Le probleme du pain

I was browsing through one of my favorite sites recently when I came across this article and subsequent conversation online. The gist is that the author is wondering why bread in Paris is just better than a lot of the bread you can get in the states.

The conversationg gets pretty interesting (I mean, come on, we're talking about bread here people) when one of the people mentions the decline of the Boulangerie in Paris. Turns out that more and more french are turning to sliced bread because it's more practical and doesn't get stale nearly as fast as a baguette (which feels very un-fresh in a few hours).

Personally, I love the baguette, but I understand. You really need to go out every night and pick up a baguette before dinner, which I love doing but isn't very practical for people who don't live right in the city, or who have children, or use bread to make sandwiches, etc. The form of a baguette is monumentally unpractical for most things. When I make toast in the morning, I normally use sliced Pain Poilane, which is sold at Monoprix and is fresh bread from a bakery (actually "the" bakery) but works better for lathering on the butter and honey. When you toast a baguette, it always burns on the outside because you have to cut it in half to make useable pieces out of it.

On a less nitpicky note... The reason that Boulangeries and a lot of these small stores around Paris that you see in every neighborhood survive is obviously because of local patronage. For instance, this sunday when I took Gabe and his family to La Chope Daguerre for a sit-down lunch, his dad, who is french, made a point, "pretty much all of these types of restaurants are good, because if they're not, nobody would go there." While it might seem obvious, it was a semi-epiphany for me.

In the states, there's crap bakeries and restaurants all over the place that inexplicably stay in business. For the life of me, I cannot explain why some of the food places in Washington DC remain open, they're an affront to everything that is pure and beautiful about food. There must just not be the same level of selection that you see here. Or maybe it's a food appreciation issue? I feel like in the states we're cultured to be satisfied with marginal food. Thinking about my host dad, with whom food is either fantastic or no good, I couldn't imagine him patronizing a place he didn't really like.