← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Taking Meat off the Menu
00:28:18
Few French restaurants offer a menu without meat, so John Laurenson's been finding out...
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Transcript12 lines
- [00:00]
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You're about to hear from our own correspondent. We do two versions of the programme, one for the BBC World Service and this one's a download of the latest edition from BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, the rebels of Eastern Ukraine, busy rubbing away all traces of a country they want no part of introducing a new global political force. City mayors. They say it's time to take power away from tired old nation states. We're up in the mountains of Greece where one of Europe's most wanted men is said to be hiding out. And no more calf's head, no pigs trotters, even the bull's tongue is off. We find out what happened when one of France's top chefs left meat off the menu. Now, when's a ceasefire? Not a ceasefire in Eastern Ukraine, apparently. A truce is officially still in place there. But there have been significant exchanges of gunfire. Last weekend, the government and Russian backed rebels agreed to pull back artillery and rockets from the front lines. A deal which has yet to be implemented. Paul Adams has just spent a week in the so called people's republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and tells us he doesn't believe they'll be brought back under government control.
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A warm autumn sun casts golden light over the endless fields of the Donbas region where farmers have been busy. Stubble glows yellow against the black rich soil where it's been unsafe to drive a tractor. Mournful sunflowers cast their dry, blackened heads to the ground. Here and there, a pylon brought down by gunfire kneels like a wounded warrior. And as you head east towards rebel territory, the checkpoints come thick and fast. Bored, grumpy, polite, jovial, hi. The soldiers come in all moods and all uniforms. The first rebel to inspect my passport was sporting a British desert camouflage jacket, complete with Union flag on the shoulder. But as summer gives way to autumn, the soldiers are pulling their uniforms a little closer. For all the sunshine, the air is turning cool. The war's first winter is around the corner. Last year, the world watched clouds of breath rising from the frigid barricades in Kiev. Then this year, winter will fall hard and ruthless across a war zone full of shattered homes, frozen front lines and hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Slowly, the rebels are rubbing away all traces of a country they want no part of. Amid a plethora of flags, the blue and yellow of Ukraine has vanished, visible only in a few rural bus stops. It's getting harder and harder to find anyone willing openly at least, to say they're Ukrainian. But in one scarred neighborhood of Donetsk, I met Larissa, an elderly former chess teacher, clinging tenuously to her nerves as artillery rounds crashed in the distance. This simmering civil war still baffled and horrified her. I'm Ukrainian, she wailed, shaking with anguish. Why are my fellow countrymen doing this to me? But in a place where dissent can get you picked up, beaten, or worse, the the Ukrainians have either left or are keeping very quiet. People who remain talk of new identities, of being citizens of the People's Republic of Donetsk or Luhansk, or, perhaps more ominously, of Novorossiya, a territory whose historic boundaries could stretch all the way to Odessa and beyond. On a rural stretch of road south of Krasnyi Luch, we stop to marvel at a trio of impossibly elegant dark demoiselle cranes sauntering casually by. As we got our cameras out, soldiers appeared and asked why on earth we were photographing a bunch of birds. Take my picture, one of them said. I'm a citizen of an independent country called Russia. Was this a statement of fact, I wondered, or merely wishful thinking? But here, in this deceptively tranquil countryside, the rebels are doing what the jihadis of ISIS are doing to Iraq and Syria, erasing what they see as illegitimate borders and, with rose tinted glasses, turning back the clock to some more congenial moment in the past. This is a part of the world where they never got around to taking down the statues of Lenin. We saw one with a helmet on his head and a grenade launcher taped to his outstretched hand. The rebels do this, happy in the knowledge that a new father figure is watching over them from the Kremlin, ready and willing to send the tanks and the troops back in. For all Kiev's offers of enhanced autonomy, there's not much the government can do to win these areas back. In some ways they've already gone, heading inexorably for some twilight status as barely recognized satellites of the newly assertive Russia, following dismal examples set in the past by Transnistria, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia. Is this what you really want for your people? I asked Andrey Pugin, number two in the Donetsk People's Republic and one of the region's chief ideologues. There are plenty of small, proud nations, he countered, and besides, Ukraine is large and poor, the cesspool of Europe. On the way back to London, we spent the night in the elegant, prosperous city of Dnepropetrovsk, back in government territory. Over dinner, I asked our host, Dmitry, whether it was already too late for Kiev to win back Donetsk and Luhansk. His reply surprised me. Let them go. If that's the price for ending this war, so be it. They're miserable places anyway, full of the descendants of convicts. At the airport, we taxied past jet fighters and attack helicopters parked on the tarmac. Soldiers were digging fortifications nearby. Winter is coming, and with it, most people believe, more war.
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And that was Paul Adams. The mayors of big cities across Britain are wondering whether one result of the Scottish no vote will be more substantial devolution for them, a greater say in running the affairs of their citizens. There's a growing number of local politicians who believe the cities should be able to determine their own taxes. This, they argue, would benefit not only their local community, but also the national economy. Misha Glenny has been in the Netherlands, where a group of municipal politicians from around the world have been planning their next step forward.
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Tousel haired and enthusiastic Mayor Eberhard van der Laen welcomes his guests. But today he is not addressing Amsterdam's council members as usual, but his peers from across Europe and America. City mayors have accepted his invitation to help build an institution which, if successful, could transform the way we are governed. A global parliament of mayors. In the United States, polls show that the level of public trust in Congress runs at a paltry 12%. Trust in American mayors, by contrast, runs at between 60 and 65%. The man who makes that observation is sharing the platform with Mayor van der Lan. His sharp features and restless energy put one in mind of a small bird of prey whose tenacity should never be underestimated. Professor Benjamin Barber, an American scholar, is the author of an intriguing book called if Mayors Ruled the World. Most academics are like Karl Marx's philosophers. They seek only to interpret the world. But Professor Barber has taken up the other half of Marx's dictum and is seeking to change it now. Mayors and local politicians the world over have taken up his call to arms and are on the verge of organising the first ever global parliament of mayors. The aim is to bring together some 600 mayors from around the world, probably as early as next year, to London, where they will announce themselves as a new political force. Global in reach, global local in experience and achievement. Professor Barber's thesis is compelling. Cities are the way of the future, whether we like it or not. Through much of the 19th century, 1 in 30 of us lived in cities. Now that figure is 1 in 2. In Europe or Latin America, almost 4/5 are already urban dwellers. Mayors running megacities like Istanbul, Dhaka or Sao Paulo have budgets far in excess of many countries. But they also have a whole range of problems, from potholes to gargantuan traffic jams that need sorting out here and now. And that means mayors usually evolve into very different beasts than national politicians. Less ideological posturing and more problem solving. If they don't address their constituents immediate problems concerning housing, transport, sewage and energy, it's simple. They don't get back into office. Wandering from Amsterdam's central station to the town hall, along the red paved streets with those gorgeous tall houses that line the canals. It is, I think, rather hard to compare the struggles of the mayor of Amsterdam to the problems of, say, Bogota in Colombia. Yet the mayor of Bogota is one of the project's most fervent supporters. Cooperation always yields results. London, for example, is finally going to build two cycle superhighways, in large part because Amsterdam and other European cities have demonstrated conclusively that they cut energy consumption and increase fitness levels. Everybody wins except the oil companies and the traffic wardens. What's not to like? In Holland? Mayor van der Leyen explained, the major urban centres learned that cooperation was the best way forward a long time ago. Ago. So instead of competing with one another for resources and favours from central government, the Big four Amsterdam, Utrecht, the Hague and Rotterdam now work together. Their accumulated clout means the government is now much more accommodating. Professor Barber argues that pragmatic mayors are in a much better position to set up cooperative networks to solve even the big global problems and of climate change or organized crime than what he believes to be the tired old systems of the nation's state and nationalism. But this is no talking shop, pontificating about how better life would be if mayors ruled the world. There is a surprise guest in the town hall whose usual clients include the Rolling Stones, Queen, Led Zeppelin and Sting. Harvey Goldsmith, Britain's most successful rock concert impresario, is, is listening attentively to the Mayor Van der Lan and Professor Barber. If city chiefs from around the world want to hold their inaugural parliament next year in London, Harvey Goldsmith is committed to making it happen. Britain's politicians may be twisting themselves in knots over the issue of constitutional change since the Scottish referendum campaign. While they do, this group of can do politicians may may end up rewriting constitutions across the globe in the way they always have by getting on with
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the job, and that's Misha Glenny. Now, only one man, as far as we know, has escaped from jail in a helicopter twice. His name is Vasilis Paliokostas. He is a Greek bank robber Serial kidnapper and one of Europe's most wanted men. Because he reportedly gives his ill gotten gains to the poor and claims to have never hurt a soul. Some of his fans call him Robin Hood. Geoff Meish has been to the foothills of the mountains near Trikala in central Greece, where Palaeokostas was born in 1966 and where they say he's hiding out today.
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There is a popular proverb here in these mountainous villages. If you steal something small, you are a petty thief, but if you steal millions, you are a gentleman of society. It describes the attitudes of many Greeks towards a modern day bandit who rose from these desperately poor communities to become one of Europe's most wanted men. A bank robber and kidnapper who reportedly gives his loot to the poor. Villagers here remember Vasilius Palaeokostas as a quiet lad with an infectious smile. His father tells me Vasilis was the introverted son who later quit his job in a cheese factory because he felt exploited. A local detective, Dimitrios Gravanis, says that the teenager was hooked on American action movies. I was retracing the footsteps of a quite remarkable career criminal. Outside the national bank of Greece in nearby Kalambaka, I was detained by local police. They were concerned that my photography was part of a robbery plan. This very bank was the scene of Greece's largest ever cash robbery committed by Vassilis Paleokostas, his brother Nikos and his mentor Costas Samaras. They stole over £300,000 worth of drachmar that day in June 1992. And according to reports, Palaeo Costas threw handfuls of banknotes from his getaway car window, causing pandemonium in the streets. Palaeo Costas quickly progressed from bank robberies to kidnappings. In December of 1995, the bandit demanded more than £600,000 for the release of a factory boss called Alexander Hateglue. The magnate told reporters later, my kidnapper's behaviour was not bad at all. Actually, I enjoyed some wide ranging discussions with them. But shortly after the ransom was paid, Palaeokostas crashed his car and was arrested. I visited the notorious Corydalus jail near Athens, where he was locked up inside. A warden tells me that Palaeokostas was desperate to break out. He used poverty as an excuse to become a criminal. The warden tells me he started to believe this Robin Hood myth. One night he found a file hidden inside the prisoner's spaghetti, but patiently waited for him to cut through the bars. Palaeokostas did finally escape. Corydalos jail in 2006, remarkably using a stolen helicopter piloted by his brother Nikos. The Hollywood style escape was planned and executed by Palaeokostis cellmate Alket Rezai, a convicted hitman from Albania. Both Rizai and Nikos were arrested shortly after the escape, but Vassilis Palaeokostas remained at large. In June 2008, he kidnapped George Milanas, a billionaire aluminium mogul. The reported take was £1.13 million. But eventually Greek authorities tracked Palaeokostas down and a couple of months later he he was captured. A group of young women invaded the courtroom, acting like a fan club, while a mob gathered outside the court chanting death to pigs and freedom to Palaeokostas. The day before his trial proper in 2009, a guard on a watchtower at Corydalas heard the familiar throb of rotor blades. Unbelievably, Vasilius Palaeokostas and his cellmate Alket Rezai were making a run for it again. I'll shoot, threatened a mysterious blonde woman as she threw a rope ladder from the helicopter to the prison yard. She was brandishing a machine gun. This time the guards fired, rupturing the fuel line of the helicopter. But still the two jailbirds flew to safety and the bank robberies resumed. Paleocosta style hold ups plagued central Athens, sometimes two in the same day, sometimes on the same street. He found himself blamed for almost every major crime in the country, including a 2010 letter bomb that killed a government aide. Though in open letters to the media, Palaeokostas insists he has never hurt anyone. But now he had a new foe. A secretive American CIA anti terror squad based in Athens known as the Invisibles, who were tasked with smoking out special case criminals. In his letter to the media, Palaeokostas described being trapped in a roadblock and shot at some hundred and fifty times. But somehow he escaped. The stories of local charity also returned, including cash gifts to the sick. Vassilis Palaeokostas has never been seen again, although the search for him continues. Detective Dimitros Gravanis, who spent much of his career chasing him, told me over a Greek coffee, it is not a matter of if he strikes again, it's when.
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And that was Geoff Meish. The announcement that the European Court of Human Rights is to hear an appeal against the conviction for tax fraud of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has done little to change perceptions that corruption in Italy is still widespread and reaches right to the top of its political establishment. It's a malaise that infects every corner of Italian society. The public have little respect for the political classes and often think nothing of dodging laws and regulations and even their tax bills. And the Mafia, if not as pervasive as it was in decades gone by, still exerts considerable influence, particularly in the south and in parts of Sicily, as Antonia Quirk's been finding out.
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Giovanni Spodoro spends his days mending and selling saucepans, fixing old showerheads and smelting metal inside a tiny, charred walled cave which has served as his workshop since 1947 on the edge of the town of Sheatley. Now 85, surely he must be considering retirement, I suggest as I sit with him over the course of a weekday afternoon, during which time not a single person stops to buy a pan. Giovanni shakes his head. I'll keep going for as long as I'm capable, he says, standing up and walking about the cave to prove his mobility. For six days a week, I have earned my bread. The hills around us are dotted with hundreds of caves like this one. Until well into the 1970s, they were occupied by as many as 2,000 people. They lived and raised their families without any kind of modern facilities until they were moved into social housing in another part of town. More recently, the stylish Milanese have been buying and renovating them as novelty residences. You can actually snap one up for around €7,500. How times change. When the film director Pier Paolo pasolini visited in 1956, he compared the caves and their community to a scene from Dante's Inferno. And yet my friend Theresa's grandfather was born in a cave and went on to become mayor of sheekly in the 1950s. In town, when I quietly ask about how the local Mafia, who always have their eye on any kind of construction, feel about this new little housing boom, I met with sour shrugs. They are here, somebody says, but we don't know these people. There is, in fact, less Mafia activity in this far southern part of Sicily than you might imagine. You see fewer of those Mafia linked abandoned housing projects, high rise flats inexplicably built in the middle of supposedly protected orange groves, endless roadworks and half finished bridges that scar the landscape further north, although tons of dead fish were recently washed up along the coast near here. This, they said, smelled of the Mafia money ruinously diverted from one budget Elsewhere, corners cut, jobs being done badly, if at all. It was ever thus in super corrupt Italy, of course. But friends in Sicily speak of a worsening of the country's Perennial mood of apathy, of nervous listlessness and iniquitous sudden social collusion. The facts do speak for themselves. 16 regions out of 20 from the north to the south of Italy are currently under investigation for the misappropriation of public funds worth around 60 million euros. More than half of the population are currently employed by the government doing sometimes entirely pointless and deeply spurious jobs. Ways of cheating the system seem positively encouraged, and the cost of tax evasion is estimated at anything up to 275 billion euros a year. Never forget that the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, during one election campaign, said people were morally justified to withhold their taxes. It's a Mafia logic, a Mafia mentality rages my Sicilian friend Luca. People never do what's right anymore and only what lines their pockets. There's no meritocracy, no quality in public affairs, no structure, no certainty of punishment and no belief in your rights as a citizen. If you protest, this is now entirely the culture of the chancer of the wide boy. The Mafia, he says, has won. We're driving past olive trees heavy with deep green fruit behind a truck piled with honeydew melons and white onions. Terraced vineyards and misted hazelnut groves stretch to right and left along the quiet roads towards Catania. It's easy to forget that this is a country that leaves many with such a bitter taste in the mouth. Luca plans to stand as mayor in his town close to Messina, on an anti corruption, anti Mafia ticket. Something many tell him is really not wise. In the north of Sicily especially, the Mafia remains strong in the down at Hill Calce quarter of Palermo. I watch as a man bold as brass pulls up a chair on a pavement and receives his pizzo protection money handed over by local stallholders and restaurant owners. In the background you can hear the choir practicing for Sunday through the doors of the nearby church. There was no protest, no rancour, no questioning of the status quo. You could almost imagine this man saying, like Giovanni in his cave in the south, for six days a week, I have earned my bread. Such is the perpetual muddling of what constitutes work, respect and self respect in Sicily, as the migrating swallows dart along the narrow autumn streets like little hot whirlwind towards Africa.
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Antonia Quirk In Sicily, now, the French are a little suspicious of vegetarians. The classic response when you tell a French waiter you want something vegetarian is, oh, are you sick? Their menus are rich in meat dishes. Many feature animal parts people on this side of the channel would never dream of eating. So no wonder the decision of one of the country's most celebrated chefs to take meat off the menu has caused a shock. John Laurenson's been investigating.
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Alain Ducasse, wrapped neck to knees in a white apron, strode into the kitchen at the Plaza Atene, greeting his chefs like a ship's captain saluting the crew. Alain Ducasse, one of France's top chefs, perhaps its uppermost top chef. His 26 restaurants around the world have a total of 18 stars in the Michelin Guide. The only Frenchman in the Forbes list of the world's hundred most influential people. I'm very lucky to have five minutes with Mr. Ducasse during the reopening of his celebrated Paris restaurant and have completely blown it by insisting that he speak in English. It's my passion. Vegetables are my passion, he says, looking mystically at me through his glasses. Long, long time ago. I have vegetable menu. I decide that. And do you have a message for my people? I want to ask him. As a matter of fact, he does eat more greens. The shocking news is that Alain Ducasse, a man never at a loss for things to do with a breast chicken, a ready salted Mont St Michel lamb or a lump of goose pate, has turned the Plaza Atene vegetarian. Okay, not in the super rigorous Anglo American sense of the word, where you actually stop eating animals altogether. French vegetarianism. A blue lobster here, a turbot in champagne sauce there. But make no mistake, taking meat off the menu is a daring thing to do in France. Traditional French cooking is a farmyard veal blanquette, coq au vin, boeuf bourguignon, pot au feu. But what really marks out the French at table is the tremendous range of apparently disgusting things they are prepared to put in their mouths. Ok, udder is getting rare on the menu these days, but calf head, ex president Jacques Chirac's favourite. Wherever he went, people used to rush out at him with plates of calf head, bull's tongue, a school canteen favourite, frog's legs. In order to get Edward VII to eat this delicacy, the great chef Escoffier described them on the menu as jambes de nymph, legs of a nymph. And then, of course, there's that bistro staple and billet sausage, which manages to be made out of one unmentionable body part and made to resemble another. It's really quite an achievement when you think about it. When I was learning French, I'd sometimes take a dictionary into restaurants, but a lot of the time I didn't know what dubious sounding thing the English Word referred to chitterlings, gizzard. I've grown to admire the French for being so omnivorous. It's their sort of ecology. I mean, it's appalling when you think of the kilometres of cow intestine that are thrown away when they could be used to make tripe a la mode de camp. And it's made a culinary world that's full of surprises, if not like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. There's a restaurant where I used to go to eat pig's trotters that has something a little special for the true amateur. A selection of peripheral pig parts that includes ear, snout and a curly wurly tail. The dish is called, rather magnificently, St Anthony's temptation. France then is not always an easy place to be a vegetarian. And for the French there's a big grey area that includes food, fish and what they call white meat, that is anything with wings. It also includes lardon, those little red bacon foot soldiers of French cuisine. How many vegetarians have explained their vegetarian and been promised a vegetarian quiche only to find themselves picking bits of pork out of their mouths? I have a vegetarian acquaintance who recounts how a dish the waiter had assured him was vegetarian was in fact full of bits of duck pate. When he complained, the waiter said, but there's only a little bit. Alain Ducasse fans say that with his wonderful courgettes, sourced in a little farm above Nice and so on, he's showing that vegetables can taste amazing without foie gras or lardon to liven them up. Absolute bliss. An assortment of salad leaves on a plate enthuses one with Alain Ducasse. Less is more. Except for the bill, of course. Dinner at the Plaza will set you back about €400 a head, not including wine. One for special occasions. Then, like resurrections for the hoi polloi, there is the promise of trickle down. Because Ducasse has a school for chefs and many, many admirers and imitators. His move at the Plaza is likely to influence humbler restaurants holed up in their apartments with their pasty faced children, fearful of going out to eat in case the waiter decides to punish them for their pickiness with a plate of plain boiled carrots. The vegetarians of France could use his help.
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And that's it. John Laurenson with that shock development in the world of haute cuisine, bringing this edition to a close. I'll be here with more tasty fare from the correspondence far and wide on Saturday morning. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.