Skip to main content

I Dropped the Ball on this one but I hope my Consolation Prize is Pleasing

Guys, I apologize, I really dropped the ball on this first one. I didn't get the chance to go to a farmer's market this weekend and totally forgot about doing it for the rest of the week. This one is on me 100%. Not a good way to start out a blog or the semester really. But, in the spirit of improvisation that has guided me for my four years here at ASU, I have a little trick up my sleeve that I hope will suffice. 

In the summer of 2015 I was lucky enough to study abroad in Paris for a month for a class titled "Food and Culture in France." Yeah, I know, what a rigorous and grueling subject for a study abroad class. In between my leisurely strolls around the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral hearing impromptu performances from jazz quartets, craft ice cream in hand, the class took us on excursions to various food related venues. The most striking of these for me was the trip to the Rungis International Market. The Rungis Market is the largest wholesale food market in the world selling everything from entire cows to fresh flowers. 

My experience at the Rungis Market started at 4 AM with a lengthy bus ride out of Paris into the Rungis suburb. We had to get to the market in the early morning because that is when most of the goods are bought and sold so that they may be turned into fine Parisian dining later that night. Getting around the market is disorienting. There are hawkers left and right, forklifts carrying pallets of fruit whizzing past you and restaurant managers rushing around to get their day’s ingredients.


The market itself is divided up into many different sections, cheese, seafood, meat, flowers, and produce to just name a few. My most striking experience at the market was walking around a warehouse of seemingly endless cheese wheels each the size of a tire. Pallet after pallet of cheese was right in front of me, just waiting to be a member of the finest charcuterie board the world has ever seen. The combination of my early morning daze and the harsh yet elegant halogen lights overhead left me dumbfounded and awe inspired amidst 1000s of pieces of cheese.

Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 22, 2018 at 2:33 PM

    I can see you have a lot of potential to do a good job of this, you don't write badly, and you did connect some details with the text. However, because the experience isn't fresh in your mind, the whole piece is stale, like a week-old baguette. Do you want to make it up?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Early Morning Pizza at the Airport

People seem different when they’re at the airport. I’m not quite sure if I can say it’s a good different or a bad different, they’re just… different. Different in a way that makes them eat pizza and drink a glass of wine at 10:00AM. Different enough to fall asleep in public and not have any cares about people looking on. Different enough to yell right through complete strangers’ ears to get the attention of their children running amok around baggage claim. Yes, the airport, more than any other public space, changes people’s behavior to be different from the norm. I think that the strange behavior of people at the airport can be attributed to the liminal nature of the airport. Business women drinking champagne at 9:45AM and construction workers eating burgers in the next restaurant over both find themselves outside of their day to day routine. This departure from their norms accompanied with the stress of being on time for a flight seems to create some sort of confusion in which ...
1 comment
Read more

Down the Street and to the Dam

I take my first step out of my house and suddenly I’m brought back to my infancy. I see my father waiting for me, arms outstretched, as I waddle toward him taking the very first steps of my life. The vision fades and I lock my front door and venture off my doorstep and onto the sidewalk. In the 21 years that I have been walking, I have become somewhat of an aficionado at putting one foot in front of the other. I do exactly this as I continue down my street. Cars whizz past me as I approach Hardy and Rio Salado. Usually, I’m on my bike and can keep pace with the strangers who have chosen to forego their bipedalism in favor of more rapid transportation. But today I trudge along as a mere pedestrian, the lowest man on the totem pole of transportation. I give the cross walk button one hard push and then a few more for good measure. Cars continue to be flung down the street in the chaos that is five o’clock rush hour. The light turns yellow and then red and I make all...
1 comment
Read more