(Le Marche des Lices, Rennes, France)
From my extremely comfortable bed in the surprisingly
well-appointed-for-the-price Hotel Mercure in
Rennes, I heard the bells of a nearby church ring. It would have been easy to stay there
for another couple of hours in that delightful state of cozy semi-consciousness. But the lure of a
market proved too much. Despite jet lag still
weighing me down, everything I had read kept nagging at me that I just had to get up and get the tired self over to the Marche
des Lices. The market is said to host some 300 products from all over Brittany. Rennes is the capital of Bretagne, or
Brittany en anglais, and this, the Marche des Lices, is the second largest
market in all of France. How could I
lounge in bed when the second largest market in all of France was but a 12-minute walk away....
I couldn't, and I didn't. I got up and got over there.
It did not disappoint.
The first assault on the senses was all saliva-inducing savory stuff: sausage and chicken dripping with butter and fat. Waffles, or gauffres, steaming hot just off the waffle iron.
The next assault is a visual one. A mass of people. Organized. Focused. Intent on the food, comparing the food. This mass of people was organized in that there were vague yet well-defined lines moving slowly, deliberately. And most had shopping baskets--real baskets, the woven kind, not the kind made of metal with 4 wheels and a coffee cup holder and a hook for the purse--winding up and down and up and down the many aisles of produce piled high and stretching, at some point, literally as far as the eye could see.
I have pictures of vegetable and fruit stands and fish markets and oyster stands from all over France dating back to my high school trips.
And there have been others like me, though not so much here at the Marche des Lices which is very not tourist-y at all despite its gorgeousness, but in other market strolls, who are snapping pictures just as insanely as I am. And of nothing but giant piles of radishes, romaine, cabbages and garlic.
Why do we do this?
I have an inkling why I do it. We eat with our eyes so the pleasure of seeing the earth's voluptuous bounty piled riotously high has to be part of the visceral joy of eating ... Whole Foods Market gets this. Their produce displays evoke this - even under artifical light - where we can indulge in a little fantasy life of market shopping in a charming old-school back-to-the-earth way.
"Flowers, as everyone knows, are among the freshest, most perishable
objects on earth. Which is why fresh flowers are placed right up
front--to "prime" us to think of freshness the moment we enter the
store. Consider the opposite--what if we entered the store and were
greeted with stacks of canned tuna and plastic flowers? Having been
primed at the outset, we continue to carry that association, albeit
subconsciously, with us as we shop.
The prices for the flowers, as for all the fresh fruits and
vegetables, are scrawled in chalk on fragments of black slate--a
tradition of outdoor European marketplaces. It's as if the farmer pulled
up in front of Whole Foods just this morning, unloaded his produce,
then hopped back in his flatbed truck to drive back upstate to his
country farm. The dashed-off scrawl also suggests the price changes
daily, just as it might at a roadside farm stand or local market. But in
fact, most of the produce was flown in days ago, its price set at the
Whole Foods corporate headquarters in Texas. Not only do the prices stay
fixed, but what might look like chalk on the board is actually indelible; the signs have been mass-produced in a factory."
Of course I realize, somewhere at some level, that there is a well-studied marketing scheme all behind this, playing to my senses, as the author of this
article quote above notes. The author wrote this while taking in one particularly bucolic
faux market setting: the Whole Foods store in Columbus Circle in NYC. I get it. I'm being played. But I go along, enjoying the fantasy, because I want to. We just can't all be in France at the Marche des Lices all the time after all.
But here at the Marche des Lices, there there is another big difference from the pretend market experience (aside from this being the real thing). In Rennes, the Market is set up nicely to be a spectator sport as well. Cafes are strategically placed up on the higher elevation of this Place. I thought hard about sitting and watching. Drinking a double espresso at 10h with that Market stretched out before me was tempting. But how much better to just be in it. Not just watching it.
And so it was that I said no to the cafe and yes to getting really into the Market.
Ducking into the larget metal and glass structure - an halle - full of still more foodstuffs: the local honey, breads, confits, salts and herbs and spices, charcuterie...I dived into the laughter and the chatter of these happy smiling vendors, who let me sample and compare, for example, the difference between honey made from spring flowers versus summer flowers, and let me eavesdrop for a long stretch an extremely long-winded conversation about goat milk yogurt.
I only recently unpacked my suitcase.
I think a certain government agency that will remain unnamed (but who left a little love note in my luggage about their gentle search of my bag) may have lost an item or two I had in the suitcase while handling it....but at least I still have my goodies from the Marche des Lices in Rennes: salt, spices ... and honey made from springtime flowers.
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