, an alchemy of topography, geography, soil type and climate. When I was researching my book Amuse Bouche: How to Eat Your Way Around France, I explored the origins of hundreds of products that were dependent on a particular terroir for their existence, be it cheese, butter, vegetables, fruit, nuts, poultry or livestock. For every region I spoke to farmers, producers, market stall holders, chefs, cooks and bakers who were all fiercely proud of the terroir and what it meant for the local community – from putting good food on their plates to providing varied and fulfilling jobs.
Among those preserving Normandy’s food heritage is Pascal Grosdoit, president of the association La Normande à la Table des Chefs, which protects the interests of those involved in rearing La Normande, a local breed of cow that provides milk for cheeses and is reared for beef. “These days, we must ensure we have food autonomy; to be able to provide good food and not just any food,” Grosdoit says. “So we must look after the treatment of the soil, the quality of the grass, we are obliged to protect farmers’ incomes. We need a whole series of actions to achieve a virtuous model of agriculture and rearing of livestock, one that continues the region’s heritage. We have five departments in Normandy, and each has its own unique character.”
When it comes to supplying beef to consumers, the association prefers to reach them via butchers, caterers and restaurants, rather than supermarkets. “In France, we have a large catering sector, so at lunchtime we tend to eat out, whereas in Anglo-Saxon countries, like the UK or the US, there’s more a culture of packed lunches, or takeaway food. In Rouen, we have restaurants.”
One of Grosdoit’s key concerns is ensuring the region’s agricultural sector maintains its workforce in order to maintain food security. “We are living in a period when children don’t necessarily want to take over their families’ farms. The reality is that we lose between 15% and 20% of farmers per year and, with global economic instabilities, if we are not careful we may encounter – and quite quickly, within four years – problems around accessing food that is created in good conditions.”
A strong system of cooperatives exists throughout France that serves to protect farmers and food producers from unfair pricing and conditions imposed by large distribution networks, such as supermarkets. In the department of Aveyron in the 1960s, for example, the Jeunes Montagnes cooperative saved Laguiole cheese from extinction and put the dish aligot (a gloriously stringy cheesy mashed potato) back on menus throughout the country. On the island of Noirmoutier, off France’s west coast, the potato farmers’ cooperative was hugely successful in marketing its delicious new-season potatoes in the 1990s, so much so that growers of jersey royal potatoes came to learn from them.
“The cooperatives and their farmers can effectively create brands and develop commercial concepts,” says Grosdoit. “Ultimately, it is also a good form of economic model: the value still partly returns to the producers.”
Related: Mange tout: 10 of the best food festivals in France
Many of France’s cooperatives are centred on a product that is protected by the appellation d’origine controlée (AOC) designation (many also hold the appellation d’origine protégée, AOP, awarded by the EU). Holding an AOC means that a product has been grown or created in a specific geographical area, where the terroir is key to its flavour. The government body responsible for awarding the AOC (and other protective labels such as the IGP, indication géographique protégée) is the Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité (Inao). Its director is Carole Ly, who tells me there are some 1,200 protected French products, including wine, cheese, meat, fruit and vegetables and even a specific kind of hay that is grown on Crau plain in the Bouches-du-Rhône department (it is not intended for human consumption but many Michelin-starred chefs use it in cooking).
“This policy was put in place in the 1930s, after many kinds of fake wine were being produced in the 1910s,” says Ly, referring to the way bottles would be sold as Châteauneuf-du-Pape, for example, when the grapes within were grown elsewhere. Location of origin isn’t the only criterion: in order to gain protected AOC designation, the producers must also adhere to rules relating to production methods.
As we chat, Ly’s colleague Raphael Bitton, Inao’s communication manager, adds, “It’s important to note that the AOC or AOP isn’t a ‘brand’. It’s a name that doesn’t belong to anyone but is shared by the producers.” Which means established producers cannot prevent anyone else from using the label, so long as they fulfil all the relevant criteria.
In France, approximately one farm in three produces at least one of these AOC-designated products, says Ly. Importantly, the system also helps members of rural communities to stay working on the land. “If the farmers did not have such recognition of these products, which are often sold at a higher price point, they would not have been able to compete against more productive areas. And we have consumers who know how to recognise these regional products, which form part of the French culinary heritage,” she says.
Though there are thousands of producers who work within their AOC’s criteria, there are others who want to work outside them – either because they believe the rules hamper innovation or are too strict or arbitrary, or because they want to distinguish themselves from the mass-production methods by which some AOP-listed products are made (by a large cooperative, say, or a multinational corporation). On Rouen’s Rue Jeanne d’Arc, for example, I meet Bruno Lefebvre, a cheese producer who has decided not to be part of the AOP for neufchâtel, one of Normandy’s four AOP-listed cheeses. Yet his heart-shaped, white bloom-rind coeur de normande looks identical.
“I think the AOP for neufchâtel has lost something,” he says, pointing out that 70% of this cheese is made by the Groupe Lactalis, a French multinational. “My cheese represents a family-run farm and tradition. All our cheeses are made by hand, with 100% milk from La Normande – others are only 60 to 80%.
“We spent 20 years making neufchâtel but we reached a point [in 2019] where we didn’t have large enough pastures right next to the farm; our pastures are a little further away. So, short of killing my neighbours to enlarge my farm,” he laughs, “there was nothing I could do but leave the AOP. We sell through the markets and people are starting to recognise coeur de normande, and so we’re getting a bit of notoriety. I have the freedom to make my cheese and my brand.”
As well as official channels that classify and protect foods, there exist throughout France more informal networks, such as the confréries. They generally consist of members of the community working in some way with the product in question – farmers, restaurateurs or simply those who are passionate about protecting its heritage. There are thought to be some 1,500 across France, representing products – such as cheese, particular vegetables, kinds of poultry and livestock – and dishes such as cassoulet in Castelnaudary.
Though their elaborate velvet cloaks, auspicious medals and ornamental hats give the impression that they date from the middle ages, most confréries were formed the mid- to late 20th century. For many, they serve as an activity to take up in retirement: I once spent a very happy afternoon learning how to make a true tarte tatin from the elderly members of its brotherhood in Lamotte-Beuvron, near Orléans.
Hosting festivals and attending others’ events is a key activity for many brotherhoods, and they often celebrate their products with conspicuous enthusiasm. At the Fête de la Dinde in Licques, near Calais, they march a flock of turkeys up the main street of the village each December. Every Easter Monday, the town of Bessières, near Toulouse, hosts the Festival of the Giant Omelette. Here, the brotherhood (and their willing helpers), dressed in chef’s whites with accents of yellow, crack 15,000 eggs into a four-metre (13ft) frying pan and stir them up with oars, before serving up to 5,000 festival-goers a plate of omelette (more like scrambled eggs) and bread. It’s a celebration of community and their network of other “giant omelette brotherhoods” from around the world (there are seven – it is like a twinning association, just with eggs).
Most such food festivals also include a parade of producers and brotherhoods, but sadly for this year’s Fête du Ventre in Rouen there is only one representative present, from the Confrérie des Goustiers du Pressoir de la Vallée de l’Yeres – loosely, the brotherhood of appreciative tasters of the apple press in the Yeres Valley – whom I recognise from his bright green apple medal.
Monsieur Picard is the grand master of the brotherhood and tells me, as we follow the marching samba band through the city’s cobbled streets, what being in a brotherhood involves. “Each chapter or brotherhood will invite others to be initiated into theirs, and we attend others’ festivals. Tomorrow, I’m going to the Fête [du Cidre] in Forges; next week, I’m going to Cambrai for the Brotherhood of the Andouillette [sausage]. I do about 15 events a year.”
Picard doesn’t work directly with apples (his father-in-law had an orchard) and he is a man of few words, but his mission is clear: “To defend the product. Quite simply, to defend the product.”
• Carolyn Boyd is the author of Amuse Bouche: How to Eat Your Way Around France (Profile Books)
