Insert Cliché Farewell Title Here

As the semester comes to a close, I have to wrap things up. All in all, blogging has been an interesting experience. I used to associate blogs with bookish cat ladies who like to post their thoughts for the world to see, but in fact never get read by anyone. I, myself, am a girl who likes books and has a cat, so I suppose I fall quite well into this category. Still, my esteem for blogs is something much higher than it was starting this. I've even become a follower of multiple blogs.

I started off with an aim to post about things relevant to France as well as vegetarianism-related things. I think I stayed in this realm pretty well, and I hope I've offered my readers a glimpse into an emerging cultural dynamic.

For one last fun vegetarian French trivia, I present you with this article: Let Them Eat Kale: Vegetarians and the French Revolution. Apparently, one of the ideas circulating during the revolution was that not only people, but also animals had to be liberated, and so being vegetarian was a way to protest the monarchy. The article quotes Jean-Jaques Rousseau in his treatise on education:

"The indifference of children towards meat is one proof that the taste for meat is unnatural; their preference is for vegetable foods, such as milk, pastry, fruit, etc. Beware of changing this natural taste and making children flesh-eaters, if not for their health's sake, for the sake of their character." 

This is quite a change in tone from most French people today, although Jean-Jaques Rousseau is popularly quoted. To tourists visiting France, vegetarianism may seem hopeless what with eating meat being almost synonymous with patriotism. This information, however, provides an insight into the culture's philosophical awareness and malleability, and their potential to at least be a bit less hostile to vegetarians.

With this knowledge imparted, I leave you. If you wish to find me, I can be seen munching on baguette at French club or biking with a beret. Or perhaps something less cliché such as squinting at a physics worksheet in the lounge.

Au revoir!

Vive La Bicyclette

My bike gives wheels to my soul. Riding it is not something that involves any thinking- I just go with it; my bike and I are one. Especially considering that I only ever bike within a ten mile radius of my home, so I know every road by heart and don't ever think much about where I am going. I pick a place, or perhaps there's a specific place I have to go, and then I'm off! No map necessary. But I usually spend most of my quality bike time riding to and from school.

So you can imagine my distress at the increasingly cold weather we've been having. The bitterly chilly wind pushes against me and my strenuous efforts to pedal prove close to futile. The icy air seeps under my scarf and freezes my throat. The blood in my gloved fingers practically freezes as my paralyzed-with-cold fingers awkwardly grip the handlebars.

That toasty warm car sure looks good at 7:30 in the morning. And if I were just to take my mother up on her offer...


Mais non! I actually despise cars. Our car culture is part of what makes Americans so isolated. We pass mostly people on the street while in the shelter of our cars, whereas if we were walking or biking, we would all be having more direct and meaningful interactions. The French pedestrian/biking culture is what provides such a vivacious café culture. I love walking around Paris or Cannes and passing all the bicyclists with a fresh baguette from the bakery under one arm or a library book in their front basket. We see little snippets of peoples' lives which we wouldn't get if we were all cooped up in our cars. We don't all live within comfortable biking distance of our schools or workplaces, but there are usually grocery stores or libraries near by. Making the extra effort to bike when possible makes all the difference.


I also just love the opportunity biking gives me to be outside in nature, breathing the fresh air and zipping beneath the tree branches laced under the sky. In addition, there's the fact that driving provides no health benefits, whereas biking fits in a glorious twenty minutes of my day in which I am actively moving (even if I am painfully struggling against cruel winter winds). And the most obvious: cars are gas hogs which pollute the environment!

I'm resolute in my decision to resist taking the car in the morning. If more people made the effort to bike when possible, we could significantly reduce our carbon footprints.

A Frightening Secret That the French Know About American Food

One lethal substance, four simple words: high fructose corn syrup. You see it on the ingredients of almost every food you purchase, be it savory or sweet. It’s hard to avoid at your average grocery store unless you stick to the organic aisle. The dangers of consuming this appear endless. It’s been linked to type-2 diabetes and America’s obesity epidemic.

OK, Americans are used to hearing this kind of stuff about sugar, etc. It’s easy to turn a blind eye. But it gets worse. The manufacturers of corn syrup put in lethal toxins. Like this stuff which kills living cells in order to sterilize water treatment systems. It’s called glutaraldehyde. Studies show that this toxin can burn a hole in your stomach. Something else you’ll be coming into contact with? Mercury. Do I even need to explain how bad that is?

It’s pretty scary that this is in almost all our food, let alone legal at all. But whatever. We should be focusing on supporting the corn industry, right, folks?

We don’t need corn syrup, and outside of the U.S, its consumption is very limited. Maybe because other countries aren’t so sheltered from the truth. Searching for honest information on corn syrup in American media can be pretty difficult with the corn industry’s influence. When I googled “Is corn syrup bad for you?” I came up with a frightening number of websites defending it. The most disturbing was www.sweetsuprise.com, which affiliates itself with the Corn Refiners Association. It claims that all the research on the dangers of corn syrup is phony on its page, “Myths v. Facts.”

But when I googled the same question (in French) with the settings on Google switched to French results, I came up with tons of images like the above as well as many disturbing articles.

These lab rats were fed high fructose corn syrup. Monsanto performed the same experiment except they cleverly stopped after about a year. “Look, it’s fine!” they could claim. French researchers continued the experiment, and in just two years, huge tumors began to grow, weighing up to a quarter of their weight. This diet also shortened the life spans of the males by twenty months, and the females by three months. That’s pretty bad for an animal with average life span of two to three years.

Well, Monsanto sure didn’t want the results of that little experiment to seep into American media, and as far as I can tell, it really hasn’t.

For comparison, the average American is estimated to consume about 132 calories of high fructose corn syrup daily. Yikes! In half a lifetime, we could end up like this.

 

Weenies Are For Meanies

 

One of the most popular everyday foods in France is sausage, or saucisse. A whole meal can consist of five different types of sausages, grilled to crispy blackness. There's a famous pork festival in the West of France I used to go to in which piles of sausage are displayed and sold cheaply by the link. I liked it because of the cute little t-shirts they sold featuring fat, friendly-faced pigs, but I never enjoyed the taste of the sausage. I hated the way juice would burst into my mouth when when my teeth would break the skin. The juice reminded me of blood and sweat.

I've read that when animals are slaughtered, they produce stress and fear hormones which are passed onto humans when we eat them, leading many meat-eaters to feel more depressed than vegetarians. I don't know what it is about sausage, maybe that juiciness, but for me, the taste always seemed particularly charged with death.

I'm probably getting way too into vegetarian-fundamentalist mode for most people, especially because most people are meat-eaters and don't really want to think about this kind of stuff. For that, I apologize. But still, sausage really does creep me out. Especially because I thought I was done with that kind of stuff, and then guess what my mom brings me home for dinner?

THIS:

Yeah. I was scared, too! That picture is life-size, so don't be alarmed by the fact that it pops out of the page. And it's supposed to be wheat gluten, but I think they went a little too far with their imitation of meat. I mean, I get that they use all the spices, and the texture, but look at that liquid in on the left side of the plastic. Is that blood? It looks like blood. I don't know why they had to recreate fake blood. That just seems ridiculous. People who want blood can go eat a real sausage.

Okay, it's probably just some sauce or something. But still. Vegetarians are sensitive to this kind of thing. I don't think they should put weird liquid in the plastic.

The Inconvenient Truth About Brigitte Bardot

This entry is a bit painful because I am renouncing Brigitte Bardot as my blogger profile picture. A movie star, singer, and model made famous as an iconic French beauty, she retired before her 39th birthday and used her fame to promote animal rights. She quickly became vegetarian and campaigned in France to have people stop eating horse meat, one of those unique foods the French are very protective of.

She sounds so perfect, right? A French icon using her prestige to encourage vegetarianism? It appeared to be an example of the fusion of French culture and vegetarianism that this blog is supposed to focus on. She was going to be my role model, my Virgil, my mentor-- but then my dad warned me of her notorious reputation in France. Dismayed by his disapproval of her, I looked into her life story a bit more.

The information I came up with is rather bizarre. For one thing, I could see that she has very strong opinions about almost everything, and sometimes she seems, quite frankly, bubble-headed. For example, referring to Muslim immigration in France, she wrote "Over the last twenty years, we have given in to a subterranean, dangerous, and uncontrolled infiltration, which not only resists adjusting to our laws and customs but which will, as the years pass, attempt to impose its own." The French court charged her with inciting racial hatred to which she responded by saying "I never meant to hurt anybody. It's not in my nature."

Reading further,  I also discovered that she has spoken disdainfully of homosexuals and called them "circus freaks" on more than one occasion, though in response to criticism, she said that she has many gay close friends to whom she meant no offense. I'm mystified by how she could be so insensitive with regards to both Muslims and homosexuals, and then proceed to claim she hadn't meant any offense.

I don't want to associate myself with a bumbling homophobic racist, and her affiliation with vegetarianism likely has the opposite effect than what I initially hoped for. As a public figure in France symbolizing xenophobia, her interest in animal rights probably only makes vegetarianism appear even more alien to the French.

Alas, I cannot count Brigitte Bardot my ally although her work for animal rights and vegetarianism in France is impressive. I've yet to find my French vegetarian muse.

Excusez-moi, but...I'm Vegetarian

The main component of French cuisine is meat. It probably has one of the most diverse varieties of meats to choose from, some of the more notorious foods including escargot (snails) and frog legs. Other disturbing choices are raw cow brain, goat heads, and the liver of a fattened goose. Not only do the French eat these foods, but they flaunt their culinary peculiarity with pride, and lace it into their cultural identity. I am a French girl, and I grew up eating these foods. When asked by American friends how I could stand these monstrosities, I often replied with, "It tastes like chicken." Now really, none of it actually tastes like chicken, but this is just a clever explanation someone invented a long time ago in order to justify the consumption of bizarre animals. Truth be told, I did enjoy eating pâté and moules frites, and not only did I revel in the rich gourmandise of it all, but I took delight, as do all the French, in seeing the shock it induced in foreigners' expressions.

Yet today I am not this girl.

When I first told my French side of the family that I had decided to become vegetarian, I was met with laughter and then disdain. First, they couldn't quite grasp the concept. I could still eat pork, right? And well after I thought they finally understood, they gave me shrimp and shellfish a few times. They told me that being vegetarian was mal vu, "badly viewed." They told me that I would grow frail and die young. They told me it was “un-French.”  They couldn't change my opinion, though, because with each criticism I could only think of the costs of eating meat- the mistreatment of animals, wasted lives, appreciation for the soul, etc.

Looking back, I, myself, can't fathom how my opinion of meat changed so drastically at the young age of eleven. The only explanation I can summon is that I was always inclined to be vegetarian, but because of outside influences, I never thought of it as an option. I loved animals my whole life, and from the age of seven, I had a pet care business. When I heard about animal abuse and poaching, I was shocked and alarmed. Something about this transformation was making me somewhat separate from my family. I was learning to forge my own path with my own beliefs. When I started to develop my own opinions and ideas, I realized that I couldn't bear the thought of consuming a living animal which had been murdered for me.

French vegetarians are rare. I didn’t even think it was really possible. I can only pass off as completely French in France until meal time, at which point I am met by suspicious glares and prodding questions where I must quickly reveal that I am also American, and influenced by a multiplicity of cultures I’ve been immersed in overseas.

The French (or should I say we French?) are very protective of their/our nationality, and are often unwilling to believe that people with strange opinions and differences can be truly French. However, when I was in Paris this summer, my family and I went to a snazzy vegetarian French restaurant, and many of the traditional French recipes were offered with a vegetarian twist. I also saw several vegetarian restaurants and grocery stores in the West and South of France.

The general focus of this blog will be to introduce to the world the fusion of vegetarianism and French culture, as well as other quirky things that vegetarians as a group are generally drawn to (e.g. yoga, meditation, organic food, etc.).

À plus tard!