“Homemade fries are a little fatty, they don’t cost much, and they’re super good”

“To make good fries, you have to get up at 6 am” : that’s what my father always said. He’s the one who cooks at home, he also cultivates his garden, and when I was a kid, I saw him prepare the potatoes in his garden, peel them, wash them, dry them, and do the first cooking before. to go to work. And then at noon, or in the evening, he started the second cooking, added a pinch of salt, and we had a great time. I ate a lot of fries as a child, and I loved it.

I grew up in Pas-de-Calais, in Frévent, a village in the Canche valley 40 km from Arras. I am a real ch’ti, from a poor and hard-working working family. Both my parents started working when they were 14. My mother was a seamstress in the factory, making mattresses and cushions until they were exhausted. She ended up as a disabled worker. My father made radiators full of asbestos before he became a municipal employee.

The village where I grew up is one of those places that hardly exist any more. When I was a kid, I didn’t have access to culture because there was no museum, theater or cinema, but there were shops, markets, jobs. Today, the city has lost 1,000 inhabitants, there is no more work, it has become a ghost town. That’s why I didn’t stay …

Healthy products for everyone

I passed my baccalaureate and spent a few fruitless years at the college in Arras, before looking for a job. My only option there was the Herta factory in Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise. But I didn’t want my parents’ life. I decided to go to Lyon, where I had a few friends, I found a job at La Grande Récré but it didn’t last: I rebelled against the fact that the channel refuses to denounce the work. children in China, I launched a protest strike, and got fired for “Non-respect of the hierarchy”.

It was the best thing that could happen to me: two friends offered to set up a bar – a place that is in line with our anti-globalization values ​​and that supports the peasant world. We launched On the other side of the bridge in 2004, a bar-restaurant-performance hall in a working-class district of Lyon, where we used the recipes of our grandmothers and organic and local producers, where beer artisanal was our tool for economic redistribution.

While working at the bar, I went back to studies, and I obtained a master’s degree in social and solidarity economy. I had to go further: with the bar, we reached an already militant public, I wanted to reach a more distant public. The VRAC association (Towards a joint purchasing network) was born in 2013, from my meeting with an official of the Abbé Pierre Foundation and with a social landlord who sought to restore social power to its tenants.

The idea: to give poor populations access to good organic products, directly from producers, at cost price. Finally, we are not so far from homemade fries: they are simple products, made with love and without intermediaries. It’s a little greasy, it doesn’t cost much, and it’s super good.