Salty, p.6
Salty, page 6
Watching The Gleaners and I, I was reminded of the staggering statistics I’d read about wasted food in the US. Americans throw away eighty billion pounds of food every year, roughly 30 to 40 percent of the domestic food supply. That’s almost 219 pounds per person, and it’s even more shocking when you consider that about thirty-seven million Americans live in a state of food insecurity. Among the reasons that people use to “excuse” this profound waste is that Americans rely on expiration labels, rather than trusting tongue or nose to determine if our food has gone bad. Many of us are so far removed from the food production process that we’re not able to intuitively tell if food is still edible or if it bears food-borne illness. I’m as guilty of this as anyone; I have a visceral response of vague nausea when I think about eating meat that was “best by” yesterday or food rescued from a dumpster, even if it’s still in the packaging.
But my Paris stints do help me see another way of living, one more attuned to “daily” bread. On my first visit, I quickly realized that you can’t buy that staple of French kitchens, the delightful baguette, too far in advance, as it turns hard by the next day. (This gets tricky when many boulangeries are closed on Sundays.) So daily baguette shopping becomes essential, and for many Parisians—who frequently have tiny refrigerators and few places to store extra food—that means daily food shopping, too. A walk home from work includes passing each of your neighborhood food vendors: the fishmonger, the patisserie, the fromagerie, the grocery. You can, if you wish, easily pick up all the ingredients for dinner each night on your way home.
Living in New York City, I could almost do the same thing. I pass several bodegas (the Spanish word New Yorkers use for their corner grocery) on my commute, plus a fish market, a bakery, and my neighborhood wine store. But New Yorkers are all about optimization, so more often I place a grocery order online at the start of the week, and then find, by the weekend, that I haven’t quite used up the mixed greens before they go mushy, or that I overcalculated how quickly I’d get to those chicken thighs. A freezer helps, but it doesn’t solve the issue. My shelves and cabinets are still full of foods with a long shelf life, bought at the start of the pandemic. I have the immense privilege to have more food than I need, to let my eyes grow bigger than my stomach.
The Gleaners and I is a call to change my ways. Among the things I’ve tried to implement is buying less and trusting that the groceries I have will last the week or that I can find a way to stretch them. Or I order vegetables from one of the companies that’s recently sprung up in the US expressly to rescue “ugly” produce and get it to customers to cut down on food waste (though I’m still waiting for a heart-shaped potato).
The last person featured in Varda’s film is a man named Alain. He occupies the end of the film, I think because he embodies, for her, the contradictions and glories you unearth when you slow down to listen to a stranger. Talking with him, Varda discovers he has a master’s degree, sells newspapers on the street, and lives in public housing mostly occupied by immigrants; there, he teaches French classes free of charge, an entirely volunteer task. Early in the morning, he gets on the train from the suburbs to gather vegetables and fruits that Paris’s open-air market vendors leave behind. Like all of her favorite subjects, he defies everyone’s expectations. Two years later, Varda revisits Alain in a follow-up film, and he’s getting ready to run the Paris marathon—with running shoes he gleaned, of course.
Throughout the film, her conversations with Alain and the other gleaners are mixed with Varda’s reflections on her own aging and her filmmaking practice of nearly fifty years. Now a widow (Demy died in 1990), she contemplates her life and work, the odd beauty of hands growing wrinkled and spotted with age. She starts to talk about her artistic practice as “gleaning,” too.
Listening to her talk about her own gleaning in this way snapped something into place for me about her work as a filmmaker. Varda has always shown genuine interest in the people who normally fall outside of the camera’s frame. For her, filmmaking is “gleaning ideas, images, and emotions,” she told an interviewer. “It’s like gleaning first impressions. I allow myself to live in the film, to ‘let in’ the film, because I thought by making a film like [Gleaners] I don’t want to be separate from it, to live in another world than those who speak so honestly, so clearly about themselves, and speak about situations in which they could be ashamed or wish to hide or wish to say ‘don’t bother with me.’”
The way Varda made art from the beginning of her career was always with a gleaner’s eye. There’s a pure transparency, a kindness, an originality to her work that can be attributed to her lifelong practice of simply paying attention to whatever her peers were ignoring at the time, whether gleaners and potatoes or the streets in her neighborhood, full of people who once were tiny newborns. “Filming, especially a documentary, is gleaning,” she said in 2009. “Because you pick what you find; you bend; you go around; you are curious; you try to find out where are things.”
She went on to note that the analogy can’t be pushed too far, because “we don’t just film the leftovers.” But in her later films, she often held up for the camera the souvenirs she purchased, the odd bits and pieces she picked up around the world, and the items she saved and treasured that people had sent her, particularly after seeing The Gleaners and I. The things of the world meant something to her not so much for their functionality or their use, but for themselves.
And she may have picked this up early on. In 1970, reflecting on her time at the Sorbonne studying with the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Varda said that he “really blew my mind. . . . He taught us to study writers not only by the stories they told but by the material things they mentioned.” You can learn a lot by the material things Varda mentions, and shows, and lingers on, and urges us to truly see.
All of this brings me back to Varda, dressed as a potato, at her Venice Biennale opening, and how she carted that costume to art shows around the world for years, many of them also centered on potatoes. (People started calling her “Dame Patate.”) It’s the kind of playful move that brings down the guard rails that people set up for themselves in “high art” settings. You can’t be too snobby about art when the artist is wandering around dressed like a potato—dirty even when you scrub it, unremarkable, lumpy, prone to shrivel and sprout. Varda’s love of the heart-shaped potato and the path it takes when it’s past its edible stage speaks of a sensibility that revels in forgotten and discarded things. The people and stories that don’t make it onto camera. The film that only screens for a few people. The shopkeeper who trims fat from pork loins and sells cans of skim milk to old women and teaches the neighborhood kids to play accordion. The man crumpled on the corner who used to be a baby, someone’s baby. And she trusts her audience to be interested, too.
That’s not every filmmaker’s position, let alone every artist’s. Too often filmmakers, rather than serving up a complex and sumptuous feast, dish out something easily digested, something that can’t be taken the wrong way and doesn’t require much in the way of chewing. Varda considered her audience differently—she thought of them, of us, as people with stories, capable of looking at one another just the way she did. “Ultimately, I believe that people have a taste for reflection,” Varda said to an interviewer in 1967. “They have a taste that leads them to reflection. I often think of my public as a mass of people whom I really like, but just because we have a friendly relationship doesn’t mean that we can’t talk seriously or lightheartedly about important subjects. It’s really on the level of feeling that this connection interests me.”
And she thought of her work as a kind of table around which her audience would be able to gather. “I believe that ultimately people have a lot in common but that they don’t have a lot of opportunities to think about this or act on it,” she said. “So I want my films to act as revelations. This is what interests me. There are questions that I personally find intensely interesting and which I’d like to find answers to. I try to ask these questions with enough clarity and enough ambiguity to get my viewers to ask for themselves.”
When Varda passed away in 2019, having become something of a style icon and a celebrity following The Gleaners and I and, especially, the Oscar nomination for Faces Places, she was still living on Rue Daguerre. As usual, fans and film lovers felt the need to pay homage to her. And they did so in the way they knew she’d love best. On Varda’s doorstep, in front of the pink atelier where she lived and worked and loved, a tribute to the artist grew: a pile of heart-shaped potatoes.
Feast
Roasted Chicken and Potatoes
One of the most memorable meals I have ever eaten in Paris was a particularly superb poulet roti, French-style rotisserie chicken and potatoes. You can buy it most anywhere, in a grocery store, on a market street, but someone sent my husband and me to Rue Mouffetard for what they claimed was the best around.
We never found that restaurant, but in hungry desperation, we located another shop with rotisserie chickens spinning slowly in the window—you can hardly miss them—and laid down our euros. The thing about poulet roti is the process by which they make it: rotisserie roasting gets the skin of the chicken good and crisp, and small potatoes cook nestled into trays beneath the rotating chickens, which means they roast in the chicken fat. It is sumptuous, even if some consider it essentially fast food. (Also, a lot of butter is involved, and you honestly haven’t had butter until you’ve had French butter.)
It is not easy to replicate an actual rotisserie at home unless you have a lot of time, money, and counter space. But it is possible to evoke a poulet roti, which has the key ingredient: potatoes. And as a bonus, this will work with any kind of potato, no matter how small or misshapen it might be. Go to the market and buy them loose, and feel free to pick out the oddest-looking little potatoes you can find. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll even find some heart-shaped ones.
I don’t know where I got this recipe—probably cobbled together from various recipes over the years—but it’s the way to go.
1 whole chicken, about 3 lb.
Around 3 c. small potatoes. If you want to (gasp) not use potatoes, or if you don’t have enough, most any root vegetable will do: carrots, parsnips, or whatever was at the market; if they’re large, cut them up so the pieces are around an inch square.
½ c. unsalted butter (one stick) at room temperature—it should be soft
2 onions, cut into thick slices
1 lemon (I have also used an orange in a pinch)
4–6 cloves of garlic, unpeeled and smashed
Fresh thyme, about 8–12 sprigs’ worth
Dried thyme or Herbes de Provence
Olive oil
Salt (the flakier, the better)
Pepper
1. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees, chop your vegetables, and get out a roasting pan.
2. Pat the chicken dry, especially the cavity, and put it on a plate.
3. Put the vegetables in the roasting pan. Drizzle olive oil onto them (several tablespoons’ worth) and zest the lemon over them. Add 6–8 sprigs of fresh thyme, plus salt and pepper, and mix it around. This works best with your hands. Make sure the vegetables are well coated.
4. Carefully place the chicken directly on top of the vegetables, almost as if they’re propping it up, so it doesn’t touch the pan.
5. Poke the lemon a couple of times with a fork and stick it inside the chicken. Push a few more sprigs of thyme and 2–4 cloves of garlic inside the chicken too. (In my opinion, you can never have enough garlic, though French cooking goes light on it, so do whatever you want.)
6. Take about a quarter of the room-temperature butter and cut it into small pieces. Slip them under the skin of the chicken; you may need to use your fingers to separate the skin from the meat in order to do this.
7. Take another quarter of the room-temperature butter and, with your fingers, spread it on the outside of the skin of the bird. Pepper it, and sprinkle with dried thyme or Herbes de Provence. (I have also used paprika for a fun alternative when I’m looking to spice things up.)
8. Place the whole tray into the oven for 20 minutes; the skin will start to brown.
9. On the stovetop, melt the remaining butter (¼ or ½ a stick) with the remaining garlic. Just melt it; don’t let it boil. This is your bird-basting butter.
10. After the chicken has browned for 20 minutes, turn the oven down to 400 degrees. You’re going to roast it for about 60–75 minutes more—this will depend a bit on the size of your chicken—and baste it every 20 minutes with the garlicky butter. You can roughly calculate the total roasting time at 20 minutes per pound, but a meat thermometer is your best bet. One year my husband got me the world’s best meat thermometer for Christmas, and I’m pretty sure the rest of my family was scandalized by the utilitarian, humdrum gift, but it’s honestly the best present I’ve ever gotten, I think? Anyhow, you’ll know it’s done when you stick a meat thermometer into the thigh and it registers 165 degrees.
11. As noted, every 20 minutes you’ll want to baste the bird with the butter from your stovetop. This is most easily accomplished with a baster, which you can use to suck up some of the butter and then apply it to the chicken. I have also, in the absence of a baster, used a silicone brush, or simply a spoon or ladle, with care.
12. When the chicken is done, take the pan out of the oven and place the chicken on a platter, a large cutting board with grooves to catch the juices, or a big plate of some kind. Stir the vegetables and put them back in the oven for a few minutes more; keep an eye on them till they look like they’re the level of crispiness you want them to be. (They’ll be very soft and buttery!)
13. Tent some foil over the chicken and let it sit for 10 minutes. Then remove the foil and carve it up. Bon appetit.
This is super, super tasty, and here’s a bonus: you can use the carcass to make broth afterward. (You can even put it in last chapter’s lentil soup.) Don’t waste the leftovers. Agnès would not be pleased.
More Salt with Agnès Varda
The Complete Films of Agnès Varda, from the Criterion Collection: This is the motherlode, the gold standard. It consists of fifteen discs, each containing a thematic “program,” from “Married Life” to “No Shelter” to “Here and There.” The special features include introductions to many of the films by Varda herself, explorations of her work, behind-the-scenes featurettes, more short films Varda made for TV, and a wealth of other materials.
The Criterion set also includes a 200-page booklet with essays, introductions, and critical appraisals by prominent film critics and historians, along with photographs she took and images from her art installations.
Agnès Varda: Interviews, edited by T. Jefferson Kline: A book laying out decades of interviews that Varda did throughout her career, tracing the way her work, themes, and thought evolved.
Chapter Four
Ella Baker
Hamburgers, Whiskey, and Radical Hospitality
On Easter weekend in April 1960, something was afoot in Raleigh, North Carolina. One hundred twenty-six student delegates from all over the country arrived on the campus of Shaw University, a historically Black institution. The delegates represented colleges in the north, fifty-eight sit-in protests occurring in twelve different states, and a number of student groups including Students for a Democratic Society and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization presided over by Dr. Martin Luther King. The students had been invited to Raleigh by King. But the conference they were about to attend was all Ella Baker’s doing.
Baker was in her fifties and a seasoned organizer in the Civil Rights Movement. The month of the conference marked two and a half often-frustrating years she had spent as the interim director of the SCLC. In her time with the organization, she was very effective—nobody organized and mobilized like Miss Ella Jo Baker—but she frequently found herself in conflict with King, whom she viewed with some suspicion for what she saw as privileging charisma over getting his hands dirty on the ground. What’s more, the organization’s dynamics and decisions were heavily weighted toward its male leaders; Baker might have been running the organization, but she knew she’d never be instated as its permanent director, which the SCLC’s leadership saw as a job for a man.
But as she’d been working, she’d also been watching the headlines. Just a couple of months earlier, four Black freshmen at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T)—inspired by King’s philosophy of nonviolence—had decided to tackle segregation in their town of Greensboro head-on. On Monday, February 1, 1960, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond went to the Woolworth’s at 132 South Elm Street and sat down at the stainless steel lunch counter, which had sixty-six seats. Each asked for a cup of coffee. They were heckled by customers and refused service by the waitress. The store manager asked them to leave, but they stayed put. They remained till the store closed.
On Tuesday, more than twenty students showed up at Woolworth’s, this time with homework to keep them occupied. On Wednesday, over sixty people turned up. On Thursday, they numbered three hundred, still mostly students. On Friday, several hundred protesters showed up again, and were confronted by a group of fifty white men who tried to keep them out. By Saturday, after a rally on the A&T campus, over a thousand people tried to cram into Woolworth’s.
The movement began to spread. Students in cities like Nashville, Jackson, Raleigh, Richmond, and many more staged their own sit-ins at lunch counters. Eventually sit-ins would occur in one hundred cities both across the South and into the North. Sometimes the students were attacked. The movement spread from lunch counters to libraries, pools, beaches, and other public spaces. In response, the City of Greensboro adopted more stringent segregation policies and arrested forty-five students; the students struck back by launching boycotts of all segregated lunch counters. Those counters lost a third of their customers—and money, as always, talks. In the end, Woolworth’s desegregated all of its lunch counters across the country.
