Goats, Sheep, Pigs, Cows, Vanilla Milk, and Jacques Chirac

France is, in essence, an agricultural society. Never has this been more clear to me than today, when I witnessed thousands of French people of all ages and walks of life romping amongst sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and horses, all while snacking on more varieties of cheese and charcuterie than one country should ever be allowed to lay claim to.
The International Salon of Agriculture seems to be THE hit attraction in Paris this week. I swear that half the Paris metropolitan area was there today - a Tuesday, I'll have you. It was an absolute mad scene by eleven o'clock. I even ran into Jacques Chirac, making his annual appearance (we crossed paths in the apple dégustation area, and I had to suffer through an extremely localized throng of reporters with dangerously swinging microphone boom poles)(He goes every year - and, according to my roommates, is known for patting the cows on the ass).


The salon takes up five buildings of Porte de Versailles exhibition park (to put this in perspective, the endless salon de chocolat reported in an October blog post took up only one such building). Two giant exhibition spaces are dedicated to food products, another to horses, another to livestock, another to gardening and vegetable lines... egad.
The highlights: vanilla flavored whole milk for 20 centimes, the endearing Angora goats, apple-filled boudin, Corsican jambon, fresh coconut sorbet, and the twenty-something French guys getting hammered on rum punch at two in the afternoon in the outre-mer section. I brought home Tahitian vanilla extract, mirabelle plums in eau-de-vie, fantastic pain d'epice, some unidentifiable cow's cheese, martinique bananas, a packet of milk from the salon cows, a mohair scarf, organic eggs, Ile-de-réunion cumin, and some booklets of recipes for lamb and horse meat.


The cultural shock was this: in America, we are generally uncomfortable with the fact that our meat comes from animals - from living beings that are mammals and have hair and fours limbs and give birth to live young (just like us!). We tend to hide the association between livestock and dinner; in France, this very connection is celebrated. Children happily interact with aisles of penned cows, feeding them straw or petting with clenched fist to avoid bitten fingers - and then cross the hall to a cooking "workshop" where they grill strips of raw beef on a special child-size cooktop. They didn't seem to be experiencing any cognitive dissonance, but I personally found it hard to stomach the thought of meat while facing the candid regards of so many fine bovine.