Avignon Almanac III - Les Halles
Morning in a market is not commerce.
It is liturgy.
Before the heat gathers, before the day dissolves into errands and obligation, the market breathes in colour and citrus and salt, and those who enter do so with a posture that is half purposeful and half prayerful, as if appetite itself were something to be consecrated.
Inside Les Halles the air is thick with olives and oranges and the metallic hum of refrigeration units doing their secular duty. Tomatoes taut and luminous. Courgettes aligned like disciplined parishioners. Herbs heaped in fragrant abundance.
And then the meat.
Slabs and slices and suspended limbs presented with aesthetic pride. Ribs arranged like architecture. Sausages coiled with almost comic confidence. Cheeses sweating gently beneath glass, their origins politely obscured, the forced impregnation and separation and commodification that underpin them translated into terroir and tasting notes.
France calls this heritage.
I call it habit dressed as holiness.
And behind one of those counters stands the most devastatingly attractive young man I have seen in weeks.
Parisian. All bone structure and insouciance. Sleeves rolled to reveal forearms that flex as he lifts carcass flesh onto scales with the ease of someone who has never had to question the choreography. Dark hair falling into his eyes. A smile that knows its effect.
He catches me looking.
I do look.
Desire is inconveniently democratic. It does not run a background check on ethics before it surges forward. My body registers him first. My politics arrive a breath later.
Love the boy. Hate what he sells.
There is something almost grotesque about the juxtaposition. Beauty framed by brutality. Youth standing behind a counter of curated death. His hands, capable of tenderness, tying paper neatly around parts of animals who did not consent to confinement, impregnation, slaughter.
Let us be honest about that word.
Consent.
These markets are full of it in one direction only. The consumer consents. The vendor consents. The animal never does.
Cheese is not pastoral poetry. It is the repeated impregnation of cows whose calves are taken so that milk can be diverted into delicacy. Meat is not merely protein. It is a life truncated, a body processed, a system that normalises violence through ritual and repetition.
Tradition is not absolution.
I stand there aware of the theatre. The elderly woman who beams at him as he wraps her saucisson with gentle efficiency. The child tugging at a parent’s sleeve, eyeing sugared pastries while a row of pâté sits quietly in the periphery. The soft hum of transaction as euros exchange hands for flesh.
And I am angry.
Not theatrically. Not performatively. Quietly and steadily angry that this is still framed as culture rather than cruelty, that the aesthetic of the stall is allowed to eclipse the ethics of its supply chain.
Ash squeezes my fingers lightly, sensing the current shift in me.
“He’s your type,” he murmurs, because even in righteous irritation, attraction does not evaporate.
“Yes,” I say. “Unfortunately.”
The boy smiles again, unaware that he has become emblem as well as object of desire. He is not the villain. He is a cog in an ancient machine that confuses longevity with legitimacy.
Markets evolve. They have done so for centuries. They have shifted from barter to currency, from horse drawn carts to refrigeration. They can shift again.
Keep the fruit. Keep the herbs. Keep the olives slick with brine and the oranges bright as minor suns.
Drop the death.
Imagine a market where abundance is not built on bodies. Where tradition adapts instead of ossifies. Where the stall becomes a site of nourishment without violence.
This is not naïve. It is necessary.
Appetite is political.
Every euro extended across a counter is a vote for the system that produced what sits on it. Empires were built on grain and sugar and slaughter. Colonisation justified by livestock and land. The politics here are quieter but no less present. Which bodies are consumed. Which are commodified. Which are aestheticised into art while their suffering is sanitised into silence.
I step sideways, away from the charcuterie, toward the vegetable stall whose owner now nods when he sees me. This morning he calls me by name. Slightly mispronounced, but recognisable.
Recognition matters.
We buy oranges. We buy greens. We buy what does not require a caveat.
The young Parisien weighs another parcel of meat. His wrists turn elegantly. The paper folds crisply. Culture continues its choreography.
I do not expect him to transform overnight. I do not expect Avignon to abandon centuries of habit because two vegans have arrived with convictions intact.
But I refuse to romanticise what is plainly violence.
Markets are morning liturgy, yes.
But liturgies can be reformed.
The olives glisten. The oranges burn bright. The boy behind the butcher’s counter smiles again, luminous and oblivious.
Love the boy. Hate what he sells.
And refuse to let tradition hide behind charm.