French Baguettes From a Vending Machine? ‘What a Tragedy.’

It’s not a new phenomenon—little town shops have been losing ground to Aldi, Lidl, the Hyper U, and Carrefour for two decades.

But I feel compelled to clarify that the baguette vending machines are NOT some sort of automatic Japanese style mini factory. They’re convenient dispensing points for local bakeries to sell their products without incurring labor costs. I bought a couple of baguettes from a machine in Petit Andelys, in Normandy, a couple years ago. The machine gave you a choice of two sizes, and it was refilled with fresh bread twice a day—before daybreak and in mid afternoon. So it’s not the most romantic way to buy bread, but it still allowed ppl in a quite small ville to get their fresh bread.

I operate my own small cottage bakery, and I can tell you that it’s physically heavy work, with antisocial hours if you sell fresh bread in the AM. I only bake once a week for a direct sales market, and that’s enough of the baker’s life for me. Some independent bakers flip the hours, selling fresh bread in urban areas in the afternoon/evening (like Tartine in San Francisco), but those who service wholesale accounts in fine dining (dinner crowds) are stuck with the early life.

In the UK, there is a small movement to form cooperative bakeries in more isolated towns: the town or a group of citizens hire a baker, with community members volunteering to work the sales counter, to deliver to wholesale accounts, or to do prep work. The Dunbar Community Bakery in Dunbar, Scotland, is one example: LINK. The town seems to be sustaining the little community bakery, but it’s also a town that has tourists visiting the Belhaven Brewery and it’s the terminus of the John Muir Way, a walking path of more than 100 miles (Muir was born in Dunbar).

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French Baguettes From a Vending Machine? ‘What a Tragedy.’ I feel like your missing the point about what it’s ultimately doing to such a unique and bucolic part of the world. The French countryside is one of the last bastions of places that are authentic to their core.

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You have over-romanticized the French countryside to the point of error. What on earth does “authentic to the core” even mean? Authentic to what time period? Authentic to whom? I went to a thriving town market in Bayeux, right in the public square—a weekly market has been held there for, oh, 900 or so years. Among the most popular vendors were a food truck selling samosas (all french speaking proprietors, born in France, of Indian descent), another selling Vietnamese food, and a vendor with giant vats of tagine & couscous. Are Vietnamese food and tagine less authentic to the French countryside than a baguette? Both Algeria and Vietnam are former French colonies—lots of immigrants from either country can be found scattered throughout La France Profonde.

Rural France, just like rural Italy and much of the rural US, faces challenges from large-scale discount food selling and production, undermining the “pastoral” ways that city people find charming.....yet those same country folk don’t want to work 18 hrs a day for a pittance, or be yoked to a job undervalued in today’s society. Some might argue that the problem is far worse in rural Italy, where immigration to the US was so common for 140 years or so. Entire Italian villages are peopled with nothing more than a few elderly folks, sustained by visits from family who live, permanently, elsewhere.

All places change, all the time. You’re just a visitor—to hope that a place is fixed in amber means you want a theme park, not a visit to a living, breathing society undergoing constant change. Oyster producers near Calcanques have a refrigerated oyster vending machine—the oysters stay fresh, and no one has to sit at a kiosk to sell them. Is it more “charming” for someone in fishermen’s overalls to sit there and hope someone wanders by? Perhaps, but I’m sure that guy would rather be doing something else while the machine efficiently sells his oysters in peak condition.

Maybe the French will see a resurgence of small, artisan baking—-or maybe they’ll realize that absolutely crazy labor regulations make it ridiculously difficult for a small business to grow, and work against micro-entrepreneurship.