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happy; they have their story. I rarely agree with what they write, but that’s fair enough. We all have our own ideas about Provence, and mine will inevitably differ from those of people who come for a week or two, particularly if they come during August, the most crowded, least typical month of the year.
    The piece that I had been sent, “My Year in Provence Last August,” appeared on April 22, 1998, in one of the worlds most distinguished and influential newspapers, the
New York Times
. It was written by Ruth Reichl, whose name, I’m sure, causes a
frisson
of apprehension when it is dropped in the restaurant kitchens of Manhattan; more so during her tenure as restaurant reviewer for the
Times
, a position she no longer occupies but did that April. A shining beacon of gastronomic knowledge in a dim and ignorant world, a maker and breaker of culinary reputations—all in all, a woman who knows her onions, as one of those clever old peasants might say.
    Not the least of Reichl’s accomplishments as a food writer and editor is her ability to get to the heart of things without wasting a moment. In the course of her visit during August, she was able to investigate, consider, sum up, and dismiss an entire region of France—what diligence!—and yet still manage to find time to have a disappointing vacation.
    What a catalogue of disappointment it was, too, from the very first breakfast: awful baguettes, worse croissants, sour coffee. A trip to the market failed to unearth a singleripe tomato. The peaches were hard as rocks. The green beans looked tired, and nothing makes a food critic’s heart sink more quickly than the sight of a tired green bean. And the heart continued to sink. None of the potatoes had been grown in France. None of the butchers had any lamb. It was gourmet hell, and visits to the supermarket, where Reichl said she was forced to shop on nonmarket days, did nothing to temper her dissatisfaction. There, too, the food was pretty dreary. The meat and vegetables were a disaster. The cheeses came from factories. The bread was wrapped in plastic. And, horror of horrors, the selection of rosé wines alone took up more space than all the cereals, cookies, and crackers in her local D’Agostino market back home. Imagine such a thing! More wine than cookies! There can be few more telling signs than that of a society in the grip of depravity.
    Other revelations will follow, but before they do it is worth examining the first part of this miserable litany in more detail. There is no doubt that you can find indifferent food in Provence, but to find it everywhere you look suggests carelessness or a profound lack of local knowledge. This would be understandable in the average tourist, but Reichl is anything but the average tourist. Her working life is devoted to the discovery of good food. She is doubtless extremely well connected in gastronomic and journalistic circles. She surely has friends or colleagues in France who could have told her that in Provence, as in the rest of the world, you need to know where to go. Didn’t anyone give her a few good addresses? Didn’t she ask for any? Didn’t she read the excellent books of Patricia Wells, her counterpart at the
International Herald Tribune
, a food writer with an intimate and informed knowledge of Provence? Apparently not.
    The elusive ripe tomato and the absence of lamb—two disappointments that we have never encountered during our years in Provence—might have been bad luck; or they might have been the result of arriving at the market and the butcher too late, when the best has already been bought. August is like that. As for the dreadful supermarket, it seems that again Reichl was either badly advised or not advised at all. Certainly there are supermarkets with factory cheese and plastic-wrapped bread, although I can’t see why this was worth mentioning. Supermarkets are specifically designed to sell mass-produced food, much of which is legally obliged to come in