We're the organic anti-beat box band

An organic cooperative supermarket has just opened next door to my appartment on Place de Catalogne.

All the food, detergents, beauty products and essential oils are certified organic.

The lessons I have learned:
1) Some of the products on sale are at a similar price or even cheaper than similar environment-friendly or organic products on sale in normal supermarkets.

2) The organic fresh milk is incomparably tastier than the organic fresh milk from the supermarket: lots of cream.
Must remember to exercise more...

3) Some of the vegetables are very interesting. It was the first time I ever saw a purple cauliflower; likewise, it was the first time I ever drank purple soup...


How do you feel about unusual foods?
A. I want to try it out.
B. I think it is scary.

Organic anti-beat box band
Red Hot Chili Peppers, The uplift mofo party plan, EMI Manhattan

Moon river, wider than a mile

I have been travelling again: I was last week in Kunming, Yunnan Province of China, to facilitate the concluding workshop of the FAO project on food consumer market research, about which I have already blogged. This time, the main purpose of the workshop was to share the conclusions of the research implemented by the four national teams on the consumers of rice, tomato and pork meat.

I noticed that the participants were not that comfortable in speaking in the relatively large multinational group of 24 participants. So I decided to use a knowledge sharing method called the River of Life to depict the main lessons learned by the participants in the project. The River of Life allows people to reflect on the chronology of their own life or of their experiences during a particular project or event. It is a method that involves small group discussion and drawing.

For this particular exercise, I asked all the participants to reflect on the project they had all been involved in together during the previous year. The River of Life that was depicted by the group thus symbolized the lifetime of the project and participants added to the general drawing the different events that had happened during the project. I first asked them to form groups of five or six people and discuss what they were expecting from the project before it had started. After their discussion, the participants started writing down their expectations on the big drawing board but, very quickly, drawings also started appearing.

In the second phase, I asked the workshop participants to reflect on the problems they had faced during the project, how they had solved them, and the lessons they had learned from the project. Here again, lots of drawings were added to the board with many participants trying to add their own element to the River of Life.


Finally, I asked everybody to think about the follow-up activities they would like to implement when the project is over. Here, we had more serious lists of future activities.

Overall, I thought the exercise was very successful as it allowed the participants who were not that talkative in the plenary group to discuss in smaller groups the issues that were important for the project as well as the lessons they had learned. Those elements were then shared with all through the large drawing of the River of Life.

I think participants were quite comfortable in drawing on the board as I had stuck the drawing of the River of Life on the wall so it was quite convenient for many to be drawing or writing at the same time on the board. Furthermore, some of the people involved had been interacting during a whole year and had participated in two previous workshops. They had become accustomed to working closely together.

The lessons I have learned: the creative part of people comes out quite easily when they have grown familiar with each other and they see the fun part of an activity. The River of Life method helps to share lessons learned from a common event when participants feel they are free to express themselves when contributing to the big picture.



Moon River
Frank Sinatra, My way: the best of Frank Sinatra, Reprise

Photos: Yuan Wei and FAO TCP/RAS/3209

This little piggy had roast beef

Vegetarians can skip this post.

My local butcher shop just changed its owner, so with the new owner came new suppliers, and with new suppliers came new meats. I am positively delighted: this new butcher supplies most of his meat from the Southwest of France where my family comes from. So I can now find the same kind of meat I was used to eating when I visited my grandparents or my grand-aunts.

The grain-fed chicken have such a strong yellow skin you know they have been eating lots of maize. The pork is butchered not far from my home town of Mont-de-Marsan. The veal and beef come from the green hills around Brive in the Périgord region.

The beef is particularly tasty. It is called "Boeuf de Coutancie". The butcher said the cows are raised during five years in the Périgord area of France. For the last three years of their lives, they live outside in the fields most of the time, eating grass complemented by grain. They also get a daily massage! How much more can one do for animal welfare? The meat was very tender: the pan-fried steak, simply seasoned with coarse-grain salt and pepper sprinkled on top, melted in my mouth.

Staying in a serviced appartment in Paris? Try it out: the butcher shop is at the corner of Rue du Château and Rue Raymond Losserand in the 14th District of Paris.

This little piggy
Rasputina, Lost & Found, Instinct Records

You know you make me wanna...

Kick my heels up and...
Throw my hands up and...
Throw my head back and...

Last July I reported that I was taking singing lessons to get into a really good choir. Well now I'm in!

The conductor Léo Warynski accepted me into Les Métaboles and I had my first rehearsal with the group last night: more than two hours of singing, non stop, everybody sight-reading difficult music, jokes, all young singers, beautiful voices, delicious harmonies.

I was so excited I hardly slept that night.

Shout
Isley Brothers, The Essential Isley Brothers, Sony

PS: I love this song, it is pure jubilation.

Photo: James Yu

Sing on cricket

I was surfing the web in my Paris flat tonight while listening to a piano recital France Musique was broadcasting live from La Roque d'Anthéron, one of the many Summer musical festivals being held in the South of France. Romantic piano music played by the American pianist Jonathan Biss... but I suddenly realized I could hear a very irritating buzz. Wondering what it was, I went into the kitchen to check the refrigerator and see why it was vibrating so much but the fridge was not to blame.

I came back into the living room, I could still hear the irritating buzz around the beautiful piano music from the radio. Then I suddenly understood. I turned the radio off and the buzz stopped with the music. The buzz was coming from around the piano. In the South of France the crickets and cicadas were singing around the open-air piano recital. I thought about Ella and her mythical improvisation in the cricket song.

After the piano recital: jazz music and Ella. How was that for a coincidence?
You can podcast the shows during a month from now to listen to the crickets, the piano and Ella.

Ella Fitzgerald
The cricket song, Ella at Juan-les-pins, Verve

Photo: litlnemo

I'm gonna chow down my vegetables

Summer has finally arrived in Paris and of course we are all complaining that it is too hot. Remember my fresh produce basket from early spring? Here's the summer version. Much more colourful, isn't it?

France has just enacted a new law requiring all fresh produce to be labelled with the origin of the produce along with the name and price/kg or piece. So that makes it easier to buy local. The only problem I have is that when I arrive bright and early around 9am to buy my produce from my friendly organic retailer Yannick Hamon on the Saturday market on Place Brancusi, he is still drinking his coffee after having set out the produce. None of the labels are out yet so I have to trust him on origin and price.

Vega- Tables
Smile, Brian Wilson, Nonesuch Variete

Je chante sur mon chemin

I have started singing in choirs as an adult in 1994 and have not stopped since. Having moved from Bordeaux to Paris to Wye (UK), to Ho Chi Minh City back to Paris and on to Bangkok, I have been lucky always to find a choir to sing in.

As soon as I had come back to Paris last February, I joined my former choir again: the Choeur Varenne. It is a relatively large group of 60 to 80 people, depending on the production. The bass section has a particularly beautiful round sound and with some work, the sopranos can sound really fine. The main reason why I went back to this group was that the group of singers is made of exceptionally friendly people. Every season, we have one or two week end-long rehearsals where we work hard on the pieces for the concert. But we all also bring food and drink to share pot luck. With 70 people bringing food and drink, we end up with an aperitif, salads as starters, a whole selection of quiches, a complete cheese platter and a choice of scrumptious cakes to sample. We have had two of these pot-luck meals already, each time I planned to take a photo for this blog, but each time I completely forgot because once all the food was set, we all went into aperitif mode, started drinking, nibbling and talking. So you get a blurred photo of the latest concert instead.

With all this, the conductor Caroline de Beaudrap is also great. I particularly appreciate the fact that she will stop us immediately when she is not satisfied by something. This allows us to try to improve the sound immediately after having done the mistake, and hear and feel the difference: greater learning efficiency, I believe. Caroline is skilled at getting the best out of this group of mainly amateur singers.


The last concert sounded great: Mendelssohn motets with organ accompaniment at the church of La Trinité in Paris with very good resounding acoustics. One disappointment though: I could not sing with the choir at this concert because I had just come back from duty travel. Having missed the dress rehearsal and the first concert in the church, I fully understood that Caroline asked me not to sing this production. So I checked tickets at the gate instead…

I do look forward to our next season: the complete Haendel Messiah with orchestra, to be sung end of March 2011. By the way, we are recruiting. To learn more on how you could join us, contact our conductor Caroline at cdebeaudrap@free.fr.

Je chante
Charles Trenet, 20 chansons d'or, EMI France