Vegan travelling in France

We recently spent a couple of weeks driving round France in our van – taking in St Malo, Bordeaux, Arcachon, Strasbourg and various points in between, plus Luxembourg and Brussels afterwards for good measure. While I was there I took the opportunity to have a look at what vegan food was on offer in supermarkets and restaurants, to see how easy or difficult it would be to survive as a vegan on holiday in France without the two ring camping stove, crates full of food and vehicle to transport them in that we brought with us.

=== Supermarkets ===

If you’ve got any sort of cooking facilities and can get to a supermarket you’ll be fine, even if your cooking facilities consist of a one-ring camping stove. Supermarkets tend to be situated on the outskirts of towns or on road leading into and out of towns, and they go in for big supermarkets, even bigger than Britain, so there’s a good range of products. As well as basic ingredients such as fruit and veg, pasta, bread, tinned beans and so on, they have organic sections which include quite a few vegan products (none of which require refridgeration) such as pâté, tofu, vegeburgers, ravioli, vegan mayonnaise, snack bars and munchy seeds, a few vegan vegeburgers and pre-prepared dishes in the chillers, a very good selection of non-dairy milks, yoghurts and soya desserts (and sometimes non-dairy ice cream or sorbet) and international sections (usually Mexican, British, Japanese and Indian-style foods) for ingredients such as tortillia wraps or peanut butter.

The main specialist vegan product brands to look for are Sojasun (entirely vegan), CéréalBio and Bjorg (who both make some vegan products but not all of them are, although I think all their products are vegetarian). Apart from some of these, hardly any products were labelled as suitable for vegetarians.

Other useful vegan products I spotted were: breakfast cereals, cereal bars, quick-cook wholegrain rice, gnocchi (little potato dumplings that only take one minute to cook – great camping food!), flavoured couscous, lots of varieties of pasta (forgot to check for sauces but there were quite a lot of Sacla ones, some of which are vegan), bags of nuts

Products I didn’t find (or didn’t find vegan versions of) which I find useful for camping/road trips: instant mashed potato (it all contained milk), straight-to-wok noodles, dried soya mince, houmous, vegan margarine (which I didn’t look for as we didn’t have a fridge).

See below for foods which don’t require cooking.

=== Finding food in towns or cities ===

Small towns didn’t seem to have much in the way of food shops actually in the towns themselves (presumably because they have massive supermarkets every few miles), some had Spar shops or similar small shops which didn’t seem to be hugely promising for interesting food. There’s always bread from the boulangerie (every little town has one of those!) but not a lot else to go with your bread as far as I could tell…

In the cities we visited (Bordeaux and Strasbourg) there weren’t many supermarkets or similar food shops in the city centre. In both cases there was a good supermarket section in the Monoprix department stores, which just looked like clothes shops from the outside but had a supermarket on the lower level.

=== Restaurants ===

As for buying food in restaurants or takeaways, I found very little in the way of vegan food. If you know where you’re going, have a look on happycow.net or similar before you go. Indian, Chinese and Thai restaurants categorised the dishes on their menus by type of meat, rather than by type of dish like they do in Britain, so you can see at a glance that there’s likely to be bugger all vegan, even in Indian restaurants which was quite surprising, although they may offer one or two vegetable dishes which may or may not be vegan. Not the choice we’re used to here! Vegetarian dishes in Italian restaurants seemed to be entirely cheese-based, and don’t even bother looking for vegan food in traditional French cafes, they’ll probably have you kicked out of the country if they find out what you’re doing… Maybe I was just looking in the wrong places, but I have to say I didn’t find very much at all. Strasbourg has a couple of vegetarian restaurants (one of which I walked past several times without even realising it was vegetarian) and we had an evening meal at a Lebanese restaurant called La Cascade, where the nice waiter/guy in charge brought us vegetarian mezze with no milk or eggs (and didn’t make too much of a fuss when we asked if it would be possible). Looking at the restaurant guides, it looks like there are lots of vegetarian restaurants in Paris, but anywhere else requires serious research beforehand. I was surprised not to find more Middle Eastern takeaways (and hence falafel), maybe they are more common in other cities.

=== Travelling with no cooking facilites ===

This is what I was really interested to find out – is it possible to manage as a vegan with no cooking facilities, for example Interrailing, staying in a youth hostel or in a hotel? I think the answer is it’s possible, but if you’re there for any length of time you will get bored. In big cities there will probably be a Monoprix supermarket or similar somewhere, so you should be able to get what I call ‘picnic food’. This generally involves:
- bread (fresh baguettes, mmm), most supermarket bread had the ingredients printed on the wrapper and the plain white or wholemeal baguettes were usually vegan
- pâté – look for the nice Bjorg ones in the ‘bio’ section
- marinated olives of various kinds
- ‘champignons a la grecque’ – mushrooms in tomato sauce, which seemed to be fairly widespread (watch out though as one brand I spotted had lactose in)
- tabbouleh (they seem to have a whole chillers full of the stuff)
- fresh fruit, when we went in June the supermarkets were full of strawberries, raspberries, cherries, nectarines… also bananas and avocados work as sandwich fillings and are good, portable, energy-giving foods
- cereal bars, some were vegan and some weren’t, just have to read the labels
- bags of nuts and dried fruit
- crisps (they’re not big on crisps but you can find them if you look hard enough)
- vegan yoghurts and soya desserts
- smoothies and fruit juice

I found carrying cutlery came in useful, take a knife, fork and spoon with you if you can (though carrying around a sharp knife is probably not a good plan, stick with an inoffensive table knife, or better still a plastic cutlery set from a camping shop). The other thing that occurred to me is that being vegan and gluten- or wheat-free would be more of a challenge, given that a lot of the bulk we were eating was bread and tabbouleh, although I suspect that gluten-free and wheat-free people may have their own strategies for coping with such situations.

=== Useful vocabulary ===

végétalien(ne): vegan (person – add the –ne on the end if you’re female)
100% végétal(e): 100% plant-based, i.e. vegan
convient aux végétariens et végétaliens: suitable for vegetarians and vegans

contient: contains
peut contenir: may contain
traces éventuels de: may contain traces of
fabriqué dans un atelier qui utilise: made in a factory which handles
arachides: peanuts (vegan, but appears on allergy advice and impossible to guess what it means)

produits bio (or biologiques)/produits dietetiques = organic products/special diets products & vitamins (the section where a lot of the vegan products are)

sans: without, e.g. sans lactose = lactose-free

Non-vegan ingredients:

beurre: butter
crème: cream
fromage: cheese
miel: honey
lactose: lactose
lait: milk
oeuf: egg
petit-lait: whey

Non-vegan and non-vegetarian ingredients:

agneau: lamb
anchois: anchovies
boeuf: beef
canard: duck
crevettes: prawns
dinde: turkey
foie: liver
fruits de mer: seafood
gélatine: gelatine
jambon: ham
lardons: diced bacon
poisson: fish
porc: pork
poulet: chicken
veau: veal
volaille: poultry