PARIS — Mustard is deeply rooted in French culture. “My blood is boiling” is rendered in French with the phrase “la moutarde me monte au nez”, or “the mustard rises in my nose” – and as Bastille Day attests, the effect could be devastating if that happens in France.
While France celebrated its most important national holiday on Thursday, commemorating the 1789 storming of the prison of the fortress Bastille that sparked the French Revolution, the mysterious disappearance of mustard from supermarket shelves has sparked, if not insurrection, at the very least. deep unrest.
Deprived of the seasoning that lends an edge to a steak frites, life to a grilled sausage, depth to a vinaigrette and richness to mayonnaise, France has been scurrying around for alternatives in quiet desperation. Horseradish, wasabi, Worcestershire sauce and even creams of Roquefort or shallots have all emerged as contenders.
Poor contenders, it must be said. The problem is that Dijon mustard is as irreplaceable as it is indispensable. Butter or cream of unique quality may be more essential to French cuisine, but many unctuous sauces wither to tastelessness without mustard. In Lyon, the idea of an offal sausage, or andouillette, without mustard sauce is just as unthinkable as cheese without wine.
Another problem, it turns out, is that Dijon mustard is largely composed of ingredients that don’t come from that pretty capital of Burgundy. A perfect storm of climate changea European war, Covid supply problems and rising costs have left French producers short of the brown seeds that make their mustard, mustard.
Most of those brown seeds – at least 80 percent according to Luc Vandermaesen, director of the large mustard manufacturer Reine de Dijon and president of the Burgundy Mustard Association – come from Canada. A heat wave over Alberta and Saskatchewan, which scientists said was “virtually impossibleWithout global warming, seed production fell by 50 percent last year, while rising temperatures hit the smaller Burgundy crop hard.
“The main problem is climate change and the result is this shortage,” Mr Vandermaesen said in an interview. “We are unable to respond to the orders we are getting and selling prices have increased by as much as 25 percent due to the rising cost of seeds.”
His company now gets at least 50 calls a day from people looking for mustard. There were no such calls before mustard disappeared. People are even flocking to the Dijon headquarters (no retail business) in a frantic search for mustard. Carrefour, a leading French and international hypermarket chain, has been forced to deny rumors on Twitter that it is building mustards to push prices up. Chefs like Pierre Grandgirard in Brittany have resorted to calling online for every extra mustard someone has.
In most stores, the mustard shelves are already emptied. Where there is mustard, some signs say sales are “limited to one jar per person.” Intermarché, a retailer, who apologizes for the inconvenience caused, explains in another sign on a shelf that “a drought in Canada” and the “Ukraine’s conflict with Russia” are the mustard “penury”, as the French call it. have caused.
For the French, who are proud of their mustard, the idea that it is rarely an entirely local product and more often dependent on the kind of multinational supply chain disrupted by the pandemic has also come as a shock.
The war in Ukraine has made things even more complicated. Both Russia and Ukraine are major producers of mustard seeds, but generally not the brown seeds, or Brassica Juncea, used in classic Dijon mustard. The mainly yellow seeds produced in the two warring countries are popular in countries including Germany and Hungary, which prefer a milder seasoning.
Because the yellow mustard seeds have been a casualty of war, prompting countries that depend on them to seek other types of mustard, “the pressure on the mustard market in general has increased, driving prices up,” said Mr Vandermaesen. .
France consumes about 2.2 pounds of mustard per year per inhabitant, making it the largest consumer in the world. While there are indications of shortages in other countries, including Germany, the French mustard crisis is unique in its magnitude, partly because France is so heavily dependent on Canada for its seeds.
In a crisis, of course, there are opportunities. Paul-Olivier Claudepierre, the co-owner of Martin-Pouret, an all-French supplier of mustard and vinegar, told Le Monde the time had come to “relocate production”.
“We’re cultivating a seed thousands of miles away that we’re going to harvest, bring to a port, ship across the ocean in containers, to transform it at home,” he said. “That costs a lot, and what a great carbon toll!”
Mr Vandermaesen said Burgundy had begun a concerted effort to increase production, even if it could not match “the very large production areas in Alberta and Saskatchewan”. One problem Burgundian producers face is that the European Union has banned an insecticide that has long been used to control the black flea beetle, a pest.
For now, it seems that France will have to learn to live without mustard, a painful adjustment. Marie Antoinette, the queen of France at the time of the revolution, is said to have said, “Let them eat cake,” when told of peasants starving without bread. (Whether she really did, before she was guillotined in 1793, is another matter.)
“Let them eat wasabi,” is a phrase President Emmanuel Macron would probably do better to avoid.