Paid Like Serfs but Eat Like Kings: Days 3 & 4

Day 3

Up at 8am. Same deal for breakfast and we were back out in the fields, so to speak, this time planting corn and green beans. Either Cyril or Dominique will explain the task to us, very patiently and then go off to continue whatever it was they were working on. When we’re finished we come find them and they give us the next task. By the end of 2 rows and 150+ green beans my knees and back were feeling the burn a bit. Domi had told me they eat meat every day at lunch and today I was not disappointed: merguez sausages (lamb) with velvety chickpeas. Rabbit was one thing, as it kind of resembles chicked, being white meat and all, but meat pieces in a casing, that was upping the ante. I loved merguez when I ate them 2 years ago in Rennes, and lo and behold, I still did. The chickpeas, that were soaked the night before, were so creamy and flavorful in their simple tomato and onion chutney. For dessert we had a mousse au chocolat that Cyril had whipped up (pun intended). Delish.

Apparently this mid-day siesta thing is habitual, even if the sun wasn’t beating down, which I was fine with. That afternoon we worked in the greenhouse planting tiny dirt clots of salad, repotting, and generally shuffling around various squash and seedlings with Domi. It was a nice change of pace and scenery after a day and a half of planting. We finished around 7pm and hung out knitting and reading a bit. That evening Lauren and I took a ride with Domi to pick up a sculpture she’d had fired in a kiln about 40 minutes away. The 3 of us chatted the whole way there and back and she is just so cool. We talked men, sex, and life in general. 

She explained how she and Cyril met at a fair, get this, on the bumper cars, when they were in their early 20's, and have been together ever since. Before farming they owned a pizzeria for 13 years that they bought on money borrowed from friends. When they sold the business they went to Nepal and spent a month there together, then used the money to buy the piece of land they're on today. When they first started out, Domi explained, though they had done a ton of reading on maraichage, when it came to actually getting their hands dirty (soo punny today!), they had no idea what they were doing. Apparently the first year the only thing they succeeded un growing were zucchinis. They didn't have the tractor they have today but a single horse. 

When we got back at 9pm Cyril had made an amazing seafood spinach curry with rice noodles that we finished with the mousse. This working for food/shelter thing suits me just fine. When and why did life ever get more complicated than this again?? The dinner conversation turned toward food, as it often does here in the country of gastronomy, and Dominique made the profound observation about how farmers are paid like serfs but eat like kings. So true.

Day 4

Woke up a little later today, at 8:30, as tomorrow we’ll be getting up at 5:30 to go to market with Domi. Standard breakfast of coffee, bread and jam. We were up in the greenhouse again all morning until lunch preparing lettuce seedlings for planting and also to sell at the market. To do this we trimmed the outer leaves and cut the 3” sprouts down to about 2”, and then cut away the excess dirt from their little plot. After that we all killed some time before lunch as Cyril hadn’t put lunch in the pressure cooker early enough. This gave me some time to contemplate what I was potentially about to ingest: beef. Now, given that the past 3 days I’ve conquered both rabbit and lamb, it might seep a little silly that I was stressing about a little slow-cooked beef, but I was. Cows are just so…BIG, and somehow in my mind beef was the point of no return, after this my status of vegetarian would be null and void. As I was pondering this milestone time passed and I was also growing hunguer, so by the time the food was on the table, I was more of less ready to dig in, whether I was mentally prepared or not. It was a kind of goulash with steamed potatoes. As everything else I had eaten there thus far, it was really yummy, however not my favorite meal. We finished with cherries that I had picked from a tree along the drive and some grapefruit. After the siesta Lauren and I finished with the lettuce in the greenhouse for the rest of the afternoon. That evening I retried the elusive loop with Tita and succeeded. After I showered at around 8:30 we began loading the truck for the market the next morning, which turned out to be a much larger job than I had anticipated.  It’s like a giant game of Jenga. We stacked upwards of 100 crates of lettuce peas, artichokes, apple juice, and, the majority of the cargo which was tomato, squash plants which require a lot more care and precision to load without causing damage. Plus there’s the tables, umbrella, signs, baskets, tablecloths, scale, etc, etc.

The hours ticked by and soon it was 11pm before we were finally sitting around the dinner table for a meal of leftovers that were no less delicious than the first time around: chick peas, pate, sausage, and 5 different kinds of goat cheeses of varying ages. Plus salad and fried duck eggs that were the most rich and flavorful yolks I’d ever tasted. We finished with strawberries that were left on their vines. They were tiny and tasted like no other strawberry I had ever had, literally like candied berries.

Domi and Cyril’s energy is astounding, they just don’t stop. Crate after crate they loaded, bending down, stooping to sling it up on to the truck. Long days that’s for sure.