Francesc Serés: "When they ask me what I miss about home, I say: family, friends, and fresh fish"

Francesc Serés (Saidí, 1972) is a writer. Author, among many others, of La pell de la frontera, La casa de foc –Proa Novel Prize and Llibreter Prize–, La mentida més bonica and El primer any, he has been living in Graz for almost three years, about two hours by car from Vienna. Serés' relationship with wine is marked by a bad relationship with sulfites and distrust towards those sold as "100% sulfite-free".

Graz is wine country.

— And one of the things that catches my attention is that, here, the fields, since theoretically they don't need to be watered because it rains – we'll see if it rains in the future–, are in the mountains, on the slopes. Seeing fields on very steep slopes is something that fascinates me. And you see it with vineyards: they don't make terraces, but rather follow the slope of the incline.

It must be impressive to see.

— I don't want to fall into 'brother-in-lawism' [a colloquial term for stating the obvious or making common sense observations], but for someone accustomed to flat terrain, like myself, seeing vineyards or apple trees on a slope has a certain effect. It seems a bit like a fairy tale.

Apple trees on a slope!

— The classic local drink is apfelschorle, half apple juice and half carbonated water. And there is a whole tradition of transforming apple varieties. Because it is not so industrialized, we still have access to native varieties. In Lleida, on the other hand, we industrialized everything and in the end there were always the same four varieties.

Does cider interest you?

— I have always liked cider. What happens is that you have to work [laughs]. It's not that I'm a monk. It's different, because it was all industrial, but [at home] we picked apples for cider: trucks loaded with bulk apples, thousands and thousands of kilos, without boxes or plastics, used to go to Asturias. I haven't lived through that romantic time of farming with traditional production.

The vineyards have a strong presence in La mentida més bonica (Proa, 2022). How is it that he knows this world so well?

— My parents are lifelong farmers, and although they didn't make wine, the contact with people who did was constant. In fact, at the village house, we have a wine press for treading grapes that must be about 300 years old. When Albert Velasco, the art historian, saw the house, he told me it must date back to around 1700.

Why did you keep it?

— When I did the renovation work, I decided that I wouldn't throw away anything that could be salvaged. You can't keep everything, but we kept everything that could be salvaged. And one of the things we wanted to keep, obviously, was the wine vat. It's a heritage that I'm very happy to have rescued, cleaned, and restored. The wine cellar is beautiful; the whole old wine vat with the stone…

Is there wine in Saidí?

— Many people think that La Franja is all the same, but La Franja is like Chile: the people from the north say that the people from the south have never seen it. Baix Cinca was one of the first places in all of Aragon and Catalonia to have effective irrigation, thanks to a branch of the Seguí canal. When I was little, water was a punishment. This allowed us to grow sweet fruit, and that's why we also started to abandon grapes: the vineyard doesn't yield the same as fruit when you have guaranteed water. The irrigation that existed opened up an enormous possibility.

Has grown up in the countryside, has that influenced the way you relate to food?

— For example, I have always peeled the fruit. All of it.

Even the apricots?

— I make them wash for a long time, like with grapes. Without mercy. I remember the chemicals we used to throw to prevent pests. And this has made me not so much of a germaphobe as demanding, in the sense of watching how and what you eat. Now all this is no longer possible: it is forbidden, controlled, etcetera. But in the 90s I had seen drums of amoxicillin and ten-liter carboys of ibuprofen or paracetamol for the animals.

And fatherhood, would you say it has changed your relationship with food?

— It makes you more aware of everything, even more demanding. At the same time, living in another country, you don't have the same things you had at home. And there are many good ones, but...

What are you missing?

— Fish. I explain it in the book: when they ask me what I miss from home, I say the four fs: familie, freunde und frischer fisch [family, friends, and fresh fish].

Have you found any solution for the last one?

— From time to time I go to Turkish shops. The advantage of Central Europe is that it is very multicultural, and this helps a lot to have access to things that you wouldn't have otherwise. The amount of vegetables I find in Turkish shops, at a very reasonable price – cheaper than in Catalonia – and of condiments and preserves, like ajvar or ljutenica…

I was asking about paternity due to the trauma that children who do not eat well cause some parents.

— At home, mostly, I cook. And it often happens that what you have specially prepared for your son, he doesn't eat. And you eat it. But the topic of healthy eating is a very political topic: about resource capacity, about land control. La pell de la frontera [2014] –about immigration in the Franja de Ponent and Baix Segre– speaks a lot about this: how we create food, how we eat, how we spend our money.

Were these the times of your grandparents?

— A book by Miguel Ángel del Arco has recently been published called La hambruna española. Nothing has explained the mentality of the area to me so well. My grandparents carried the memory of the disaster of the war and the misery of the post-war period. For them, all food was sacred. The great mental shock, in the 80s, was to see the behavior of my grandparents – the food, the misery, the hunger, the war – while I lived in a totally different space: Baix Cinca, in the 80s, was a space of abundance. There was meat aplenty. Fruit and vegetables, aplenty. Flour, aplenty. A brutal cognitive dissonance.

It is difficult to leave behind the memory of hunger.

— I went to an abandoned village in the Pyrenees and people explained that they scratched the walls of the houses because moss grew on them. It's the same people who were later told: "They're at it again with their squabbles".

Do we ask people to turn the page too quickly?

— Above all, because you can't turn the page: we don't know what will happen. Right now there is a very big, very continuous drought, due to climate change, and we don't know where the food will come from tomorrow.

The struggle for land and water...

— It will increase the price of products, and you will be able to pay for it or not. And fresh produce will become more expensive each time, because it is more difficult to manage. This is what we fight against: we try to promote the old culture of home, of making do, which now turns out to be what we should have been doing instead of acting modern.