This article is published in number 37 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until September 14, 2021
In Quibou, a town of nine hundred inhabitants in Normandy, there is a baker called Maëva L. and she collects wheat without a combine harvester. By hand, as it once was; and knead the bread by hand. A love for horses and nature prompted her to move to Quibou in 2019, in search of a simple life. With a pastry chef father and a baker grandfather, he could only take over the old town boulangerie. She likes to do everything, she says, “from A to Z”. He has planted different varieties of wheat for the different forms of organic bread that he offers to customers-supporters: because several have responded to his social appeal, becoming part of a curious collective of old-fashioned reapers. There are at least seventeen, of different ages, squatting with dedication and with gloves and scythes in the land that Maëva tries not to impoverish thanks to crop rotations.
“We could have been more,” she says, but is still pleased with her network. Somehow it also includes the miller, the brewer, two sheep farmers and one of laying hens. With his wood-burning oven he churns out 350 kilos of bread a week. And there is the right pride of those who find, gesture by gesture, the path that leads to the simplest, most vital, sacred of foods. Made with durum wheat flour, «light, fragrant, with a white crumb like the paper I’m writing on. And when I write about it I feel my mouth watering, as if time had not passed, and as if I were still in a direct relationship with the sensations of my childhood. The slice of bread that melts in my mouth, which I greedily swallow … Without a doubt, nothing has satisfied me to such an extent, since then I have not tasted anything that has so satisfied my hunger, that has satisfied me so much ». It is the memory of a French writer, JMG Le Clézio.
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