Home » France » Consciously Consumed

I walk the streets of the city. I’m traveling, yet I’m stationed within a foreign land, one I’ve become accustomed to for the last three months. Above me, in usual winter fashion, the sky is gray, dark with threatening rain. But the people are out, for it’s after noon as the weekend begins. Here, after the social nights of Friday, the parisien rises to find a bistrot among family and friends. Stomachs rumble with the digest of the previous evening’s soirée.

Consciously Consumed

Camron Karsten
2007-04-27 22:14:47

Displayed times (last time: )

I walk the streets of the city. I’m traveling, yet I’m stationed within a foreign land, one I’ve become accustomed to for the last three months. Above me, in usual winter fashion, the sky is gray, dark with threatening rain. But the people are out, for it’s after noon as the weekend begins. Here, after the social nights of Friday, the parisien rises to find a bistrot among family and friends. Stomachs rumble with the digest of the previous evening’s soirée.

As I take my wandering path through Paris, I stare through the plumes of condensation ascending from my mouth into the domains of the café, brasserie and restaurant. Platters of food arrive: steaks & frites, an arrangement of greens topped with baked chevre, and a terrace of steamed clams and mussels falling into a buttered sauce. Indeed, I must admit, my stomach joins the choir, moaning as I catch scents through the wafting doorways.

I turn off the main boulevard and down a calm back street. I’m on my way to my own market, one found as a center of representation of the home I know while traveling, for as a vegetarian on the road, my needs can often be demanding.

Yes, I’m a vegetarian—a vegetarian while traveling, a strict vegan at home—and that’s where I’m headed: a market I’ve discovered, a place I can call a home-away-from-home.

Far From Wal-Mart

Paris is a meat-feasting city—all of France is—not to say the rest of the world is any different. The French love their food, especially flesh, but slowly, rising in different quartiers across the city like a revival of the arts, the “biologique” producers are opening their doors.

This was my home, one of them. Beyond more restaurants, passed the ethnic shops of couscous and kebabs, I take another road, where on the corner of a side street I step inside and enter my destination.

La Vie Claire and its homely shop, tucked with the whole goods of any village baker. ...