Stepping off the northbound Parisian RER at Garges–Sarcelles, one enters a world of scent and sound.
The nutty aroma of roasted corn drifts through the air, softening the midday sun like a veiled landscape in a Renaissance painting. Wigs sway atop weary mannequins; plastic jewellery glints in unruly piles; rows of lotions, beauty products, and fantastical hair treatments promise impossibly cascading locks.
The nutty aroma of roasted corn drifts through the air, softening the midday sun like a veiled landscape in a Renaissance painting. Wigs sway atop weary mannequins; plastic jewellery glints in unruly piles; rows of lotions, beauty products, and fantastical hair treatments promise impossibly cascading locks.
The Sarcelles market stretches a kilometre along Avenue Frédéric-Joliot-Curie, pressed against the neighbourhood’s sandstone housing blocks. Three times a week, thousands of shoppers weave between stalls, bargaining as rhythmic music leaks from tinny speakers. “Un euro, un euro, un euro,” vendors call in an auctioneer’s refrain. Food sellers thread through the crowd with baskets of nightshades, bags of spices, and unlabelled bottles of tapioca flour. Fish stare blankly from frozen displays, witnesses to it all.
Calories now arrive in our shopping bags from every corner of the globe, forged in the heat and pressure of the Haber–Bosch process and powered by fossil fuels. Modern food systems are inseparable from the energy regimes that sustain them.
But to understand food and the body, we must think in terms of flows. Caloric flows shape ways of life through diet, and diets have long ordered both bodies and societies. In fourth-century BCE Attica, classical medicine placed diaita at the centre of health. For Hippocrates, balanced eating was both prevention and cure: the first physician was also the first cook. As Giorgio Agamben reminds us, diaita joined food (sitos) with activity (ponos), regulating intake while training the body to adapt. It carried a political meaning as well—judgement responsive to circumstance rather than fixed law—and named an entire way of life, later preserved in its Latin heir, regimen. At the level of the “regime,” Agamben argues, biological and political life remain indeterminate.
But to understand food and the body, we must think in terms of flows. Caloric flows shape ways of life through diet, and diets have long ordered both bodies and societies. In fourth-century BCE Attica, classical medicine placed diaita at the centre of health. For Hippocrates, balanced eating was both prevention and cure: the first physician was also the first cook. As Giorgio Agamben reminds us, diaita joined food (sitos) with activity (ponos), regulating intake while training the body to adapt. It carried a political meaning as well—judgement responsive to circumstance rather than fixed law—and named an entire way of life, later preserved in its Latin heir, regimen. At the level of the “regime,” Agamben argues, biological and political life remain indeterminate.
The market makes the political dimension of digestion visible. Before Sarcelles, there was Les Halles. For nearly a thousand years, Paris’s central market linked countryside, state, and citizens, channeling food from farm to body. Les Halles served as a barometer of urban governance, securing the crown by keeping Parisians fed.
The Grand Hiver of 1709—when rivers froze, roads vanished under snow, and even stored bread and drink turned solid—exposed the fragility of this balance. Famine and cold followed, and, in the decades that followed, the state turned its gaze to reserves. The Halle au Blé, completed in 1763, staged an image of abundance, if only in appearance. Bread was political, and the administration under Louis XV knew that Paris could not be allowed to run out of it.
In the modern nation-state, desire became standardised, and bodies were coordinated alongside other instruments of control. Architecture was central to this project, organising foodscapes that sustained life while regulating conduct. Under Napoleon III, Les Halles were unified in the 1850s into iron-and-glass pavilions that embodied state ambitions for hygiene and morality, achieved through the management of air, water, gas, and food flows—and bodies. Control over productivity moved through architecture, from isolated buildings to the regulation of the commercial environment as a whole.
In the twentieth century, this logic culminated in the relocation of the wholesale market to Rungis in 1969. The Marché d’Intérêt National de Paris–Rungis bound calories to global infrastructure and secured low food prices relative to wages, enabling an economy increasingly oriented toward mobility and leisure. As Meredith TenHoor notes, rationality, transparency, and controlled distribution were elevated as instruments of security and growth, demonstrating how aesthetic and technical ideals shaped territorial, alimentary, and economic planning—and how state infrastructure could transform both land and bodies.
The caloric infrastructure of Les Halles is gone. The iron-and-glass pavilions of the Second Empire were demolished in 1971, an act many Parisians experienced as a public aggression, leaving a gaping void at the city’s centre—the Trou des Halles. Yet markets still punctuate Paris and its banlieue, from Rungis to Sarcelles, each with its own rhythms. In Sarcelles, women in bright dresses gather with babies on their backs and toddlers at their sides. Fried corn crackles in repurposed shopping carts; small bags of ground starch change hands. A slow vehicle appears, blue uniforms inside, lights pulsing. Sellers scatter, dissolving into the crowd, leaving only a brief puff of sand.
By day’s end, blowers chase scraps and debris, vendors fold stalls under blue tarps, and refuse lorries arrive, swallowing the remains and animating the dusk.
Until the nineteenth century, Paris circulated nutrients between city and countryside. Market gardeners cultivated land nearby and returned human excrement to the fields. After the 1860s, sewers broke this cycle. Nutrients were flushed away, and by the 1920s recovery had collapsed. The Seine became a sink for a fractured metabolism.
Until the nineteenth century, Paris circulated nutrients between city and countryside. Market gardeners cultivated land nearby and returned human excrement to the fields. After the 1860s, sewers broke this cycle. Nutrients were flushed away, and by the 1920s recovery had collapsed. The Seine became a sink for a fractured metabolism.
Today, crops draw nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium from soils, but humans absorb only a fraction; the remainder is flushed into sewers, diverted to the wrong places. Fields are depleted while rivers and coasts are fertilised instead, triggering algal blooms, killing fish, and collapsing marshes.
As night falls, blinding halogens blaze from furniture shops, illuminating monstrously curving sofas behind plate glass. Behind them, the sky fades from orange to deep blue. At the station, Paris-bound trains arrive one by one, collecting market-goers rushing south, hopping off just before the tunnel into the walled capital, plastic bags and trolleys heavy with the day’s goods.