The Lardon Conundrum

For almost 15 years, we’ve known this woman who lived near us when we had our house in the Corrèze. She used to run a goat farm and we bought our cheese from her. Now she works as a therapist with people who are, for one reason or another, emotional or mental wrecks. She speaks softly and smiles warmly and I guess she’s thought of in these parts as somewhat alternative.

She and some of her ‘alternative’ friends took part in one of Debbie’s first courses on aromatherapy. And she’s been coming to see her on and off as a client ever since. The point is, she’s the type of individual who should know better.

Whenever they share lunch together, this woman never fails to bring something with meat in it – even though she’s known for years that Debs is (whisper the word) a vegetarian. In France, you see, vegetarians are either green-toed web-fingered freaks – or English people.

Yesterday, she and Debs had a snack lunch together after a treatment ‘in my lady’s’ clinic. Tilley and I took bets on what this woman would bring with her. We decided that it was odds-on something with lardons in it. Bacon bits, that is. And we all know that vegetarians don’t mind eating lardons. They can’t do, because they often feature here in vegetarian options.

So when her mother got back from another long day’s journey into night, Tilley asked immediately what this woman had brought to eat. A kind of pizza, this time, with potatoes – and lardons. She thought that Debs wouldn’t mind picking them out of the pizza.

Tilley’s outrage made her mother feel ashamed that she hadn’t confronted the woman. But 15 years of apologising for your beliefs wears you down in the face of such… what, intolerance? Ignorance? Sheer bloody-mindedness, perhaps. It’s an attitude akin to: this is our country and we do things our way; don’t think that we’re going to pander to your fancy-Dan ideas and notions.

Father and daughter - out come the freaks

Poor Tilley, though, has every right to feel outrage. She has suffered more than her parents have for her refusal to succumb to the indigenous cuisine. Now she’s at the lycée in Brive, she can eat her lunch at the clinic with her mum, safe in the knowledge that it will be free of lardons and goose grease. But during her long school career here (they start at école maternelle between 2 and 3 years old, when they’re propre – or out of nappies), she’s been made to feel like an outcast of society in the various canteens she’s sampled.

We’ve written letters, talked to the people in charge, talked even to the people who cook the food. It never made an iota of difference. Debs once went to see the mayor of the relevant commune. She asked, ‘what about Moslems, who don’t eat pork? You wouldn’t do anything for them?’ His reply was a contemptuous shrug.

Many was the day when Tilley would come home exhausted – not simply because it’s a long, arduous school day here, but also because she was just plain undernourished. An ‘effort’ constituted a plate of green beans or a bit of pasta with some butter or grated cheese. It was as if she were being punished for a childish caprice.

There’s a prevalent notion that you’re a vegetarian because you’re fussy. Another of Debbie’s clients talked of how relieved she is now that her grandson had given up his nonsense of wishing to be a vegetarian and was finally eating the meat that she served him. Fussy no more, in other words. Debs told her that she herself is a vegetarian not because she’s fussy, but because she detests the way animals are farmed and then transported to the slaughterhouse. ‘Oh gosh, you don’t want to think like that,’ her client told her. ‘I tell my butcher that I just want the meat. I don’t want to see the head or the hooves. That way it’s just meat, not an animal.’

Christmas is coming and the thousands of geese in these parts are getting fat. Not long now before they’re trussed up and turned into a roast. We haven’t yet decided what we’ll be eating together on Saturday, but we’ll do nicely, thank you. And whatever it is, we won’t be picking lardons out of it.