“Sacrilege is rarely so tempting”, salivates the journalist, in a report proposed by the BBC. The object of the crime sits on the stall of a bakery: a croissant… without butter. In this Parisian shop, the pastries, quiches and pastries are made without eggs or dairy products. In France, what an affront!
Rodolphe Landemaine, owner of the bakery in question, is vegan, sensitive to climate issues and animal rights. However, he never pronounces the term “vegan”, notes the British media. Would the word be taboo? “It’s very complicated [pour les Français] to give up butter and eggs”, explains the craftsman. But less and less, we must believe, because his concept is attractive: he already has five bakeries in Paris and hopes to open more in Bordeaux, Lyon and Rennes.
Vegan cuisine is slowly developing in France compared to other countries, comments the BBC. The country, she titles, “digests poorly” these “vegan croissants”. Symbolically, this touches on profound issues: the visceral relationship of the French with the terroir and their gastronomy, the “outcry over certain environmental measures” and the “farmer protests intensifying across Europe”.
For the French food industry, explains the BBC, doing without dairy products is difficult to imagine. Question of corporatism and tradition, but not only that.
A “little revolution”
Because this is where the real subject of the article comes into play: near Amiens, the BBC meets Sophie Lenaerts, a dairy cow breeder whose farm supplies a butter factory (we’re coming back to the famous croissants!). A few weeks before the European elections, she plans to go to Brussels to block the roads near the EU institutions. She denounces competition from imported products – cheaper but which do not meet standards –, the suffocating margins of mass distribution and the fact that “farmers are too often the scapegoats for all climate-related problems”.
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