Welcome to the Geographer's Table
Hello, I’m Jean. Thanks for stopping by. This is my substack where I write about food, my life in France, and traveling in other countries.
I’m a cultural geographer by training and I work as a college professor for most of the year. I teach environmental studies and geography, and when I’m lucky, I get to spend a semester abroad with students from my home institution: the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.
The rest of the year I live in Lyon, France with my French husband. For a long time before we met seven years ago, I spent my summers in France and Italy in a way that was cheap, food centered, and involved full immersion living and eating with local families. How did I do that? You’ll have to read on to find out.
I’m calling my Substack The Geographer’s Table for two reasons. First, because here in France, the table is where conversation happens. Meals are very long by American standards, and everyone eats together. If one person is going to be late, we all eat late. If one person has a commitment later in the evening, we all eat early. Most of what I’ve learned about French life and culture from my French family (my husband, his children, and his parents) over the past seven years has happened at the table. In that spirit, I invite you to join me at the table and look forward to your comments.
The second reason is because my daily life, even when I’m teaching full time, really does center around the table: what I am going to eat next, or cook this week, or learn how to make. I am interested in all aspects of food: shopping, cooking, eating, but also growing, producing, and processing. The only kind of shopping I really enjoy is food shopping, and cooking is what I do when I have free time, for pleasure. And for more than a decade, I’ve spent summer vacation time working with local families on small, organic farms in Europe through the WWOOF organization. I’ve transplanted squash, staked tomatoes, braided onions and garlic, milked cows and goats, made cheese, hand harvested grapes to make wine, and so on. I returned five summers in a row to one place, a goat cheese farm in the south of France, where the couple I worked with became dear friends. In fact, it was their table, pictured below, in front of the hearth in a beautiful 17th century stone farmhouse that originally inspired my writing about France and the name of this newsletter.
If you subscribe to this substack (which is free, just skip over the link that asks you to pay), expect to read posts about food and cooking, living in France, eating in Rome and Italy (where I lived for the fall semester of 2023), and travels in other places.
Welcome to my table.
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