1 July 1999
Letter from the Levant
In search of the
free-range chicken!
Amid the worldwide scare of the dioxin contaminated chicken and other food products one thing comes to mind: Can we ever feel safe about what we consume from the global marketplace? Everything we eat and drink is suspect; from chocolates to milk to canned meat to butter to soda. Our food chain, along with our shopping preferences, have been impregnated and compromised and now we are paying the price.
I blame globalization, GATT and the Internet! In an interdependent world, the term being superficial and inaccurate, our concept of where everything comes from and where it goes to becomes irrelevant. My 12-year-old son believes food and other goodies grow in the supermarket. It’s too early to explain to him the concept of retailing and one stop shopping as a by-product of the global consumer revolution.
Our standardized custom made chicken, for instance, comes from farms that use imported feed, which is in fact a mixture of organic and non-organic material (you don’t want to know), some of which happens to be produced in Belgium. It was there that dioxin, a cancer causing substance, was accidentally added to chicken feed. The food scare led to many countries banning meat, dairy and poultry imports from the EU.
With the panic of mad cow disease still fresh in mind, the chicken contamination and the Coke affair, where soda cans were accidentally sprayed with insecticides, Belgians, and other consumers, find themselves increasingly weary in their choice of food and beverage.
But this is not a limited phenomenon. Last summer Jordan was the victim of a critical water contamination scandal, and years before, locally produced vegetables became suspect as well; too much insecticide residue, use of growth induced hormones…etc.
Mass production and greed have compromised the way we produce our food and consumers pay the ultimate price.
The latest food scare has forced housewives to throw away European dairy products, poultry and meat. Even the local chicken market in Jordan was hit hard when it was revealed that some farms might have used imported chicken feed that could have originated from Belgium. Result? Local farms complained that prices fell by ??about 90 percent overnight and most feared going out of business.
Our food chain has become so complicated in the past few years that minor accidents could easily mushroom into wide-scale catastrophes. The cycle of production is not as simple as it was few decades ago. From the farm to the consumer, was the motto of so many producers. But before it leaves the farm or the factory, food products go through a sophisticated assembly line. Preservatives, hormones, insecticides, chemical treatment, special packaging and other “value” added material go into the manufacturing process. Nothing is 100 percent natural anymore. One has to pay more for that.
Which brings me to the concept of the free-range native, baladi, chicken, that almost extinct bird which used to roam the backyards and alleys of our rural areas. Villagers still rear them for their eggs and meat, away from contaminated feed, growth hormones and other alien additives. I was told that since the latest food panic villagers made small fortunes selling their stocks of local chicken and eggs to distraught urban consumers.
In recent years a number of innovative Jordanian entrepreneurs set up small farms that produced chemical-free, organically grown vegetables—selling their produce at above market prices of course. Health conscious consumers are willing to pay extra for their peace of mind. More and more Jordanians are planting their own gardens and plots to produce enough vegetables and fruits to satisfy their own consumption.
Few years ago such scruples about food were rarely imagined. Mass production farms were still relative newcomers. Supermarkets were novel and interesting concepts. A typical Jordanian family stocked up on meat from the neighborhood’s butcher, vegetables and fruits were supplied by the local vendor while fish and poultry were bought from the local monger and so forth. Shopping the old fashioned way created human interaction and a sense of belonging. You were not the next customer in line at check point number 11, but a real person exchanging pleasantries and the latest gossip with your neighborhood fruit vendor as he helped you pick up fresh tomatoes.
Such interaction is missing from our lives today. We believe supermarkets save time and make shopping a fun thing. Well shopping in the old days was the real fun. Today’s shopping is hard work. It’s boring and lonely.
One old tradition that has refused to die in Jordan has to do with watermelons. True, today’s watermelon is omnipresent throughout the year, minus one or two winter months, but Jordanians still refuse to buy their watermelon from supermarkets. Instead open-air stalls sprout along every main road in the capital. At night these stalls, with their wide canopies, are lit by kerosene-powered lamps as colorful flags and other trimmings flutter in the chilly night breeze. Tens of watermelons are stacked on top of each other like pyramids.
Jordanians are proud of their ability to distinguish ripe from unripe watermelons. An ancient ritual goes on every time a buyer approaches one of these stalls. Vendor and buyer inspect the green piles holding the fruit in one hand, slapping it, listening to the echo before deciding on a pick. It usually works. And if one were in doubt the vendor would not hesitate to “mark” the fruit by cutting a slice to prove that it is red and ripe from the inside.
We now know that our watermelons are bred in green houses, given growth hormones and are genetically engineered so that almost all are guaranteed to taste the same…but still we prefer not to buy them from supermarkets. We feel a sort of nostalgia for the old times and shunning supermarkets is our way of paying tribute to these golden days.
But these are dying rituals. The supermarket mentality will not be chased away. It is here to stay. Our food chain will continue to get bigger and bigger, with local bananas giving way to the more physically attractive Ecuadorian cousin. And the same is with American apples, Italian seedless grapes, French cheeses, Belgian chickens and British beef. GATT will remove all trade barriers and that means the world will become one huge supermarket supplied by franchised farms and factories.
And just like white farm chicken replaced its free-range native ancestor, the rest of our food will also become uniformed, nicely packaged with universal bar codes and all.
And while the big supermarket will always be there, virtual shops, through e-commerce, will soon take over. If you thought shopping has become private and impersonal, wait until the Internet allows you to shop from home clicking on items in virtual aisles, dropping them in your virtual shopping cart before paying by secure digital transactions. An anonymous delivery boy will deliver the shopping to you while you are at the office happily working to boost your country’s GDP. All this to save us time so we can enjoy life better..
With so much time on my hand I am
supposed to be free to pursue life’s pleasures at ease, such
as hunting for what is left of the free-range chicken!