Every culture in the world has a Slow Food tradition. At the heart of it all is homemade food, made with love, from local ingredients. While Saudi Arabia has been known for its excess it has also been featured in humble projects like the open fridge concept.

Now, Slow Food Saudi Arabia, in collaboration with the Culinary Arts Commission, will participate in the Saudi Feast Festival from November 27 to December 6 at the Abadi AlJohar Arena in Jeddah.

Under the theme Taste the Culture, Slow Food invites visitors to experience an immersive celebration of Saudi Arabia’s rich culinary heritage, with a special focus on the Ark of Taste program—a global initiative that catalogs endangered food products. The Ark of Taste is a living catalog of delicious and distinctive foods facing extinction.

At the heart of the event lies Slow Food’s commitment to preserving traditional food products, highlighting the work of local communities across the Kingdom who are dedicated to safeguarding their culinary traditions.

The Slow Food presence at the festival will showcase the diverse and unique flavors of Saudi cuisine, with particular emphasis on more than 120 Ark of Taste products representing the food diversity of the 13 Saudi Regions, from Al-Hassawi Rice to Figra Mountain Honey, from Iqt to Al-Bakaya Date Palm.

A key highlight of the event will be the launch of the Arabic edition of Good, Clean and Fair, the seminal book by Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini, which embodies the values of the Slow Food movement.

Visitors will have the opportunity to engage with Slow Food Saudi Arabia by signing up for membership, nominating new products for the Ark of Taste, and exploring Slow Food Travel experiences—unique opportunities to discover Saudi Arabia’s diverse culinary landscapes in greater depth.

What are some examples of protected Slow Food from Saudi Arabia?

Currently, Saudi Arabia has documented 13 protected food items under the Slow Food movement’s Ark of Taste, an initiative to safeguard traditional foods at risk of disappearing. These items represent the country’s diverse culinary heritage and include:

1. Saudi Al-Kholani coffee beans
2. Mountain sidr honey
3. Al-Hisawi rice
4. Al-Samh seeds
5. Kabath (a traditional plant)
6. Truffles
7. Ghafisah (a traditional dish)
8. Salt cane
9. Al-Maghmi dates
10. Najrani Burr (Al-Samma) wheat
11. Al-Haliah dates
12. Red camels (noted for their unique traits)
13. Moringa trees

Want to eat slow? Take a bite at the Saudi fair.

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We feel what happens to food prices and our lifestyle when conflict broke out in the Ukraine and Russia. So much of our daily lives are interdependent on the global village that countries, and people, know they need to start thinking more locally to support food traditions and the culture they love. On one side of the spectrum you have China building 8-story vertical pork farms, and on the other, thankfully you have individuals leading a new kind of sanity, like Hagay Ben-Yehuda. He is making bread by hand using ancient grains.

The baker from Kibbutz Einat, just outside of Tel Aviv and who works with the Volcani Institute, an agricultural research center, has become famous for his sourdough bread (follow our recipe from our in-house baker Miriam) made from locally-grown ancient wheat.

While the emmer wheat was native to the Levantine area, and helped usher in this region as the breadbasket of civilization, in recent decades all of Israel’s wheat, except for religious customs, is typically imported from America.

Funny, in the religious Jewish culture that devotes so much of its prayers and blessings to bread that these “blessings” have been brought from far and away lands, farmed on pesticide-intense mono-culture farms, and brought on ships. 

But that’s changing thanks to a slew of bakers in Israel and no doubt the world, bringing on their own change loaf by loaf. But at a cost. Because local farming and hand baking doesn’t come cheap in one of the most expensive countries in the world. While the cost for fancy sourdough bread in Israel is rather high, about $9 or $10, customers are willing to pay for it as a commodity they can’t live without. 

Ben Yehuda says that as a fifth generation baker “bread is an inseparable part of my family, of my memories and in general of who I am.” 

Emmer wheat is one of the wheat he uses. It’s known as the “mother of wheat”, as it is the wheat used for bread in Biblical times and was then rediscovered growing wild near Mount Hermon, on the borders with Syria and Lebanon, by the 1940s.

Other strains of ancient wheat from the region include jaljuli, hourani, abu fashi and dubiya samra – all grown locally for millennia in the Levantine area, but by the 1960s already replaced by imported common wheat which is cheaper and for some easier to digest, but much less good for the body.

Making a few hundred loaves a day, mostly going to Tel Aviv Ben Yehuda says he wants people to have the right memories from childhood, and does it as a labor of love. He says: “For the past for years I have been sowing ancient wheat varieties that were once grown here in the land of Israel in order to bring back the flavors and textures that originally belonged to this land, thus producing bread and local culture in the full sense of the word.

::Hagay and the Bread

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Political tension in Egypt in the aftermath of the revolution which began nearly two years ago, has hit tourism, led to high food prices, and caused an economic slowdown which is raising food security concerns. In 2012, Egypt was the world’s largest wheat importer (read this story on how wheat connects the planet), shipping in 11.5 million tons, and highlighting the gap between official food sustainability goals and reality.

“There is an urgent need to increase wheat productivity,” said Nagui Saeed, head of Egypt’s Wheat Producers’ Association – not just to conserve foreign currency but also to cater for Egypt’s growing population, which has nearly doubled in the last 30 years to 83 million.

Egypt’s long-term food security faces a number of challenges: nearly 99 percent of the population live on about 4 percent of the land (adjacent to the River Nile where most of the fertile land is).

Arable land covers around 3 percent of the country, and is under threat from desertification, urbanization and salination, particularly north of the Aswan High Dam, leading to the loss of an estimated 11,736 hectares of agricultural land every year.

The grand dream has always been to transform little-used desert areas and expand out of the densely-populated Nile valley.

What happened to Mubarak’s Toshka project?

In the mid-1990s former leader Hosni Mubarak initiated the Toshka Project (also known as the New Valley Project) to cultivate 202,347 hectares of farmland in the western desert, irrigating it with water from nearby Lake Nasser, a vast man-made lake created by the construction of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile in the south. (We covered in-depth what happened to Toshka here).

Funding problems, mismanagement and wavering political support have hindered the large-scale project, which nevertheless still looms large in discussions on food self-sufficiency.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyG94Oiaq_Y[/youtube]

But in the current political instability, the dream of a single project turning vast tracts of desert into grain farms looks more like the pet-project of an authoritarian leader than the most pressing priority for the newly elected government.

The Muslim Brotherhood, to which President Mohamed Morsi belongs, opposes the scheme, but the wider policy idea of improving food security for a growing population remains part of state policy.

How can current farms be improved and expanded?

“There is determination at the national level to achieve self-sufficiency in wheat,” Iman Sadek, a senior researcher from the Agricultural Research Academy (within the Ministry of Agriculture), and the head of the National Wheat Campaign (a project that aims to reduce Egypt’s wheat production-consumption gap), told IRIN.

Using desert land seems a key part of the solution, she says.

“But we have to bear in mind that the variety of wheat that can be grown in the desert can be different from the one grown in the Nile valley or delta.”

Away from mega-projects, some progress has been made, if slowly.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Egypt produced 8.7 million tons of wheat in 2012, 4 percent more than in the previous year, itself a good year.

“Productivity improvements can be done by both increasing the lands cultivated with wheat and also applying new technologies to raise the productivity of present fields”, said Saeed of the Wheat Producers’ Association.

“There is determination at the national level to achieve self-sufficiency in wheat” – Iman Sadek, senior researcher, Agricultural Research Academy The total land area sown with wheat has increased to 1.2 million hectares in 2012, from 1.1 million hectares in 2011, according to Agriculture Minister Salah Abdel Mo’men.

The new Egyptian government has a target of producing locally 75 percent of domestic wheat needs within the next three years. Pilots carried out in 2011 and 2012 by the Egyptian Agriculture Research Centre and Egypt’s Academy of Scientific Research and Technology have shown productivity can be boosted by 30 percent.

The increased yields were attributed to new varieties developed by the Agricultural Research Academy and new agriculture methods (raised bed planting).

What’s holding back greater food production?

Agriculture needs fertile land and water, both of which are in short supply in Egypt, but when it comes to persevering fertile land, water is ironically the biggest threat.

The Nile Delta generates a third of national agricultural production, but saltwater intrusion is now a major problem with the Mediterranean having risen 20cm in the past century.

Egypt is particularly exposed to climate change.

The country has an annual water shortfall of seven billion cubic metres, with the Nile the only regular freshwater source, and itself threatened by growing water-use upstream.

Agriculture will bear the strain of any decrease in water availability, consuming as it does 85 percent of supply, according to Egypt’s state of the environment report, which criticises the “the continued use of unsustainable agricultural methods of planting and irrigation management”.

With only 55 billion cubic metres every year, Egypt does not have enough water to quench the thirst of its growing population and irrigate its farmland (around 3.3 million hectares in total).

What’s the government doing?

Current the government is importing cereals from global markets, leaving the country’s poor heavily exposed to fluctuations in world food prices, effectively importing water in food form.

The lack of security on the open market – as shown when Russia banned wheat exports in 2010 – has even prompted the government to consider growing cereals in other countries, including Sudan.

A delegation from the Ministry of Agriculture is preparing to visit Sudan later this year to examine the possibility of growing wheat on as many as 470,000 hectares of Sudanese land.

While better use of current water supplies seems to be the most practicable idea for improving national food security, others see a broader solution just around the corner.

Scientists say the western desert is home to a huge groundwater reservoir that could help Egypt reclaim up to 1.5 million hectares of land in the future.

Khaled Abd El-Kader, a professor emeritus of stratigraphy from Assuit University, used satellite images of the Great Sand Sea, an area in the western desert that contains huge sand dunes up to 100 metres in height, to search for ground water.

Findings from a field trip to the area concluded that there may be a huge and accessible underground water oasis spanning Chad, Egypt, Libya and Sudan.

An earlier study by water expert Maghawry Diab pointed to the presence of huge amounts of underground water in the Western Desert, enough for the reclamation of 261,000 hectares of land, and suggested that Egypt could do without the Nile for reclamation purposes if this source could be tapped.

The government, according to Sadek of the Agricultural Research Academy, is digging experimental wells in the desert to try and reach this water but in the meantime researchers at the Academy are focusing on new varieties of drought- and salinity-resistant wheat.

(This article is reprinted from the UN reporting service, IRIN); top image via panopticon

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What should humans eat for optimal health? The key word here is optimal. Our bodies are remarkable machines, and we can manage, more or less, on a wide variety of foods. But what foods work with our natural physiology, rather than against it? While many look to the future and modern food technology for guidance, it may be wise to take a historical approach. Homo sapiens (that’s us humans) have been evolving for a couple million years. Agriculture is believed to have originated just 10,000 years ago – a mere blip in evolutionary terms – in the fertile crescent: present day Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. So what did people eat before modern agriculture? Let’s take a look.

Cultivating grains, such as wheat, along with the domestication of animals made it possible for humans to settle down in one location for extended periods of time. This assured food supply led to the development of civilization.

However, the change from hunter-gatherer to farmer came at a price. The average height and lifespan in Paleolithic times was actually greater than it was after the transition to a plant-food diet based mostly on grain, according to beyondveg.

This is a clear indication that our bodies were designed for a diet similar to that of Paleolithic man and woman, not that of their Neolithic, wheat-eating cousins. After all, genetically we’re not really different from our Paleo brothers and sisters.

So what does a modern Paleo diet look like?

1. No Industrial Processed Foods: This is a dietary recommendation that almost everyone – vegetarians, conventional eaters, and Paleo eaters alike – can agree on, (if not actually stick to).

2. Eat fresh fish, eggs, meat, and poultry, especially offal: Organ meat packs more nutrients per gram than just about anything else does. Eat the whole animal. Yes, lamb’s testicles too.

3. Eat plenty of vegetables, plus some fruit and nuts: Paleolithic man didn’t cultivate foods, but made use of what was available. Organic, is of course, best. Until recently, all food was organic.

4. No grains: Especially not wheat. Today’s wheat, after years of hybridization, isn’t the wheat that was first cultivated in the Middle East. White flour has very few nutrients, but whole grain flour, and wheat in particular, is loaded with anti-nutrients like phytic acid. It isn’t a coincidence that many people feel better when they ditch the grains.

5. No dairy… well maybe just a little: On dairy, there is less consensus. Many people living the Paleo lifestyle are happy with at least butter, ghee, (or Moroccan smen), and cream.

For Paleo eaters, how food is produced is as important as what you choose to eat. Try to find eggs laid by pastured hens; organic fruit and veggies; meat, fish, and poultry that is humanely raised and not pumped up on chemicals and antibiotics, and so on.

Watch a video on the Paleo Diet:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCFZoqmKf5M[/youtube]

With our long history of wheat production, North Africa and the Middle East have the world’s highest rates of per capita wheat consumption (links to PDF).

By eating lots of pita, pasta, and bread, and crackers, we may, in fact, be doing significant damage to our digestive systems. It is certainly worth investigating the Paleo lifestyle to see if it can improve your health.

Read more on Paleolithic-type eating:
Eat the Whole Animal: Lamb’s Testicles
Whole Animal Cooking
Making Smen the Old Fashioned Way

Ruth blogs at Ruth’s Real Food
Image via healthhabits.ca

The post 5 Steps for Eating a Paleo Diet appeared first on Green Prophet.

Human civilization began with the growing of wheat in the fertile crescent. Fifteen thousand years ago in the Middle East, people started to select and later to cultivate strains of wheat and began farming, and the rest is, as they say, history. (You can read the history of ancient emer wheat here).

Warmth and sun is needed. But not too much. With the onset of climate change, temperature rises are actually beginning to cut into wheat yields. Although Egypt was one of the original lands of the fertile crescent, it has now become the world’s biggest importer. With Ethiopia damming the Nile, agriculture could change forever in the Nile region.

The North African and Middle Eastern countries of Algeria, Tunisia, Cypress and Egypt were still exporters of wheat as late as the nineteenth century. But as temperatures have risen in the Middle East, that has changed.
Egypt no longer can grow enough to export any surplus.

Increasingly, the first wheat farming region now relies on wheat supplies from places that only warmed up enough to able to support wheat farming in recent centuries.

Russia and Ukraine were insignificant wheat growers until the end of the 20th century. But as the world has warmed, the conditions have improved for farming wheat at higher latitudes. The region now provides 30% of the world’s wheat.

But, temperatures are not going to simply conveniently stop at the perfect temperature for wheat farming. This year, in got too hot for wheat, even in Russia, with temperature records that were broken worldwide. And with too much heat, yields drop. Russia lost a third of the wheat crop this year. It stopped exporting.

Egypt, as well as Tunisia, Algeria and Jordan, all reacted to the Russian ban by buying extra wheat on the spot market. Worldwide, wheat prices have nearly doubled in just four months from $4.26 a bushel.

Scientists estimate that even the small amount of wheat that Egypt can now produce for its own market could fall by another 15% by 2050 if temperatures increase by two degrees Celsius, and by more than a third if temperatures rise by four degrees.

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