Egypt farm food

"I wish I could say that since moving to the farm I've lost a ton of weight and become sleek and svelte, but that would be fibbing. I haven't but I know that my diet is a lot healthier than it was in the city. The temptation to just call for a pizza was always really a tough one. Now most of my meals are prepared from the things that we are growing on the farm. This depends on the season, but being able to freeze or dry vegetables makes them last. Like most of our neighbours, we are growing the summer crop of bamia, or okra."

My friend Leila (who writes great comments on this blog and who blogs as Bedouina) sent me this link about "An American lady living in Egypt for the last quarter century keeps a blog about her small farm in Giza near the Saqqara pyramids." Here the American lady writes about peasant food.

Having it both ways

"For several seasons now, fruit and vegetable farmers have had to scramble to find enough workers to harvest their crops. One factor in the labor shortage has been an increasingly militarized border, making it more difficult for would-be workers to cross over. Another has been the building boom, which has lured undocumented workers into higher-paying construction jobs.

Thus farmers in production centers like California and Arizona were already tense about the labor situation when Bush rolled out his hodgepodge of measures designed to force farmers (and other employers) to stop relying on undocumented workers. (For the record, as I've written before, I think it's schizophrenic and childish to make a big show of hunting down and deporting the people who feed you.)

Farmers across the country quickly cried foul. In New York's Hudson Valley, where workers come from Mexico and Central America, apple growers fear a bumper crop could largely wither on the branches. "We have 3 billion apples to pick this fall and every single one of them has to be picked by hand," one grower told The New York Times. "It's a very labor-intensive industry, and there is no local labor supply that we can draw from, as much as we try. No one locally really wants to pick apples for six weeks in the fall."

What happens when farmers can no longer work their land profitably? They generally sell it to developers, and land under cultivation succumbs to low-density sprawl. Again, that's already happening in California. In the state's lush Central Valley, home to probably the nation's most valuable territory for growing fruits and vegetables, developers bulldozed 100,000 acres of prime farmland in the 1990s alone, according to American Farmland Trust. If present trends continue, AFT warns, another million acres of farmland could vanish within a generation." (thanks Rania)

It's going to be olive picking season in Lebanon soon. We are very very proud of our olive oil (which is not that great, although some of it is excellent). It is very expensive (2 to 3 times the international price), but we happily pay the price. Olive farmers complain non-stop about their losses from olive farming, and that their largest cost is the harvesting labor. Until a few years ago, this was partly resolved by hiring Syrian farm workers. They know about olives, and were willing to work for short periods of time. But since the assassination of Hariri, Syrian workers are reluctant to come and work in Lebanon, as they have clearly been told (with guns and shrouds) that they are not welcome. The Lebanese categorically refuse to work as farmhands.

Climeat change

“In late November, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report stating that the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.

Al Gore calls global warming an existential risk to humanity, yet it hasn’t prompted him to change his diet or even mention vegetarianism,” he complained. “And I guess the environmentalists recognize that it’s a lot easier to ask people to put in a fluorescent light bulb than to learn to cook with tofu.” (Thanks Rania)

I hate tofu

Localized reaction

"Localism is a movement made of pieties. The cult of seasonality was a taste that evolved into a politics; localism is essentially a politics attempting to create a taste. It is built on the conviction that the industrial economics of food growing and delivery are bad for us and bad for the planet, but it also has an implicit moralistic attitude that prefers small country patches over big urban deserts. It is possible to have localism without nostalgia, though, and Gabrielle urged me to look into the tilapia-farming program at Brooklyn College.

There are powerful arguments against localism: apart from the inevitable statistical tussles about exactly how much fuel is used for how much food, the one word that never occurs in the evocation of the lost world of small cities and nearby farms is “famine.” Our peasant ancestors, who lived locally and ate seasonally from the fruit of their own vines and the meat of their own lambs, were hungry all the time. The localist vision of the tiny polis and its surrounding gardens has historically led to bitter conflict, not Arcadian harmony.

It is even perilously easy to construct a Veblenian explanation for the vogue for localism. Where a century ago all upwardly mobile people knew enough, and had enough resources, to get their hands on the most unseasonable foods from the most distant places, in order to distinguish themselves from the peasant past and the laboring masses, their descendants now distinguish themselves by hustling after a peasant diet.

This may be so; but the fact that one can explain everything in social life as a series of status exchanges does not mean that social life is only a series of status exchanges. It was cool to be a liberal in 1963, but that did not make liberal attitudes to race foolish. All human values get expressed as social rituals; we place bets on which of the rituals are worth serving."

Excellent (very long, but very colorful) New Yorker article on local eating in New York. (Thanks Leila)

Dom people

Further to my post on the Roma people (Nawar), Valery pointed me to a website and a journal devoted to the Roma people, or the Domari or Dom people as they are known in the Middle East. I provide here links for 3 articles which are interesting about the Dom people in Lebanon.

http://www.domresearchcenter.com./journal/countries/lebanon/index.html

they provide a good general background on the Dom of the Middle East and Lebanon. (thanks Valery)

Mutant beer

"But the potential was clear. Soon, by exposing large numbers of seeds and young plants, scientists produced many more mutations and found a few hidden beneficial ones. Peanuts got tougher hulls. Barley, oats and wheat got better yields. Black currants grew.

The process worked because the radiation had randomly mixed up the genetic material of the plants. The scientists could control the intensity of the radiation and thus the extent of the disturbance, but not the outcome. To know the repercussions, they had to plant the radiated material, let it grow and examine the results. Often, the gene scrambling killed the seeds and plants, or left them with odd mutations. But in a few instances, the process made beneficial traits.

The payoff was even bigger in Europe, where scientists fired gamma rays at barley to produce Golden Promise, a mutant variety with high yields and improved malting. After its debut in 1967, brewers in Ireland and Britain made it into premium beer and whiskey. It still finds wide use.

“The secret,” reads a recent advertisement for a single malt Scotch whiskey costing $49.99 a bottle, is “the continued use of finest Golden Promise barley and the insistence on oak sherry casks from Spain.”"

Mild criticism

An open letter in al akhbar from Ziad Abdel Samad, executive director of the Arab network of development ngos to PM Saniora in which he asks: how can you take decisions and implement agreements with long ranging impact when your government as no global vision or planning? This will ensure that you will make fatal mistakes when the public sector is sold off and the free trade agreements are signed.

كيف تتخذون قرارات تاريخية في ظل تجاهل العديد من المسائل الأساسية، وفي ظل الظروف التي تعيشها البلاد، ووفقاً لهذا الشكل المرتجل، ومن دون أن تكون لديكم ولدى وزرائكم الرؤية الشاملة التي تضمن عدم الوقوع في الأخطاء القاتلة غير القابلة للتصحيح بعد أن يتم بيع القطاع العام والتوقيع على الاتفاقيات الدولية؟

I know Ziad and believe me, he is a mild critic of the Saniora government. This is mild criticism.

Nawar

The first article I have ever encountered in a Lebanese newspaper on the Roma people of Lebanon, locally called "Nawar", which is used as a derogatory term in Lebanon to mean "what is poor, unclean and not distingué". In Lebanon we seem to have selective blindness to the Roma people. Many of them live in the villages of the west Bekaa bordering the Damascus road. There are also groups of women and children who read palms in Beirut and on the South highway. This article says that they do not possess legal Lebanese papers and that they are occasionally arrested and pushed around by the police.

I'd really like to know more about them. I don't think there has been any systematic research on the Roma of Lebanon. If you know something please point me in the right direction.

urban farming

Agriculture in Middle Eastern cities: Commonalities and contrasts, by Joe Nasr and Paul Kaldjian

Cactus fruits

"Souk al-Tayeb, the organic food market held every Saturday in Saifi Village in Beirut, promoted this Saturday the Indian fig (or sobbeir in Arabic,) grown in different Lebanese areas. The Indian fig is a species of cactus and a long-domesticated crop plant. The event is one in a series to promote Lebanese products and recipes."

A Land and People event

Tastes odd

" Nahr el Bared is a horror story for all concerned. The refugee camp has been totally destroyed, and its 30,000 or so Palestinian inhabitants have been displaced yet again, with little chance of resuming a normal life anytime soon. Nearly 140 Lebanese Army soldiers have been killed and many others wounded, as have a similar number of militants. Rebuilding or moving the camp elsewhere will rekindle Palestinian-Lebanese political sensitivities. Only suffering, death, political discord and disjuncture emanate from Nahr al-Bared. You hear the explosions as you drive by.

The mortars pounding Nahr al-Bared contrasted sharply Sunday with the large stone-carved mortar in Ehden's central square in which Susanne Doueihi was pounding raw meat, spices, onions and cracked wheat into kibbeh nayyeh, or raw kibbeh. She was one of a dozen contestants who entered 15 different kinds of kibbeh into the tasting contest. She was also the only person who made her kibbeh nayyeh on the spot in the traditional hand-pounded way. Other contestants produced 15 different kinds of baked or fried kibbeh, in two other judged categories - flat kibbeh in a pan, and rounded balls of kibbeh."

Rami Khoury mixes tragedy with raw meat. I'm not sure i like the taste.

Lost landscapes

"This is a personal take on a depressingly familiar theme. The wadis are choked with wild cyclamen, thyme and asphodels. As he wanders, Shehadeh passes olive groves and fruit trees, encounters gazelles and goats as well as bare rock and its evidence of dramatic geological change over millennia. But, as one West Bank hilltop after another is claimed by the Israelis (Palestinians built their villages along the contours of the hills), and yet more settlements are established, the familiar view changes beyond recognition." (thanks Rania)

Time to reconsider food policies

Excellent brief on the global rise in food prices from the Council on Foreign Relations. (thanks D.)

Food prices worldwide continue to climb upward (FT) at a pace not seen in decades. Few countries seem immune to the impact—with prices up 6 percent in Britain, around 7 percent in the United States and China, and 10 percent in India. A recent study from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that its expenditures on imported foodstuffs for the least developed and most food-challenged nations will rise 9 percent from the previous year. Josette Sheeran, head of the UN’s World Food Program, told the Financial Times last month that rising food costs mean the agency will be able to reach “far less people.” The agency, which spent $600 million (PDF) for food in 2006, says its purchasing costs have risen 50 percent in the last five years. “We face the tightest agriculture markets in decades and, in some cases, on record,” Sheeran said, noting that the growing concern over the impact of biofuel demand on food prices.

Several factors contribute (Mercury News) to higher farm commodities prices—including rising transportation costs, global warming, and the demand from nations such as India and China, whose people are ratcheting up their meat consumption. Yet the FAO’s analysis asserts that much of the current price hikes “can be leveled against rising prices of imported coarse grains and vegetable oils,” commodities which feature heavily in biofuel production. A recent Foreign Affairs article argues that biofuels have “tied oil and food prices together in ways that could profoundly upset the relationships between food producers, consumers, and nations in the years ahead, with potentially devastating implications for both global poverty and food security.” The Economist notes that biofuels have caused the price of corn to reach levels comparable to those of crude oil, when comparing the two commodities based on price per unit of potential energy.

In a rebuttal in Foreign Affairs, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who hails from corn-rich South Dakota, criticizes the continued “food-versus-fuel debate,” contending that biofuels can help the world meet its energy needs “without jeopardizing food security.” Daschle, a long-time ethanol advocate, argues that higher prices will be “a short-lived challenge” since the increased demand for corn will encourage farmers to grow more of it. However, one financial analyst notes that such a solution to higher prices “might prove to be temporary” since an increasing portion of corn crops will likely be used for biofuel instead of food. U.S. ethanol producers assert that rising oil prices are twice as responsible (PDF) for high corn prices as rising ethanol prices.

Antonio José Ferreira Simões, energy director for Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, contends that biofuels offer an opportunity for developing nations to compete (IHT) in agricultural markets with developed nations, many of which “strongly subsidize” their farming. “Millions of jobs would be generated, thus increasing income, exports and food purchasing power of the poorest,” Simões wrote in the International Herald Tribune. On the impact of biofuels (FoodQualityNews.com), European food industry writer Anthony Fletcher says that “agriculture has always adapted to the changing needs of humans, and there is no reason why this shouldn’t be true now.”

Slick

Update on Lebanon's oil spill.

Really helpful

US aid to Lebanon since its independence analyzed:

قبل حرب تموز، بلغت المساعدات الاقتصاديّة الأميركيّة أعلى مستوياتها في النصف الأول من الثمانينيات (حوالى 52 مليون دولار عام 1983). وبين عامي 1986 و2000 تراوحت قيمتها بين 8 و15 مليون دولار.
ارتفعت هذه المساعدات إلى معدل 35 مليون دولار سنوياً بين عام 2000 و2006.
عقب حرب تموز، خصصت الإدارة الأميركية مساعدات طارئة للبنان بقيمة 180 مليون دولار، وقامت لاحقاً بطلب حوالى 300 مليون كمساعدات إضافية للعام 2007. (معظم هذه المعونات مكوّنة من هبات).
2ـــــ الأهداف والشروط المرافقة لهذا الدعم:
الهدف المعلن لهذه المعونات هو إعادة إعمار لبنان عقب حرب تموز. لكن تصريف هذه المساعدات مشروط بنجاح حكومة السنيورة في إقرار «إصلاحات» اقتصادية معينة. وبالفعل، وقبل أن يقرّ الكونغرس هذه المساعدات، أعلن السنيورة نيّة حكومته تقليص بعض الضمانات والمساعدات التي تمنحها الدولة لبعض القطاعات الاقتصادية.
هذا بالإضافة الى احتمال خصخصة الكهرباء وخدمات الهاتف والاتصالات ورفع ضريبة القيمة المضافة من 10% إلى 12%، وإجراءات أخرى تهدف بحسب قوله إلى تقليص الدين العام البالغ قدره 40 بليون دولار والذي تبلغ كلفة خدمة فائدته حوالى 3 بليون سنوياً. وقد لقيت هذه السياسات معارضة داخلية أجبرت السنيورة على مراجعة توقيت تنفيذ هذه القرارات وكيفيته.
استنتاج: إنّ هذه المعونات الاقتصادية الأميركية للبنان كانت ولا تزال جزءاً لا يتجزّأ من السياسة الأميركية النيوليبرالية المتّبعة حول العالم والتي تهدف الى إضعاف دور الدولة (التي تدّعي دعمها) وبناء الاقتصاد الحر غير المنضبط

This article by Hisham Safieddine covers US military aid to Lebanon (which I will not translate here) and development aid, which I will summarize:

"US development aid to Lebanon peaked at $53 millions in 1983, but then fell back to between 8 and 15 million a year till 2000. It increased to $35 millions annualy between 2000 and 2006. After the July war, the US administration budgeted $180 millions as aid to Lebanon, and then requested $300 millions for 2007. Most of it as gifts.
The declared goal of this aid is the reconstruction of Lebanon after the war. But it is conditional on the Sanioura government carrying out economic reforms. Effectively, when Congress agreed on this aid package, Sanioura declared his aim to reduce the support offered by the state to certain economic sectors. This comes in addition to the possibility of privatizing electricity and communications and telephones and raising the VAT from 10% to 12% and other reforms he claims will reduce the $40 billions deficit. Strong local opposition forced Sanioura to delay his plans momentarily.

Conclusion: this development aid was and still is part of the US neo-liberal economic policy to weaken the states it claims to support and to impose unregulated free economy."

For some reason Al-Akhbar stuck the two tables below together. The article refers only to the one on top (US aid to Lebanon), but the second one is interesting too: how Congress sees sectarian distribution in Lebanon.

Squeezing Iraq

""I hope that the water issue does not fall prey to politics. Our river levels have plummeted and Iraq needs guarantees that projects Turkey is building won't hit us further," Rasheed said after talks with Syrian officials.

Euphrates volumes through Iraq have fallen to 30 billion cubic meters a year, half the flow of a few decades ago before Syria and Turkey increased dam building, Rasheed said.

"The picture on the Tigris is slightly better, although Iran is blocking its tributaries and we need to talk about this with Tehran. We have cooperation from Syria," said Rasheed, a Kurd who was a leading member of the opposition to Saddam Hussein.

Rasheed said talks with Turkey have picked up after the U.S.-led invasion that removed Saddam from power in 2003. But Iraq still lacked information on the scope of Turkish plans upstream and the expansion of cultivated land."

Why?

تأتي محافظة البقاع في المرتبة الأولى من حيث إنتاجها للخضرة بنسبة 59.7 في المئة، وذلك بحسب الدراسة الصادرة عن وزارة الزراعة تحت عنوان «الزراعة في أرقام»، تليها لبنان الشمالي بـ27.1، والنبطية 9.0 في المئة، ثم محافظة لبنان الجنوبي بـ3.2 في المئة، لتنخفض الى 1.0 في المئة في محافظة جبل لبنان

If you've ever wondered why the Lebanese governments never cared about farming, here's one of the answer: 60% of the production of vegetables (one of Lebanon's main products) takes place in the Bekaa followed by 27% in the North (mostly in Akkar), 12% in the South, and ...1% in Mount Lebanon. The Bekaa, Akkar and the South are also the poorest regions of Lebanon, in this order. From a recent study by the Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture.

Flatten the earth to save US farmers

"If the whole notion of a world trade in food becomes suspect, setting off some eat-local trade war, this endangers a quiet, good new thing: American farmers earning a living by finding new customers overseas." (Thanks D.)

In praise of free trade to save American farmers. But interesting take. I especially like the bit about whey costing 70p a pound. In Lebanon the dairy industry disposes of it on the fields.

Souk El Nabatiyyeh-1860

My friend Mustapha Mond sent me this piece. You can read more of MM's writings chez Ms Levantine. His latest piece on the Metn election is highly recommended.

Souk El Nabatiyyeh

I read with great interest your post on Souk El Tayeb "Public Space, Political Space". It is not surprising that organic farmers markets tend to be elitist, after all the most important organic farmer in the United Kingdom is prince Charles.

Furthermore, Verdun and Saifi do not exactly have a tradition of farmers market, and you will not have individuals from all walks of life mingling to purchase goods. Still, I was glad to read that Souk el Nabatiyyeh is being revived.

Nabatiyyeh has a long tradition as an important market town and I suspect that if its farmers market will eventually become highly successful.

Chaker el Khoury lived in Nabatiyyeh as a refugee in 1860, and this is how he describes the Souk in his book "Majmaa al Masarrat", my translation:

"Souk el Nabatiyyeh is one of the mightiest market places in our parts. People meet there every Monday. They come from all directions some of them from twelve hours away.

Most of the trading is in grains and livestock, and around five to six thousand individuals attend every week, both buyers and sellers. The amazing thing is that over fifty thousand trades take place between buyers and sellers and all is done orally by using a couple of words: I buy/I sell. And problems are extremely rare.

Stranger still, all sorts of people can be found at the Souk: Christians of all sects, Metwalis, Druze, Jews and Muslims. To this day, no one has heard of a problem occurring between any of them.

The whole Souk takes place every Monday from morning until late afternoon. By night fall, you will not see any of the many people who came to the Souk.

The Souk has taken place for hundred of years and it is still going strong despite the fact that other towns tried to organize their own Souks, but with less success. For example, there is a Souk in Hasbayya known as Souk el Khan, but it is not as important as the one in Nabatiyyeh".

Majmaa al Masarrat, page 40, Lahed Khater Publishing.

So there you have it, Nabatiyyeh as a cosmopolitan market place in the XIXth century, where individuals of all sects traded peacefully. Let us hope that the city can regain its old glory, and that it will act again as a magnet for people.

Come to think of it, it would be nice if Souks can thrive again in different Lebanese cities, without any snob appeal, just public spaces where people can interact and mingle without fear.

Let a thousand Souks bloom.

Mustapha Mond.

Food nationalism or food racism?

A good post in a good blog

"I've been pondering the notion of food racism lately....

Given Brillat Savarin's quote "tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are" it only bares to reason that food in many senses becomes symbolic of difference, similarities and cross cultural miscommunication

Michael Pollen wrote that colonisation of one country over another starts with diet.

I still think back to the stifled work lunches and dinners between foreigners and Cambodians, where foreigners would pick at the Khmer food on the plate in a way that was symptomatic of more than just a reluctance to "break bread" with their dining companions.

So I was thinking of all the racist slurs for the "other" based on food such as:

Kraut
Curry muncher
Dog eater
Limey
Twinkie
Bounty Bar
coconut
frog eater"