Ever wonder how the ancient Jews lived during their 40 years of wandering in the desert?
When the Jews left Egypt, God commanded that they wander in the desert until the original slave generation had died out, leaving mature younger people with the free man’s mentality. Making and breaking camp often, circling the arid Sinai desert with only an occasional interruption from fractious Philistines, how did that vast community survive?
Turkish PM Erdogan at the UN: His way or no way
There’s a lot more for southern Cyprus to be alarmed about these days concerning its commitment to explore for natural gas offshore. First of all, there is the environmental factor dealing with undersea drilling off Cyprus, which could be damaging for an island so dependent on industries like tourism. There is also the acute water shortage issue, making Greek Cyprus heavily dependent on desalination for fresh water supplies.
But the most critical, as well as most dangerous problem that southern Cyprus may now be facing is an increasing belligerency from Turkey, which controls one third of this island; and whose proxy government there, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) is telling the Greek Cypriots that it could become “very uncomfortable” for them if they go ahead and do the drilling without the TRNC being able to participate as well.
This week marks the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Jews will build small huts and live in them for a week.
Sukkot, also known as the Feast of Tabernacles, couldn’t come at a better time than now. After the heaviness of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), Sukkot joins Passover and Shavuot as a Jewish holiday which celebrates agriculture and is known as Z’man Simchateinu, the season of our rejoicing. It is the most festive of all the holidays and lasts for seven days and has a direct link to the environment.
Iranian environmental activists and artists are getting bolder. Recently, “tree huggers” planted these stumps on a street in the city of Kerman to protest against deforestation.
Sometimes environmental activists are visionary people who take enormous personal risks. Ashley Fruno from PETA was arrested for parading around Jordan covered in nothing but lettuce. Bill McKibben and hundreds of other activists in the United States wanted to get arrested to draw attention to the Keystone XL Pipeline, and an Iranian woman was recently tortured for protesting the degradation of Lake Orumiyeh – a terrible incident that screams: activism will not go unpunished.
But then there are artists and actors. While Iranian “tree huggers” were busy planting tree stumps in Kerman to draw attention to deforestation, a different kind of protest was unveiled at a school in Tehran. Concerned about Iran’s dubious distinction of having the most polluted cities in the world, several artists and an actor launched the Tehran Monoxide Project art exhibit.
Turkey has used wind energy for more than ten years now, but never from locally developed and produced wind turbines. That’s about to change.
In what Turkish newspapers are calling “the biggest project in the history of the republic,” the Turkish government recently announced the country’s first National Wind Energy System. The project, which is led by a team of experts from top Turkish universities and scientific unions, has been ongoing — in secret — for the past two and a half years.
Late next year, expect the unveiling of the first stage in this ambitious energy project: a 500-KW wind turbine built entirely locally, using only parts produced in Turkey.
October offers a variety of short-season delicacies. Look for olives, dates, and beans.
Each month brings forward new fruit or vegetables to charm the eye and palate, while the previous month’s stars fade away. October’s specialties are plentiful, and good for locovores looking to make good on the harvest. Read below for the best of this month’s fruit, vegetables and herbs, with olive season (and homemade olive pickling!) and fresh dates being a highlight.
Middle Eastern newcomers this month are kiwis, persimmons, and quinces. Get our perfect Lebanese quince jam recipe here. Fuzzy quinces usually get cooked into jam, but tuck a few peeled slices into a slow-cooking tajine or stew.
Raw olives for pickling are prime now, and their season is short, so if you’re in the mood to pickle your own olives, run to the shuk now. Or if you are adventurous take a stick and a sheet and shake them out of a public tree which can be found in cities like Jaffa.
Fresh yellow and red dates are sweet and good, but only if frozen for two days before eating. Before this simple processing, they are dry and astringent.
Bananas have moved into full season and firm, handsome bunches are in every market now. Choose some that are slightly green, and allow them to ripen for a day or three in your kitchen. It’s still warm enough to ripen all kinds of fruit indoors. I like to buy tomatoes in different stages of ripeness for that reason. By the time the ripe ones have been cooked or sliced into salads, the ones that were green have ripened.
Same with pineapples, which are still (and probably always will be) expensive, but somewhat less so at this time. Given pineapples’ high prices, it’s good to know how to choose a good one. Look for firm, yellow flesh all around and an attractive sweet odor at the base. Some green at the top is fine. Reject any that have mold on the stem end, a dried-up crown, or large brown spots.
Local apples and pears now compete with imported varieties in beauty and flavor. The darker varieties of plums are still with us. Table grapes of all shades and shapes are fine now. Look for pomegranates too, still plentiful now.
Citrus fruits are out, but wait for a wet week or two before buying. Until it’s rained at least once, oranges, tangerines, and grapefruit won’t be sweet. Lemons are fine now.
Vegetables in full season are green and wax beans and all kinds of runner beans. Tomatoes, bell and hot peppers and cucumbers are still as abundant as in summer, probably because it’s still hot in the Middle East. How about some shakshuka, eggs poached in sauce made from some of those tomatoes? And, it’s the last chance to try our vinegared cucumber salad before cool weather drives prices up.
Squat, grooved baladi eggplants are fine right now, and they make a wonderful baba ghanoush dip. Or try Green Prophet’s creamy eggplant soup. Fennel bulbs are worth buying now. Simply cut in half, drizzled with olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper then oven-roasted till tender, they are delicious.
Brassicas like October. Red and white cabbages, cauliflower and broccoli look firm and good, as compared to their breathless, fast-wilting brethren of mid-summer.
So with the alliums: leeks, puny a few weeks ago and now large; onions, shallots, pearl onions and fat yellow onions and the sweeter red onions, so good marinated in a little vinegar, sugar, and olive oil, then mixed into salad.
You can count on autumn vegetables to be firm and sweet in October: sweet potatoes, white and red potatoes, zucchini, pumpkins, all kinds of squashes. Root vegetables like celeriac, carrots, and parsley root continue fine and fat.
Beloved to the Middle Eastern palate herbs do well in this interval between summer’s worst heat and rainy, cool winter.
Going out of season in October’s Middle East markets:
To buy now, soon out of season: melons, peaches, nectarines, figs, avocados.
Forager’s notes: hawthorn berries are ripe for picking now. Make hawthorn jam, wine, or a heart-strengthening medicinal tincture. Wild fennel is flowering along the wayside and is worth drying for flavoring grilled foods later. Sprinkle some dried wild fennel flowers over baking apples. Very good!
Green Prophet has lots of recipes for October’s succulent seasonal goodies:
Slow-roasted tomatoes recipe
Sweet potatoes roasted in date honey recipe
Eggplant with tahini-labneh sauce recipe
Expatriates living in the United Arab Emirates may not be ready to don his kandoora just yet – an ankle-length white shirt woven from wool or cotton – but they do lean heavily on Ali Al Saloom’s friendly inside scoop. The man behind “Ask Ali” – a weekly column in The National’s M Magazine – this young Emirati hipster delivers insider tips about the region’s culture, etiquette (for example, wear clothes that cover up cleavage), and history, as well as lighter information such as where to go for good eats, entertainment, and travel. Now Ali is applying his good looks and charm to crucial environmental issues.
Green Prophet’s own Green Sheikh posing with a mime. Could the Caracas model of street miming reign in bad Middle East drivers?
Drive anywhere in the Middle East and you are taking your life in your hands. Whether you are in a car, bus, train, or just walking on a sidewalk or riding your bike, safety should be your number one concern. A new App in Lebanon helps you report dangerous drivers. And a Canadian-Emirati is fighting for safer driving laws in the United Arab Emirates because his sister was killed by reckless driving. Give a Middle East man a fast car and he turns into a crazed speed demon. Bad road behavior matched with poorly enforced laws means more deaths, and it makes people less inclined to get on their bikes. But a new approach in Venezuela has drivers becoming more mindful of the laws, when policing doesn’t work. How are they doing it? Using mimes.
As the Jewish holiday of Sukkot approaches, it is only natural for us to reflect on the state of the planet’s health and well being. After all, it is harvest season in the Holy Land and Sukkot is a holiday that for some raises the consciousness about our environment. Jews live in huts thatched with bamboo, shake palm fronds, aravot, inhale the sweet scent of etrogs (yellow citron), devour seldom eaten fruits, and for the most part attempt try to be one with nature.
Heap leaching or dump leaching extracts nickel using a very toxic process.
Turkish environmental groups are calling for increased awareness against toxic waste dumping like that in Lebanon. Toxic dumping is taking place in the Caldag region, about 60 km east of Izmir, where a mining concession was given to a UK mining company, Sardes Nickel. Operations started in 2004 to explore and mine deposits of nickel ore located under some of Turkey’s most fertile farm land. The mining, operation according to an article in the Todays Zaman news site will involve using a similar method of “heap leaching” that utilizes sulfuric acid, one thousand kilograms of acid per ton of crushed ore — to dissolve the target mineral.
Azad Nanakeli returned to his Kurdish home Erbil to find all of the wells contaminated with waste and chemicals. AU is one among many art pieces on display at Iraq’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Fewer canvases are overflowing with pristine landscape scenes as unsustainable building programs throughout the Middle East encroach upon this once-abundant source of inspiration. Of course, land in the region has been set aside to protect historical monuments and indigenous fauna and flora, but artists such as Camille Zakharia in Bahrain increasingly find themselves documenting a depleted, shattered earth.
So it is for six Iraqi artists whose work is currently on display at the 2011 Venice Biennale. After years of war, Iraq’s environmental woes are numerous, though the depletion and pollution of water takes the prize. Called “Wounded Water,” the Iraqi pavilion in Venice doesn’t only creatively depict the ongoing water crisis that has arisen as a result of neglect, but also the sometimes extraordinary ways in which life is able to adapt.
Taliban holds fire thanks to tooth-sized nut. Image via the NY Times.
Some say all is fair in love and war, but for guerrilla warfare between the Taliban and Haqqani in Afghanistan, there are limits. Guns go down for pine nut season. Pine nuts are those delicious, tooth-sized nuts which are a staple in pesto. Browned and sprinkled over hummous and Middle East dishes, in the Paktika Province of Afghanistan, near its border with Pakistan, insurgents put down their guns so the able bodied can collect the pine cones, which house the little nuts.
A starchitect from Japan? As Israel’s oldest and leading arts academy, shouldn’t Bezalel be a locavore when it comes to hiring architects?
The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, established in Jerusalem in 1906 as an institution that would help form a new visual language for the Jewish people, is now synonymous with Israeli art. (In the green world it has helped create many eco-minded designers, such as Michael Tsinovsky, the maker of melting pot styled furniture, Galit Begas, the creator of the plastic bag shoe, and ocean debris sculpture maker, Koby Sibony.) Yet recently, when Bezalel made the progressive decision to move the campus back to Jerusalem’s city center (thereby making it more accessible), it also made the bizarre decision to hire a foreign team of architects for the project. In other words, it chose not to ‘go local’.
It chose, instead, to hire the Tokyo-based architecture firm Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa and Associates (aka SANAA), who will be collaborating somewhat with Nir-Kutz Architects of Tel Aviv.
Yemeni activist Tawakul Karman has become the first Arab woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Today, Yemeni activist Tawakul Karman was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her role in the Arab Spring along with two other Liberian women who mobilized a women’s ‘sex strike’ which ended a 14-year civil war in their country. Tawakul Karman, the 32-year-old mother of three who formed the group Women Journalist Without Chains in 2005, dedicated her prize to the women of Yemen fighting against tribalism and oppression. As well as going some way to help ensure that women’s role in the Arab Spring isn’t marginalised, the Nobel Peace Prize should also remind those who need reminding that Muslim woman can and do play an important role in the transformation of their societies.
Ken Finn is a passionate man. Sitting with him in his Brighton kitchen (which he built himself), our conversation ranges from his book, ‘My Journey With a Remarkable Tree’, to the current state of the economy: “We’ve got to decouple the juggernaut [of economic meltdown] that is hurtling towards us” is a memorable quote from him: to the recent summer of unrest throughout the UK, and both the malaise and regeneration of human, tribal, society, to an exploration of the benefits of travel and our human stories.
I’m here to talk to him about the book, and to be interviewed for his radio show (more about this later), but mainly because since we met at the UKAware Festival 2 years ago in London, I’ve wanted to catch up and have a longer conversation with this deeply engaged individual. I find him warm, deeply articulate and insightful on what he sees around him.
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