We’ve got an itinerant cheese-selling woman who comes into town every Friday morning to sell the cheeses she purchases from local farms, and I like this old-fashioned way of buying cheese (other people, like the mayor, find it mortifying that our village is too small to support its own cheese shop). She stations herself in the plaza and likes to share news about the farms and villages she’s visited this week (at the moment we get a lot of baby animal news, like new calf announcements.) She has the unfortunate habit of denigrating her own cheeses without meaning to because she is a cheese perfectionist. You ask for a bleu, she grimaces hesitantly and says “Ah, poor choice, it doesn’t look quite right to me today”; or you tell her “I really liked the brie I picked last time, so creamy!” and she shakes her head and goes “Ah, you got lucky, often that farmer gives me such shitty brie with a chaulky texture—” then she suddenly looks frustrated with herself, you can tell she’s thinking “why am I giving this information to a client?? I’m the worst cheese saleswoman ever.” It’s very endearing.
She also sells eggs, and always writes the name of the farmer she got it from on each carton so you can make sure to buy your friends’ eggs and avoid your enemies’ eggs. You’ve got to be like “Six Gilbert eggs please” and publicly announce where your loyalty lies, it’s a whole Thing. If one day you decide to go rogue and ask for Agnès eggs instead you can be sure people will notice, and they will talk. Getting my own chickens is the only way I have found to avoid pledging egg allegiance.
I am OBSESSED with this egg based clique culture
