Blog :: Dieppe seen by Peter Avis

Can you survive as a veggie in Dieppe? | 05/09/2010

Legumes Well, you can. Though it’s a little bit difficult, as it is elsewhere in France, if you are thinking about restaurant meals. The fact is the French mostly don’t do vegetarian, and they find it odd that anybody could find a vegetarian meal either necessary or totally satisfying. And that’s odd, because you can buy the most magnificent seasonal vegetables and fruits in the Dieppe market, take them home and transform them into comestible treats.

We asked a distinguished restaurateur on the Quai Henri IV how she dealt with customers who ask for vegetarian dishes. "They never do", she replied. I presume they never do, because they never expect to get a helpful reply.

Getting a helpful reply elsewhere has often amounted to being offered an omelette, or (if you are with a group), the vegetable accompaniment of other people’s carnivore dishes. That may be an answer, but it’s not the same thing as being offered a conceptualised and tasty vegetarian dish.

One restaurant is Dieppe has bitten the veggie bullet (this is not a commercial: I shall receive no pay-off) and that is the Grand Duquesne, adjacent to the Église St Jacques. Look at its menus and you will see there is "la découverte végétarienne" at 17 euros for three courses which, on the day of writing these contemplations, listed as usual a formidable choice of dishes, in which tomatoes in different guises held a place of honour.

In the world of today, you don’t have to be a vegetarian for any particular ideological reason, or for any reason of taste, to realise that consuming vast amounts of meat is doing our world real harm. Tony Benn argues in a chapter of his recent Letters to my Grandchildren: "The argument for vegetarianism on environmental grounds alone has become even more powerful as the world population rises and food supplies fall short of human need".

The simple fact is that pastoral farming (a soothing term that now embraces the most brutal factory farming methods) entails pumping vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, hastening global warming and threatening global disaster. And we use immense tracts of the world’s surface to produce food to feed to the animals that we raise to kill and put on our plates.

This is not a plea for everybody to transform himself or herself into an instant vegetarian. But Paul McCartney and others have made the reasonable proposal that we could start by having a day each week when we just don’t eat meat. The idea might (or might not) become contagious.

Of course, we see all this through our European eyes. In India, with its billion population, most people never eat meat anyway: it’s too expensive, apart from any other considerations. Dieppe has an Indian restaurant: the Bombay on the Quai Duquesne. Try its little collection of vegetarian dishes: the mushroom curry won’t harm you.

Foregoing restaurants, you can achieve wonders at home with the leeks and courgettes on sale now in the market. And the season for endives (chicory to the British) is not far behind. Treats in store.

PS: If you want to add a comment to this blog, please click on the link below: 'ajouter un commentaire'.

COMMENTAIRES
par anne routledge • 16/11/2011 à 13:17
Peter
Ive been trying to find you
i sent letters to diepppe where r u living?
Remember me with craig who died
Im now living in Nottingham with new friend
How r u??
anne