French Food in Decline?

Mike Steinberger at Slate is busy hyping his book on how the vaunted French cuisine is all shot to hell.

Maybe; he's a lot better informed than I. But we spent a week in Paris last month and I'd have to say that the food at the street market in the Rue Mouffetard was just as breathtaking as I remember it from my first taste of it 33 years ago. We also scored several bottles of perfectly acceptable French wine from the little wine shop just across the street (on the uphill side)--$20 range stuff, not necessarily breathtakingly better than what we've drunk elsewhere, but awfully good, and enough to make us happy to be where we were.

We also tossed down one highly agreeable lunch at Itineraires, which seems to have survived a gushy review by the late Johnny Apple persist in the production of convincing bistro food.

All of which brings me back here to Palookaville and a familiar whine. That is: California's fresh fruit and veggies--those comestibles for which we are supposed to be famous--simply are not as good as they should be. I guess Alice Waters can continue to get her famous designer arugula (although I haven't actually set foot in the place for years). But the everyday stuff--forget about Safeway, I'm talkin' farmers' market--always leaves me dreaming of life and meals on the Other Side. Not universal, of course: there is one seller of greens right here in Palookaville whose stuff is in a classs by itself. He gets all feral when you try to interrogate him about his secret, so maybe there is a secret (nightsoil?). Meanwhile, I suspect that too many guys are dug into the American tradition of big, fat, juicy and waterlogged.

This is not quite Europe snobbery, even though it may come close. The best sweet pepper I ever had in my life came from an Amish market outside Columbia, Maryland. You could get wonderful beef, back when I ate beef, in anonymous county-seat steak houses in the farm belt of Southern Ohio. Come to think of it, the best wheat bread I ever tasted came from the kitchen of Mrs. B's friend Carol back in Peoria, Illinois; I think she cracked her own wheat. But if I had to settle on just one provider, I think I'd have it airlifted in from the Rue Mouffetard.