Picard's Foods

The Picard store in Ferney-Voltaire

Picard is my favorite French grocery store.  Although they don’t carry milk, cheese (a necessity in France), seltzers (or wine and beer – additional necessities), salad greens, and some other staples, which means I make the rounds of different food markets, Picard is a specialty-item enterprise: they sell frozen foods. 

Picard's rows of deep-chest freezers

Picard’s stores look somewhat sterile, with rows of deep-chest freezers packed with tempting packages whose alluring graphics of the foods within entice buyers like me to pick up more foods than the tiny French freezers could hold.

Flash-frozen fruit

The company flash-freezes fresh produce or prepared products, which preserves their texture and taste.  Picard’s non-GMO foods are gourmet, flavorful, well-made, easy to use, and do not have artificial preservatives or flavorings.  But what makes Picard my favorite French grocery store is the choice and the fact that whatever I buy doesn’t taste like frozen food.  Take, for example, frozen spinach.  In the US, I could buy a 10 oz block of frozen spinach, but what if I want to use just a quarter cup?  I’d have to take a hammer or saw to cut it up, or thaw out the entire thing and toss most of it out.  Picard’s frozen chopped spinach, on the other hand, like all their pureed vegetables in bags, are molded into individual little rectangles, around an inch by an inch and a half, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick.  I just pour out as much as I need and freeze the rest.

Frozen cubes of pureed peas, pumpkin, and spinach

Whether I buy frozen fresh vegetables, like cauliflower florets, peeled fava beans, or chanterelle mushrooms, or a vegetable mixture such as a Moroccan tagine or grilled eggplant and peppers, or salmon wrapped in puff pastry, or vegetarian pureed soups, or some sort of ethnic food (such as frozen Indian, Japanese, Mexican, Thai, or Moroccan meals), or herb mixtures or sauces, or any of their mouth-watering cakes and ice creams, preparing everyday gourmet dinners feels like cheating. 

Appetizers

Pureed soups (all vegetarian)

Fish

Ethnic vegetable mixtures

Crepes

Tartes and Quiches

Japanese foods

Cannelloni (Manicotti)

Thai foods

Cakes

Desserts (no calories, of course)

Ice cream confections

Ice cream desserts

The Picard insulated bag

One small purchase in my Picard bag

Like many French women (yes, women still do most of the cooking), I’ve become dependent on Picard, and I dread to think that, when I return to the US, I’ll have to make from scratch so many of these foods that I buy frozen in France.  Maybe we can get Trader Joe’s to carry more of Picard’s items (in fact, some of Trader Joe’s frozen foods from France are Picard products with TJ’s labels).  Better yet, maybe we can get Picard to open some stores in the United States – starting with Oakland, California.

The one frozen Picard item we don't need in the U.S.

The CERN Cafeteria

One section of the CERN cafeteria

Physicists have to eat.  So do the engineers, support staff, administrators, construction workers, and artisans who contribute to making CERN the world’s premiere physics laboratory.  CERN’s cafeteria is where they go, not just to refuel, but also to socialize and talk about their work.

Working in the cafeteria mid-morning

CERN has two cafeterias.  The smaller one, in the outlying area of CERN, sits inside a fence that separates CERN from the fields and vineyards of a Swiss farmer.  The other cafeteria, located in a more central part of the campus, is the principal venue for having meals, snacks, and coffee, and for relaxing with a beer in the late afternoon.  Cafeteria One, as it’s called, has several sections or rooms with different types of tables, as well as two outdoor patios where patrons eat their lunches under umbrellas in good weather.  That’s where the smokers go, since smoking is prohibited inside CERN’s buildings.

The patio on a rainy winter afternoon

CERN’s cafeteria, though, is not just for eating.  By mid-morning and after lunch, the cafeteria provides a workspace for physicists who want a venue other than their offices for thinking about and discussing their experiments.  Moreover, the cafeteria is used every so often by journalists who conduct interviews with CERN scientists. 

The cafeteria manager (right) at the long salad bar

What also draws the CERN workforce to the cafeteria is the food.  It’s really good.  People decide what they want to eat after looking at the selections in the cafeteria’s different sections: a trattoria and a grill; two salad bars (one round table with bowls of plain vegetables and legumes, the other - a long rectangular table - with assorted pre-made salads, a variety of olives and pickles, cut meats, poached salmon, quiches and sushi); and a long dessert table with tarts, pastries, fruit salads, and puddings.

Some prepared salads

 Quiches and breads at the salad bar

Fruit salads and puddings

Pastries on the dessert table

 

Daily options for hot meals include pizza, pasta, meat, and fish, which come with a choice of rice, beans, cooked vegetables, and French fries or other potatoes, as well as a small salad.  There are sandwiches, too.  Aside from water, which most CERN employees drink, people can buy beer, wine, soft drinks or juice.

Veal sausages and vegetables

Decisions, decisions

CERN cafeteria's wine and beer bar

Physicists at lunch

 

Lining up for espresso, ristretto, cappuccino, or plain coffee at one of the coffee bars is the final ritual of lunch.  Then it’s back to work, at the office, experimental site, or…at the cafeteria.

CERN cafeteria's coffee bar

A post-lunch meeting in the CERN cafeteria

Ferney-Voltaire’s Marché

Produce purveyor at Ferney-Voltaire's Saturday market

Some merchants arrive by 5 AM to set up their stalls at Ferney-Voltaire’s Saturday market.  By 8:30, the marché is open for business.  The Ferney market is famous in this region, and because it borders Switzerland, it’s one of the more expensive ones in France.  Most of the vendors live hours away, but most of the customers live in the Ferney area or in the Geneva suburbs.  But shoppers from Lausanne will drive 40 kilometers to buy produce in the Ferney market at prices that they perceive to be less expensive than what they would pay in Swiss grocery stores.   

Although I buy more produce at Ferney’s less expensive supermarkets than at the marché, I go to the Saturday market because it’s a celebration.  The quiet town mutates into a retail festival, with one section of the main road devoted to the sale of food and the other section allocated to clothing.  Rectangular polychromatic  umbrellas transform the streets into narrower passageways where young parents push baby carriages, elderly couples walk arm in arm, middle-aged men and women fill backpacks, baskets, or shopping carts with food for the week, and children whine for chocolate or churros. 

Shoppers at the Ferney market

 Customers at a butcher's stall

Lining up at a cheese seller's truck

The Ferney market is a United Nations of shoppers.  This area is home not only to the French, but also to an international array of personnel employed at the various NGOs and UN agencies in Geneva as well as at CERN.  So milling about the marché, inspecting assorted fruit, vegetables, breads, cheeses, meats, pasta, olives, wine, flowers, clothing, tablecloths, fabrics, jewelry, books, and ready-to-eat food, are Africans, Chinese, Indians, Americans, Arabs and multilingual Europeans. But interacting with the vendors requires some knowledge of French.

Of course, there is appealing fresh produce

Cheeses from the region

Beaujolais wine, produced two hours from Ferney-Voltaire

Teas

Moroccan olives

French olives for tasting

Few of the merchants are actually farmers.  Most are produce purveyors who create colorful tableaux with overpriced fruits and vegetables.  Fishmongers drive more than four hours to Ferney and then they transform their long refrigerated trucks into extended display counters to sell fresh fish and seafood from the Mediterranean Sea.  Bakers retail baguettes and pain au levain as well as unusual loaves that can’t be found at local boulangeries (such as breads made with chestnut flour, or with figs, cranberries, or hazelnuts).  And cheese sellers often give miniscule tastes of raw milk cow, goat, and sheep cheeses that are produced in the region.  Then there are immigrants who market ready-made food, such as paella, schwarma, tagines, and fried plantains, and French natives who sell vin chaud (hot spiced wine) or choucroute (a dish of sauerkraut covered with anemic-looking sausages and thick slabs of pink ham riddled with fat).

The fishmonger's display

Specialty breads

North African food for sale

Choucroute

Grand Rue, the cobblestoned pedestrian street, is where weary shoppers sit in the sun at outdoor cafes and watch women contemplating the skirts, blouses, hats, stockings, soaps, and jewelry that are displayed along the other side of the road.

Taking a shopping break at a cafe on Grand Rue

Trendy tops

Sweatshirts printed with fictitious American college names

Lingerie stall

Winter hats

The marché, crowded, animated, carnivalesque, closes at 1:00.  Customers leave.  Merchants pack their trucks and head out to their next destination.  Cleaners remove the rubbish and sweep the streets.  By 2:30, Ferney-Voltaire returns to its tranquil, provincial, sleepy self.