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Food and Drink

Speaking food to power

It all started with a street vendor who lived in a three-room house and sold fruits and vegetables from a cart to support his family in Sidi Bouzid, a small dusty place maybe 200 kilometres south of Tunis.

No, he wasn't a university student, despite the reports to the contrary. He barely made it through high school, and gave up his chances at university to support his family. But by all accounts 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi was a hard-working, well-liked young man who often gave away his produce to families in need.

After he tried and failed to get back the bag of apples and his electric scale that an overzealous policewoman and her cohorts had grabbed, he lit a match that sparked not one, but what looks like a series of revolutions.

Throughout the recent headlines, an image sticks in my mind: Mohamed Bouazizi and that policewoman struggling over a bag of apples.

When people are hungry and desperate, anything can happen.

Even though the commonalities of food, clean water and shelter link all of humanity, for those of us sitting in our safe, comfortable little houses anywhere in this neck of the woods - heck, anywhere in Canada - it remains, for the most part, a huge stretch to understand the realities of the impotent under-classes who've been living for decades in poverty and fear in countries like Egypt and Tunisia.

January saw the highest food prices in recorded history, according to UN reports. Now we can add Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria and Libya to the list of places where the lack of food compounded by soaring prices became one of the proverbial last straws breaking the camel's back. A straw along with chronic unemployment, strongman governments, and collective futures without hope for even hope itself.

For years, through Plan International, my husband and I have "supported" a young Egyptian girl in the tiny village of Elwaha near Beheira, northwest of Cairo. I use quotation marks around "supported" because with Plan, like similar agencies doing work in developing areas, you don't really support anyone per se. Rather your monies go into a pool of funds used for projects in the area where "your" child lives.

I have to admit when we were first connected with Aya in Egypt I felt disappointed. Egypt, I wondered? On the web site I'd indicated we would support a child in an area where need was the greatest. Wouldn't that be, say, Mozambique, Somalia or Mali?

But Aya's case reports soon set us straight, describing how our monthly donations went to things like benches to sit on and lights in the classroom at the local school, and clean running water and latrines for homes. (By comparison, Mubarak's family amassed a fortune worth up to USD $70 billion USD.)

Aya's family and, from the looks of the aging, dusty buildings around, most of their neighbours would be counted in the 40 per cent of families in Egypt who live on just over USD $2,000 a year - that's right, $2,000 a year, an amount most Canadians could barely support our families on for a month.

And all this only a half-day's drive from what most of us as tourists might experience; something that, until Aya was in our lives, had fixed in my mind, embarrassingly, as an idealized colonial image of Egypt: multi-course dinners as you floated aboard your comfortable boat down the Nile, or sipping a glass of karkade, a cooling tea made with hibiscus, in the comfort of a quiet air-conditioned restaurant.

A reliable barometer, suggests travel writer Alison Appelbe, whose articles appear in Pique , is the correlation between the distance ventured off the beaten tourist track and the seemingly medieval reality for millions of Egyptians.

For most visitors meandering through Cairo's famously sprawling Khan El Kalili souk (or market), where vendors artistically pile an embarrassment of food riches - fresh dates and figs, fragrant spices, fruits and vegetables - there will descend a blissful unawareness that, were it not for government subsidies, almost half of the local population is unable to afford the basic local staple, the flat round bread called aish (which means both "bread" and "life"). Never mind the fresh turkey, chicken, beef or seafood fresh from the Red Sea.

Aish , as the name suggests, is archetypally Egyptian. In 2008, bread riots erupted there after food prices skyrocketed. Then, as now, people investing for profit in food commodities, such as wheat and corn, can shoulder as much blame as the weather.

Bread as symbol also surfaced this month in Tunisia. Several iconic images of the riots that ensued after Mohamed Bouazizi's death were of protestors carrying baguettes.

A couple of years back, my cousin Greg and his family spent a couple of months in the small coastal Tunisian city of Sousse, about two hours south of Tunis. Like many Egyptian destinations, it's long been a haven for Europeans. Now North American visitors arrive, hunting down full-amenity, cheap vacations.

But my cousin and his family, to their credit, try to buck the "ignorance is bliss" trend. Using a barometer similar to Alison's, they rented a house off the beaten tourist track.

Yes, there was lots of wonderful fresh food to be had in the souks where they and the locals shopped - beef, chicken, fish and tons of fresh vegetables and dates. Yes, there were lots of shawarma and donair stands, and people seemed to get enough to eat. But then they realized that the Tunisian government was also subsidizing bread prices to the tune of about 21 cents a loaf.

If the great divide of two classes could be symbolized in a snapshot, it would be the air-con Mercedes pulling up to the air-con French restaurants near the seaside while, on the outskirts of town, donkeys pull their dusty, weather-beaten masters on dusty, weather-beaten carts.

Did Greg et famille break through the divide? Maybe.

It's a small story and, ironically, involves a Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller. Near the end of their visit, they managed to convey to their favourite vendor, whose prices dropped and friendliness increased the longer they stayed, that soon they would be leaving. The vendor rushed around from behind his counter. Yes, it was 50 degrees out and, yes, he was sweaty and could have smelled better - maybe because he didn't have running water at home.

But he hugged them all, regardless, tears running down his cheeks as he said goodbye.

We all wonder if his was one of the faces in the news.

 

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who makes a lot of couscous at home.