Food

I never had a meal with Marionette but I know she walks down to the boulangerie for her baguette every morning, and walks back up the steep hill to her house with the bread under her arm.

Marionette's lived in a village in the Auvergne in the middle of France all her life. It's a hilltop village with a church built in the 13th century and an old chateau that was in ruins until a couple from Paris restored it and turned it into a high-priced inn. The village always smells of food--fresh milk, mushrooms being sauteed in real butter, a chicken roasting. 

After she has breakfast and feeds the goats she keeps in her backyard, Marionette walks down to the cemetary and puts a flower on her husband's grave. She does this everyday. Sometimes I'd see her walking back up the hill and stop and offer her a ride. She'd smile at me but always insist on walking.

It turns out that most of the restaurants in Paris, once the cuisine capital of the world, were started by people from the Auvergne who couldn't make a living in the countryside and went to the city to make their fortune. The best known dish of the region is truffade, made of potatoes and Tomme cheese, though some people prefer Cantal.

To a certain type of person of a certain cultural milieu, food's the new art in the US, the way art was in the eighties and nineties when magazines like Flash Art and Parkett could exist and it was important to know about artists before they were really artists. Food and drink is our new aspirational obsession.

Marionette's granddaughter told me that Marionette had never been to a restaurant, and I believe her.