A very French baguette waiting for a movement of the wand that we hope will be magical. Google opens this Thursday a new online exhibition within its Arts & Culture space (in iOS, android Y website) dedicated to a slender and crunchy French woman known worldwide.
Last year, France made an official request register “the know-how and culture of the baguette” in the intangible heritage of UNESCO. A file that is proudly defended by the artisan bakers of France and which should receive a response from the international organization next week.
Waiting to find out if the reputation of the baguette, the inescapable star of the French image abroad, is enough, Google presents it in an online exhibition rich in thousands of documents and called The baguette, a French icon.
“Bread, a component of our civilization”
More than 2,000 photographs, paintings, iconographies and other images are presented through 77 virtual and interactive sections that recount both the controversial birth of the baguette, its know-how, bread all over the world, its representation in art, as well as what it is to be a baker in 2022 or recipes for not throwing away hardened bread.
“Bread is a component of our civilization, perhaps the main one, which the West makes. The baguette is a modernized expression of this,” explains Vincent Ferniot, food journalist and editorial director of the project. “It was important to us to give a voice to all those who still keep bread and baguettes alive, an absolute French tradition.” In this way, he wanted to pay tribute to “that know-how that we are the only ones to master” through a space that he hopes will become a benchmark in the matter.
City bread, memories of the bakery next to our house where we go almost every day, the baguette has a special history, “but one that speaks to each one of us, evokes childhood memories of the first purchase that parents many times We let it go,” he adds. Pierre Caessa, Director of Partnerships at Google Arts & Culture.
Created in 2011, Arts & Culture is a typically French venue with international influence, which creates these virtual exhibitions (more than 7 million available on all themes, the world’s largest museums on Street View, the most famous paintings digitized on gigapixels and explained, country issues such as artistic movements, etc.) within its online space. But the Parisian facilities are also home to artists-in-residence who design experiences both physically and for the place.
20,000 bakery jobs to be filled
All these memories and images of bread, Google and Vincent Ferniot have wanted to transcribe them through the presentation of bakery trades, emblematic figures and renowned chefs. “It’s like a special issue of a real magazine,” the journalist laughs. “We did a real curation job with the project partners (MUCEM, Intercereales, EKIP, Museo del Trigo y del Bread, National Confederation of Bakeries, FDMF, MOF, Editor’s Note) to have quality files, great stories, anecdotes. We wanted this virtual exhibition to be a reference work on the baguette and French know-how around bread”. It is also a way of maintaining traditions in the territory and continuing to make them live in 2022.
In France there are only 35,000 bakeries left, less than one per French city or town, while in the 1970s there were 55,000. “The madness of the 80s passed through there,” laments Vincent Ferniot. “The rise of supermarket baguettes has hurt the industry.” The cost of the activity also and, little by little, the profession declined. “Today there are 20,000 jobs to be filled in the bakery. Obviously, we hope that the profiles we present of these young people who want to become Meilleur Ouvrier de France, of these bakers who do this out of passion or of these women who will shine there, will arouse vocations”, admits Vincent Ferniot.
And to seduce the little ones, the exhibition also includes a video game in which a cyclist must collect the four constituent elements of bread (water, salt, flour, yeast) and not one more, as in the real recipe. Three levels are offered in Paris, Brittany and the countryside.
For Google Arts & Culture, putting bread and baguette in the spotlight isn’t just a coincidence with the next announcement. “We have been working on the issue for two years,” recalls Pierre Caessa. “This is our first exhibition dedicated to gastronomy. But it seemed essential to us.” Available in all languages for viewing abroad, it has an air of boastfulness and national pride.
“The baguette is not just an art of living, a very French product. It is also a source of transmission, of sharing knowledge. A true craft and a piece of French identity,” recalls Vincent Ferniot, who speaks passionately about bread and his love for it also cared to propose anti-waste recipes to show that the strength of bread is declining in every way. A heritage that, according to him, largely deserves (re)recognition.
5 things you didn’t know about the baguette
- Only four ingredients are authorized in the preparation of traditional bread: flour, water, salt, yeast or sourdough.
- It sells an average of 190 baguettes per second in France (6 billion sold in 2021). A Frenchman consumed an average of 94 g in 2018 compared to 900 g after World War II.
- It would have been created to be used in the bags of Napoleonic soldiers… or designed to be cut by hand to avoid putting knives on the table during the construction of the Paris metro when workers of Auvergne and Breton origin multiplied the fights and stabbings
- Its weight and size are not fixed, except for the Contest for the best traditional baguette: 50cm long and 250g after baking (all with +5% tolerance). But to benefit from the Bakery designation, bread must be prepared and baked on-site and, above all, not frozen.
- The wheat is of 100% French origin, like all the ingredients used.
Source: BFM TV
