Nobody Bakes in LA: Why you can't find a good baguette in LA to save your life...

I've spent the last few weeks since we got back from Paris meditating on the differences between life in Paris and life in Los Angeles... One of the more troubling differences I've found may seem patently obvious: the food...

I don't mean "fancy" stuff like Poulet Basquaise or Boeuf Bourguignonne... I mean the hopelessly simple things that you just can't find in LA.

Like bread.

For some reason, the bread in France (which you can buy on every street corner in the nieghborhood Boulangerie or Gas Station) is amazing... Extremely crispy crust that gets crumbs all over your sweater, with an impossibly fluffy inside that melts in your mouth... It's the kind of thing that you totally take for granted, and then weeks later you find yourself craving just one piece of bread, and there is simply nothing that satisfies...

We've been searching for a good baguette in Los Angeles for a couple weeks now, and while I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet, I find it discouraging that we can't seem to get this very basic piece of culinary mundanity correct...

As I waxed philosophic on the subject, A friend pointed out this article that says:

“Someone said to me today, "But the trouble is, here in Britain we don't really love food.". Perhaps that's it. Perhaps for many customers in the UK bread is just chunky, tasteless, soft and stodgy carbohydrate. An outspoken Australian will have no hesitation in telling the shop staff when they've got it right, and wrong. I can still recall my mother telling shopkeepers what their problem is. It matters to the customer because the reward for emigrating was always to have a better quality of life. And when that's missing, the Australian customer complains.” (http://www.danlepard.com/content/pages/melbourne.htm)

Perhaps that’s it… We have no love for food… Here in the States food is a necessary evil... Fast food is crippling America one obese 3rd grader at a time. Anything resembling "healthy" is marked up as a luxury, and the only food that the common man can afford is packed with so many six syllable preservatives it takes two scientists to understand just what I'm eating...

This leaves us with an interesting dilemma... I can either spend all my money buying groceries at Whole Foods like the snob I am, and have no money left for travelling the world... Or else I must simply settle for the slop that gets passed out at Food4Less at discount prices...

David tells me that when he first moved here from Australia, he hated the bread, and just quit bread altogether for about a year. Then he started eating bread and found that it wasn't so bad, he just had to forget what good bread was really like and settle for the "chunky, tasteless, soft and stodgy carbohydrate" that passes for bread here in Los Angeles.

How very sad.....