“My convictions around meals are rooted in Corsica. Firstly, through my grandmother from Bastia, who shaped my relationship with cooking. Like all the women in the family, she was afraid of getting fat and often went on diets, but from time to time she prepared great family dishes that everyone agreed on, such as storzapretti, soft half-baked dumplings. gnocchi, half-quenelles. There, I understood how much civilization held together thanks to meals. Storzapretti are served in a large dish, au gratin in the oven, and their name means “priest choke”, because the legend says that one day a priest ate it until he choked.
In Corsica, I grew up near chestnut forests and in citrus orchards – oranges, lemons, clementines – which were untreated and whose peel could be used as pulp. This is one of the things that put me on the organic path: I understood that when they are not treated, and that they are harvested and consumed in season, our food is tastier, better for health and more economical, since everything can be used.
In the storzapretti, there are also products that are close to my heart: Swiss chard, an unloved vegetable that I adore, accessible, easy to grow and so Mediterranean. The herbs of the maquis bring an incomparable perfume, the brocciu, which is taken from the whey drained from the tomes of sheep and goats, is emblematic of pastoralism and our omnivorous condition. These animals make it possible to enhance the most impassable areas, by feeding on brush and giving milk.
A choice of society
It took me a while to make this journey. After my baccalaureate, I did a hypokhâgne in Nice, then Science Po in Paris. I worked in marketing, at L’Oréal and Vuitton, then in consulting. A major health problem brought me back to basics: thinking about what I really wanted to do rather than what “did well” on my resume. I was fascinated by the wave of “good healthy meals”. It clicked while reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan [Penguin, 2006], brilliant deconstruction of our food system, unfortunately not translated into French, and I decided to devote everything I knew how to food.
My first assignments were as an independent consultant for mass distribution, which wanted to welcome SMEs on its shelves. One thing leading to another, I found myself at the head of the Organic Agency (which supports the development of organic farming in France), where I defend biodiversity and access to healthy food for all.
Today, I see something terrible happening: people have turned away from organic, because they think it’s expensive while inflation is less strong in this sector. When you understand what that means – 0% synthetic pesticides – and what that means for consumers as well as for farmers, the land and nature, you know that you can’t do without it. It is a choice of society and a choice of life. »