Food

Ethnographic Encounters

Leo Coleman, Leo Coleman

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847889096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Food preparation, consumption, and exchange are eminently social practices, and experiencing another cuisine often provides our first encounter with a different culture. This volume presents fascinating essays about cooking, eating, and sharing food, by anthropologists working in many parts of the world, exploring what they learned by eating with others. These are accounts of specific experiences - of cooking in Mombasa, shopping for organic produce in Vienna, eating vegetarian in Vietnam, raising and selling chickens in Hong Kong, and of refugees subsisting on food aid. With a special focus on the experience and challenge of ethnographic fieldwork, the essays cover a wide range of topics in food studies and anthropology, including food safety and food security, cultural diversity and globalization, colonial histories and contemporary identities, and changing ecological, social, and political relations across cultures. Food: Ethnographic Encounters offers readers a broad view of the vibrancy of local and global food cultures, and provides an accessible introduction to both food studies and contemporary ethnography.

–1–

Food and Morality in Yemen

Anne Meneley

I was sick and moaning after our first meal upon arriving in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. I may have unwittingly taken a sip from the water glass set out on the table. It was not the food, but the water in which the food was washed or cooked that made me sick, as Yemen’s water supply was certainly not safe at the time. At the American Institute for Yemeni Studies, a hostel where many academics stay on their way to and from their field sites, a seasoned American scholar of religious studies hurled a bottle of Pepto-Bismol at me, and berated me for being so naïve as to travel without it. Soon, I was carrying the pink bottle with me everywhere, furtively taking swigs as one might from a hip flask. Our three months in the capital were spent studying Arabic with a tutor every day, and making countless trips to the Yemen Center for Research and Studies and the visa office, in an attempt to get permission to go to Zabid, where I had planned to carry out my field research. My husband and I and the director of the institute often had lunch at a somewhat depressing little spot down the street from the institute, run by the son of a Vietnamese mother and a Yemeni father who was said to have fought in the Vietnam War. They served a lukewarm, watery sort of Vietnamese soup without spices and slabs of fried dayrak (kingfish), an oily fish which to this day I cannot abide.

My main culinary pastime in the capital was an endless quest for meals that would not make me sick: With our Arabic tutor, Ibrahim, we often went out for ful (fava beans) which was made in stone pots in a furnace so hot no parasites could have possibly survived. Salta, a meat stew seasoned with fenugreek, was cooked in a similar fashion. We also made occasional trips to a beloved Lebanese restaurant for hummus and French fries; I am sure they served more exciting dishes, but my tender stomach craved something safe and bland. I later heard that this restaurant, sadly, had been destroyed in the 1994 Yemeni Civil War. My husband sampled the deep-fried locusts in the suq, which he said were like a salty, crunchy snack, but I stuck to getting my salt and crunch from pistachio nuts. Another culinary specialty, from the coastal plain of the Red Sea, the Tihamah, where we would eventually end up, was fresh fish, slapped on the side of a wood-burning furnace and served with delicious round flat wheat loaves adorned with hubb as-sawda (black cumin seeds).

We were eventually allowed to make our way to Zabid in June 1989, after a three-month delay in the capital. While most of Yemen is mountainous and cool, Zabid is located on the humid Tihamah, where T. E. Lawrence, among others, suffered mightily from the blistering heat. We arrived while Zabid’s torrid summer was in full swing, which was a shock to our Canadian physiology. Had we not had such difficulty getting permission to go to Zabid in the first place, I would have been tempted to flee the first day. The hottest season was also the most beloved social season: the wedding season. Almost immediately after moving into our house, I was invited to dozens of parties, including wedding lunches, which I initially viewed with absolute dread. One of the reviewers of my book Tournaments of Value noted that, while I had plenty to say about competitive hospitality in Zabid, I did not actually mention much about food itself.

When I contemplate why it was that I published so few of my own stories about Zabidi food, I am sure it was because they were often, at least at first, narratives of humiliation. I hated eating in public in Zabid for at least the first four months of my stay. This was not because Yemeni food is inherently hateful or even that unfamiliar, aside from the above-mentioned deep-fried locusts (and sheep’s eyeballs and camel-hump fat). In fact, in Zabid, a formal lunch included boiled lamb, rice, potatoes in a tomato sauce, a salad of green onions and tomatoes, okra, and a maraq (lamb broth) in which freshly made bread (made from wheat or sorghum, both delicious) is dipped. Dessert consisted of a pastry dish called bint as-sahn, or “daughter of the plate,” a thinly layered pastry adorned with honey and hubb as-sawda (black cumin seeds).

My discomfort about eating in public, therefore, was not really about the food, for which I eventually became quite nostalgic. Nor was it merely because of the food’s uncomfortable physiological aftershocks: I was plagued by a parasitical infection I’d gotten from the water, so the ingestion of food was not always followed by a gratifying fullness, but by pain, embarrassing rumblings, and wild-eyed searches for a bathroom, in case my regular doses of Pepto-Bismol or Imodium failed.

Rather, in retrospect, it seems as if my dislike of mealtimes stemmed from my anxiety about being unable to accomplish feats that were ordinary for everyone else I was with, and hence feeling like I was sticking out like a sore thumb. I spent the first few months trying to acquire the everyday “techniques of the body,” to use Marcel Mauss’s evocative phrase, which are so engrained that the Zabidis take them for granted. I would join the women squatting on the ground around large communal dishes, each person helping herself from the many plates of food. My problem was that squatting was not a technique of the body I could easily accomplish, so I lived in constant fear of flipping over backwards. Like many Muslims, Yemenis eat only with the right hand. My Yemeni hosts often plunked down a large portion of steaming lamb right in front of me. I found myself struggling to tear off a bit of boiling meat with only my right hand. And I was befuddled by the Yemeni technique of tucking a small handful of rice between one’s forefingers and thumb, which was then popped elegantly into one’s mouth with nary a grain wasted. In contrast, I ended up with a few grains in my mouth and the rest on my dress. Of course, techniques of the body such as eating are so deeply inculcated as to be taken as natural, so the Zabidi reactions to their awkward guest (my status as an anthropologist was never very interesting for them) from Canada would inevitably include a murmur of surprise: “My God, they don’t even know how to eat in Canada.” Someone else was likely to holler to my embarrassment: “Bring her a spoon” (a utensil which I never found of much use when addressing the boiling meat). A child might be sent to bring me a cushion when my wobbling got too obvious. Also be aware that at mealtimes, as at all times in Zabid, I was too hot, and the relentless humidity rendered me a good deal sweatier than is optimal for social engagements.

Any pause in my pace of eating would prompt the hostesses to urge me, the guest, to eat. The cries of “Eat, eat!” would ring out. Or else indignant questions such as, “Why are you being shy?” or, “Aren’t you comfortable here?” often made me struggle to continue, despite my difficulty in keeping food in hand as it travelled to mouth. When I had had enough, or at least enough trying, I would rise, saying the only acceptable thing to get oneself out of eating, “Al-hamdulillah (Thanks be to God), I’m full” and escape my hostesses’ protests that I had hardly eaten a thing. While I was self-conscious about being the center of attention, this urging of the guest to be comfortable and eat her fill was integral to proper moral comportment in Zabid.

Even the young children were trained in this generous behavior: Children as young as three years of age would offer me bits of food or join the others in urging me to eat. This, I might add, is in stark contrast to our own children, who are taught to consider their own needs first. Children were often sent over in the mornings by their mothers or fathers to bring my husband and me fresh limes, dates, or other fruits from their agricultural estates, which surrounded Zabid. I kept a stock of gum, candies, and batates Nom’an, small bags of potato chips adorned with the characters from Ifta ya-Simsim, the Arabic Sesame Street (the show from which I first learned to count in Arabic), to gift to the young food deliverers. In this way, I entered into food exchange relationships with my tiny, curious neighbors, who loved coming over to our house.

Gender and Food

In Zabid, we faced a different set of circumstances than we had in the capital, because we began to conform to local gender segregation practices, which were essential for proper moral comportment. In Sana’a, it was possible for foreign women to go to restaurants (although I would not have tried it without male accompaniment) that Yemeni women would not have gone to, or to go to male qat chews, which no self-respecting Yemeni woman would ever have done. But in Zabid, by conforming to gender segregation, I learned much more about how food is prepared and ingested along gendered lines. While it is still commonplace for people to assume gender segregation is the worst form of oppression, it has its advantages. While women do all the cooking in the home, men do all the shopping. So that meant that in the late morning, while I was hanging out with my friends in cool, dark rooms of the old mud-brick houses with their distinctive elegant facades, cracking zayaka (toasted watermelon seeds) with my teeth to get the tiny seed-meat, my husband was out in the sweltering sun at the open-air fruit and vegetable markets, haggling over a few cents for a bunch of bananas or a papaya. For the most part, he enjoyed bargaining, but there were occasions when he would have been happy to pay a little extra to get out of the hot sun. If he had, however, he would have been berated by his friends for being a fool and driving the prices up. Since food, aside from dry goods, is never kept in the house (very few people had refrigerators and those who did turned them off at night to save electricity), shopping for fruit and vegetables, and fish or meat (caught or slaughtered every morning) was a daily event. After that, men went to the qat market to haggle for qat for their families, including their wives; women in Zabid, unlike in some parts of Yemen, were daily chewers, at least the married women.

Some older women, over sixty, who had been through much in their lives, no longer cared about gender segregation, or veiling for that matter. Our neighbor across the street, Alia, was one such woman. Her husband had died several years before, when her now twenty-year-old daughter was still very young. Her daughter wore the all-enveloping black shaydar, like the majority of young Zabidi women. But Alia and my elderly landlady wore short-sleeved, midriff-baring shirts and ankle-length skirts while at home or in our neighborhood, dressing more formally only when they left our narrow street. We parked our small jeep outside of Alia’s front door; whenever my husband drove up, she would come out and yell, “Whoaa Faidhallah,” and they would have a small chat.¹ Alia made and sold lahuh, delicious sorghum bread—rich and chewy with bubbles on top. As soon as we moved in, we became regular customers.

The food was bought and delivered by men, but everyday food, such as rice and potatoes, was prepared over tiny propane burners by women. The key spice was a zahawig (chili relish) made of hot peppers and garlic, which were ground on enormous mortars and pestles. If invited for lunch by close friends, I would go over early to “help” prepare the meal. I would usually be given some simple task, such as peeling garlic or chopping onions, but it was always clear that they thought that I was monumentally incompetent in the kitchen, an opinion which was not unfounded. One of my favorite dishes was made of ground camel meat prepared with onions and hot peppers and covered with a pastry topping. It was then sent out to a bakery that had huge wood-burning furnaces. The other pastry dish, bint as-sahn, was also sent out to these local bakers. I realize now that I never actually saw one of these bakeries, because while women always prepared the food, the bakers were men, so one of the young boys in the family would be assigned the task of taking the prepared food to the oven and bringing it back after it was baked. Like shopping for food in the market, interacting with the male bakers was a job for men or teenage boys. While in small families, men, women, and children would eat together, in Zabid’s kabir (so called, great families), they never did, because men would always have to be prepared for unexpected guests to drop by. Some poorer clients ate with the men of the great families every day. So the women and children would eat separately, often entertaining female guests or neighbors for lunch.

I really did not know much about cooking at that stage in my life so, just as Steve Caton recounts in his lovely ethno-memoir of fieldwork in Yemen (2005), we ate a lot of odd tuna conglomerations when we cooked in our own home. While I still like tuna-fish sandwiches, which got me through writing my dissertation, combining heaps of tuna and rice and whatever vegetables we could find into a kind of hash did not constitute a dish that we have ever remembered fondly. When I was given a portion of meat on ‘id al-adha (the feast after Ramadan where sheep are slaughtered), I protested that I didn’t know what to do with it. My landlady was appalled by my lack of culinary skills, and because she insisted that it was baraka (a blessing), I felt compelled to take it. The other food that was offered on religious occasions was shafut, (sorghum bread soaked in watery yogurt and covered in green onions). I literally could not eat this dish without becoming immediately sick, so for months I would accept it and then throw it out, until I realized that it was perfectly acceptable to say that certain foods did not please you. After all, Yemenis, like people everywhere, have particular food aversions and preferences. As long as you established that you did not disdain all Yemeni food, saying that you did not like a particular dish was fine.

Yemenis, like other Arabs, are famed for their generosity and hospitality, which was always dispensed in gender-segregated contexts. What counted for hospitality in Zabid was not necessarily the food itself, as the meal was fairly standard. For the most notable hospitality events, the wedding feasts, the meat and rice were cooked in enormous caldrons by the muzayyinah, a status group comprised of butchers, barbers, and circumcisers. The female neighbors would join the women of the host family to prepare the rest of the dishes, the salads and pastries, in evening work parties, which were usually a great deal of fun. The men would have their wedding meal and qat chew on one day, and the women would feast the following day. What was really important, for both men’s and women’s feasts, was the quantity of the food: It was a great shame for a host family to leave a guest hungry. At one wedding, a low-status man, who was one of the last to eat, exclaimed loudly after lunch that he was still starving. The higher-status guests are served first, but it is a great shame not to have enough food even for the lowliest guest. In this context, a guest is a guest and should be well fed, regardless of status. The neighboring families who heard this comment (it went quickly from the men’s gossip circuit into the women’s) displayed a certain schadenfreude, even glee, at the host family’s failure and the besmirching of their honorable status. Despite wealth, considerable landholdings, and influence in the schools and local politics, there was much back-talk about how the family was miserly, how the house was never prepared for guests and that it took forever for guests to even be brought a glass of tea. Talk about the stinginess of the offering of food and drink was skillfully managed: A gossip was careful to know her audience. Had this kind of gossip become known to the host family, there would have been hell to pay, as stinginess, the opposite of the much-praised generosity, is considered a sin in Islam. Proper moral comportment in hospitable behavior was essential for a family’s honorable status.

The food product that was used to make qualitative distinctions between guests at weddings was honey. Each region of Yemen has its own honey, the taste of which varies according to the kind of plant on which the bees feed. The honey from the Hadramawt region of Yemen was most prized, and the most expensive. The higher the status of the guest, the higher the quality and more expensive the honey he or she was served, usually poured over the pastry dish bint as-sahn. At one wedding, a host eager to show his hospitality to the foreign guest, or perhaps to make sport of him, poured honey directly into my husband’s mouth, practically drowning him; this was not at all a regular practice. Yemeni honey has an international reputation: At a honey store in the Old City in Jerusalem, Yemeni honey was accorded a place of honor and was of the most expensive for sale in the shop, which featured honey from all over the Middle East.² When I returned to Yemen in 1999, I was surprised to see a very fancy honey store on one of Sana’a’s main shopping streets. It resembled the designer olive oil and gourmet food shops found in North American and European cities of late: clean, uncluttered presentations of expensive food items, elegantly packaged. It stood out quite markedly from the usual Yemeni food shops, which tend to be cluttered or presented in the old style of the suq [market]. I later heard that this business was a front for Osama bin-Laden’s shady interventions in Yemeni politics, although like many rumors in Yemen, this was never confirmed or denied.

Social interactions involving food were occasions when people would position themselves in solidarity with or opposition to others. Over time, one neighboring family started to send one of its young children over in the morning to invite us to join the family for lunch. These casual invitations were an index of closeness, as was the meal itself: We would often be served fish in a tomato sauce, whereas a more formal lunch, as described above, would always include boiled lamb. The family would say, “See how much we love you? We’re comfortable to invite you no matter what we’re eating!” A family with whom there was a more competitive relationship would never be invited under such circumstances. A guest would never offer to bring a substantial dish, as this would imply that the host family was unable to afford to feed guests properly, or worse, that the guest feared the host family would be stingy with food. Nonetheless, I felt the need to bring something; we could not reciprocate with a lunch because no one, not even me, had faith in my cooking skills. I was also “alone” (i.e., the only woman in my house), and hosting meals required considerable female labor. When we were in the capit...