It would be a mistake to think of microtourism, the latest invented word to capture the imagination of the travel sector, as mere staycationing. The practice, as defined by a pair of design students in Denmark who recently completed a project on the theme, is a prerogative of a future in which “gas prices are so high that we must develop a new form of adventure that does not require travelling great distances.” Microtourism is not glamping (no yurt) or bleisure (no work) or minimooning (no wedding). Nor is it Netflix and putter. If a staycation means pajamas and the garden shed, microtourism means sneakers and the subway.

For several years now, my favorite microtouristic destination has been the Salon International de l’Agriculture, the enormous show that each spring brings the farmers of France together under the eight roofs of the Porte de Versailles convention center, accompanied by nearly four thousand of their bovine, ovine, caprine, porcine, equine, asinine, and canine companions. (The weight of the manure generated, almost three hundred tons, is equivalent to that of the steamship in “Fitzcarraldo.”) The Salon is about the bounty of la France profonde. Anything passably earthy goes. And, so, in addition to the éleveurs (animal farmers), there are agriculteurs (farmers in general), knife-makers, beekeepers, hot-tub venders, insurance agents, representatives of feed conglomerates, backhoe salesmen.

The notaries of France have a stand, as does the national association of drainage. You can buy a beret or a birdcage. You can obtain an I.D. card for your pet. You can subscribe to Pâtre, a monthly magazine for shepherds. Each of the country’s eighteen regions sponsors an area highlighting its gastronomy. Slurp down some oysters in Arcachon, grab some choucroute in Alsace, and then turn a corner and you’re in Martinique, drinking Ti’ Punch. Picture the Iowa State Fair crossed with the Aspen Food & Wine Classic, with the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show going on in a side ring.

In 2013, the first year I went to the Salon, I was living in Geneva. One Sunday morning, my husband and I caught the seven-forty-two train to Paris. By eleven-thirty (from Switzerland, it was maybe a mesotour), we were sampling what would become my favorite delicacy in all the land, the tourteau fromagé of Poitou-Charentes. (Giving Mancunians and Arkansawyers a run for their money in the demonym stakes, the area’s residents are known as the Picto-Charentais.) The tourteau fromagé is—getting into the compound-word spirit here—a goatcheesecake. The shortcrust pastry of the bottom part forms a lip where it meets the upper half, which rises domelike from the cereal-bowl-shaped base, and looks as though it were composed of volcanic ash. The burnt top is deceiving. It imparts just the slightest char, in the manner of a good pizza crust. The inside is tangy. Poke the crumb, and your finger emerges feeling almost wet, as though you’d stuck it into a loofah. At Tourteaux Jahan, Joël Ricard’s stand in Pavilion 3, the wares are displayed on risers, like a boys’ choir at a holiday concert. Ricard has been coming to the Salon since 1983. In a week, he sells five thousand cakes.

After the tourteau fromagé, it was the hatching chicks that hooked us. Watch them struggling out of their shells—albumen-coated miracles, translucent and greasy—and you’ll never again classify eggs as inanimate objects. (I read that the éleveurs brought fresh eggs every morning from Loué, a hundred and fifty miles southwest of Paris, a few premature emergences delighting commuters on the high-speed train.) We went again in 2014. And in 2015. Two months before the opening of this year’s fair, we moved to Paris. For me, the City of Light is as much about the allées de prestige—the orange-carpeted promenades lined with prize-winning exemplars of heritage breeds—as it is about the Champs-Élysées. Trudging their lengths with a bulging backpack and mucky shoes, I fell in love with the place. The Eiffel Tower will never be as dear to me as its produce-aisle facsimile: brassicas at the base, apples in the arches, a soaring midsection of leeks and carrots, topped by a four-layer finial of tomatoes, potatoes, pears, and lemons.

“We’ve already projected a winner.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

Last month, I walked to the Métro and boarded the No. 12 train, direction Porte de Versailles. For weeks, the city had been covered in posters featuring Cerise, who was serving as the “muse” of this year’s exposition. She had her own hashtag, #Cerise. In her honor, the management was offering free entry to anyone who shared her name. She was a brunette, from a small village in the Landes, the daughter of Ugolin and Sylvie, said to be “graceful but not aggressive.” She was a nineteen-hundred-pound Bazadaise cow, whose owner kept her coat lustrous by shampooing it daily with dishwashing liquid.

Thirty-five minutes later, I was blowing into a brass hunting horn the size of a phonograph. It made a sad little deflationary sound, like a party blower.

“Spit!” a vender at the Trompes Millienson booth yelled, coaching me. “Let’s go—spit!”

The Salon is a political crucible. Eternally obligatory, it can be, depending on the year, festive or harrowing. It’s basically an unseated town-hall meeting with tremendous amounts of booze thrown in. Jacques Chirac, the President of France from 1995 to 2007, was its undisputed master. Between 1972 and 2011, he missed the Salon only once, when he was recovering from a car accident. His version of kissing babies, as immortalized by “Les Guignols de l’Info”—a popular satirical puppet show—was “tâter le cul des vaches” (“caressing the cows’ asses”). Fuck Yeah Jacques Chirac, a blog that has reclaimed Chirac’s retro-suave style for Parisian hipsters, features fifteen pictures of Chirac au Salon. He might have been a mediocre chief executive, but the man knew how to dance to a Breton bagpipe and drink milk through a straw.

François Mitterrand, the President before Chirac, was not a Salon fan. Nicolas Sarkozy, the President after him, who has always had a hard time playing folksy, because of his distaste for wine, embarrassed himself by snarling, to a man who refused to shake his hand, “Casse-toi, alors, pauv’ con.” (It means, more or less, “Get lost, asshole.”) It was a big enough deal that in his book “La France Pour la Vie,” published in January, Sarkozy felt compelled to revisit the incident. “I myself was very wrong . . . to give in to provocation in responding to the individual who had insulted me,” he wrote. “It was an error, because he had the right to think what he said, even if he didn’t have to say it like that.” François Hollande, the current President of the Republic, has a reputation, according to Le Figaro, as “le marathonien du Salon.” In 2012, in full campaign mode, he stayed for no fewer than twelve hours.

Salonology is a pastime of the French media, particularly in a preëlection year. (France will choose a new President in May, 2017.) This year, BFMTV, the country’s most watched news channel, was reporting a “sinister atmosphere.” The network was, to an extent, sensationalizing the scene. But the suggestion of a certain gloom was reasonable. One could detect the most delicate aftershocks of the November terrorist attacks in the heightened security presence, and in the cancellation of the traditionally rowdy night sessions. (The exhibitors had voted to suspend them, on a trial basis, before the attacks, but the show’s president told reporters, “This year, given the state of emergency, it’s a good thing to not have an evening where we have to manage a lot of entrances and exits.”) The main thing, though, was la crise agricole, which was all anybody could talk about, and which meant that—because of a complicated chain of geopolitical events that had resulted in an oversupply—a litre of milk, on which a farmer needs to earn thirty-five centimes to break even, was now yielding him twenty-nine. In four years, the price of a metric ton of wheat has fallen from two hundred and fifty euros to a hundred and forty.