âThe international market of Rungis, the largest fresh food market in Europe, is located close to Orly airport, south of Paris â about an hourâs drive from the city centre during the day, but just 20 minutes in the dead of night when those who feed Paris are already awake and hard at work.
At 4am in Rungis, it feels like the entire city is awake and roaring. And it is a city â around 13,000 people work here across 234 hectares, getting on for twice the size of Londonâs Hyde Park. Not only is it the size of a small city, it is hustling like one: across a series of hangars that stretch as far as the eye can see, there are hundreds of lorries manoeuvring, forklift trucks going in all directions, cries and boisterous laughs, the odd trader on his plastic chair drinking instant coffee before hitting the road, with the entire uncanny landscape illuminated by floodlights. So much of what Paris eats emanates from these hangars: the bavette sold by your local butcher, the fish grilled in a Michelin-starred restaurant, the piece of ComtĂ© cheese youâll purchase at your favourite cheesemongers.â
Todayâs article, the first in our series on Paris, is by
@justi on Rungis â the monumental fresh food market that dwarfs any equivalent in London â and its relationship with the modern city. At Rungis you enter another world far removed from the sanitisation of central Paris: wholesalers of every kind, producers whose hands have worked the soil, endless rows of offal specialists, hundreds of tonnes of tails, brains, skins, livers, kidneys, testicles, tongues, hearts, lungs, and even a small ecosystem of restaurants that serve tĂȘte de veau next to the place the meat was butchered.
Many thanks to
@quedubon_bistrot and
@goldenpintade for joining, and
@wendyhuynh for the astonishing photos (content warning: there are dead animals).
Link to the full article in our bio