Crustaceans are Animals, too

I felt like a million bucks on this morning’s 50 minute run. It’s the first run of the year where I felt like I could run as far as the trail that stretched out before me would allow, which in this case would have meant running all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.

I’m in the south of France. My run route this morning was the tree lined towpath of the Canal de Midi, a UNESCO-protected waterway that runs from Bordeaux to Sète, connecting the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and joining a hundred tiny towns in-between by waterway. I’m here alone, escaping the ice and fog around Lake Geneva and, I have to admit, chasing a romantic notion of aimlessly traveling around France, eating baguette and brie and drinking red wine on a different hilltop every evening.

It’s a little too cold to sit on hilltops right now, and I can’t eat any brie. But I can, and have been, eating a bounty of vegan foods that can be found in the south of France. To start with, there’s a wide variety of fruit in the markets, even in winter, and an accompanying colourful array of vegetables. But since I’m not equipped with food prep facilities, I have had to find some short-cuts to assembling meals for myself. Interestingly, I'm finding this is giving rise to a diet with much more variety than the baguette and brie regime of my dreams.

Two days ago, I sat on the lip of the fountain in a quiet Montpellier park in the late afternoon eating a chilled couscous salad, to which I added a roasted beet and fennel salad, both found in the déjeuner a-go-go section of a minisupermarché. Not bad at all.

A day later, I lunched on fresh baby spinach tossed with carrots and raisins and the largest red globe grapes I have ever seen (like little golf balls), along with a sublime (and cream-free!) sweet potato soup in a Toulouse café. And in between, I climbed up the inner wall of the Medieval Cité in Carcassonne, with a demi-bottle of Bordeaux and some sort of spiced lentil dish (again, a supermarket find) in my backpack, and dined as the sun went down over the sprawling ville basse that stretched out below, legs dangling over the ramparts.

This style of solo, ad lib and al fresco dining is working well for me. Besides the obvious benefit of being cost-effective (but can you put a price on dining at sunset with a view from the wall of Europe’s largest fortified town?), it’s also easy to vet my food choices when I can pick things up from a shelf and read the ingredients’ listing. Ordering that requires interaction still poses challenges, but the only kink to speak of so far came when trying to order in a Carcassonne Thai-hangout at lunch today.

Standing in front of his helpful display fridge, the owner told me (with much animated enthusiasm), that they had a vegetarian option for me. He pointed at a noodle dish that clearly had prawns in it and exclaimed ‘végétarien!’

‘Ummm...mais il y a des crevettes, dedans, non?’ (Ummm...but there are prawns in it, no?)

‘Oui, oui, seulement des crevettes. C’est vegetarian!’ (‘Yes, yes, just prawns. It’s vegetarian!’)

I could see there was some work to do here, but I was hungry and was not about to engage a Frenchman in the philosophical discussion as to whether shellfish are animals, so I ordered the steamed vegetables. Thank goodness there’s nothing ambiguous about broccoli.