Foodz

Tunisia doesn't have great restaurants, because its really not a restaurant culture. The vast majority of people here live with their family. Young people usually live at home until they get married, and older people live their children. 90% of restaurants serve sandwiches and pizza.  This made finding food pretty interesting during the first few weeks when I was living without a kitchen. However right now its Ramadan, so I've been invited to a decent number of "Iftars". The iftar is the meal that Muslims eat at the end of the day to break the fast. So besides some other random pictures, most of the photos of traditional Tunisian food in this post come from home-cooked iftar meals.

Sandwich Thun- Basically all I ate before I had a kitchen, and my lunch most days before Ramadan (when basically all restaurants close during the day). Sidenote- They put Tuna on EVERYTHING EVER. Seriously, salads, pizza, pastries, whatever you can think of, they combine it with Tuna.

Escolape Makloub- Basically a turkey sandwich with pizza crust bread

Mayonnaise and harisa. Condiments added to any sandwich. Harisa is a hot sauce made mostly of red pepper and olive oil.

Traditional Tunisian sweets. These are mostly fried dough with prunes or dates in the middle

Brik- Some combination of fried egg, potato, other veggies, and Tuna in a sort of wonton wrapper

Tunisian Tajine- Not to be confused with its superior counterpart, the Morocco Tajine. The Tunisian version is more like a quiche, made with lots of eggs, milk, bread and some veggies

Salata Machwiya- "Grilled Salad"-  Tomatoes, onions, and green peppers are grilled until they are mushy. Then you mash them together and add a ton of olive oil. The egg bits and olives are optional

Don't actually know the name of this- Its basically chicken soup

Basic salad, but note the Tuna

Bread, an essential part of any meal here. Notice the cool fish shaped ones!

The veggies/meat for couscous

Desert table! Besides delicious fruit, notice the coffee. They make it by grinding up coffee beans with orange and cardamom and then adding orange blossom water to the final product. Its amazing.

Different iftar, same house- This is a sort of brisket type dish, with meat wrapped around an egg filled center. To the right you can also see Shurba, a traditional Tunisian soup

Blsdfsadfsdk Soup- Yeah I can't remember/didn't really understand the name, but its a soup made with meat and specific type of plant. The plant is boiled forever and then combined with lots of olive oil. I thought it was really good, despite its off putting color.

Another soup I forget the name of- Its made with eggs, tomato sauce, and olive oil

Different type of brik- "Brik fingers"

Malawi- Not to be confused with the country, this is a traditional type of bread. Its basically fried, layered dough. Really tasty.

The market where I now buy all my delicious fruit!

More market pics.

Even more.

Cactus fruit!

Notice the guy cutting it is wearing gloves. Even though the large spikes have been removed from the cactus, it still has little ones. I learned this the hard way.

Cactus fruit without skin. This and malawi are for sure the foods I'm going to miss the most.

Had to have a ketchup pic. The ketchup here is amazing. I never thought I would like anything other than Heinz, but I've been converted

Thats all the food pics I got. Notice the sad, sad absence of traditional middle eastern fare, like hummus, falafel, tabouli, and baba ganoush. Unfortunately none of those are really available here. There are a few Lebanese places that sell a watery, hummus-like product, but honestly the stuff you find in the US is way better. Which is why Sabra hummus is one of the first things I want to eat when I get back (along with brownies, pancakes, bagels, and delicious delicious cheese).

Nature and stuff is probs good

Before going to Morocco last summer, I knew nothing about environmental issues outside of the United States and a few other large countries like Russia and China. Although I never really thought about it, I’m sure if you had asked me what I expected in North Africa I would have guessed that it was much cleaner than the western world. Seriously I feel like everyday I read another article about how terrible US policies are for the environment, how we never signed Kyoto, how the Clean Air Act is actually an example of doublespeak. And lets be real, I go to the University of Chicago; the vast majority of my friends are liberals who loves trees (full disclosure: I may fall into both of those categories as well).

Indeed, I’m sure the overall impact a country like Morocco or Tunisia has on global pollution is tiny compared to the US. Despite the problems I’m about to describe, the amount of industrialization in the United States makes these countries look like a joke. Plus US companies go around the world and destroy incredible natural habitats everywhere, so thats another delightful gift we give to the world.

All that said, just walking around Tunis its obvious that environmentalism isn’t really a thing here. Tunisia isn’t some sort of third world country-- there are cars, computers, internet, and Nutella (which I’m pretty sure is the true mark of civilization). Yet although Tunisia has many of the conveniences of modern life, it doesn’t really have the infrastructure to handle disposing of them.

One of the few chores* that is easier here is taking out the trash. First of all, there are no recycling facilities, so there is absolutely no point in trying to sort out bottles/other recyclables. This is really unfortunate because most people don’t drink the tap water here, so they use TONS of plastic bottles. Second, there is no central trash collection place to put everything. “Taking out the trash” means gathering the garbage in my apartment into plastic bags and then dumping those bags on the street. Late at night trash collector/street cleaners come by and pick up at least some of the garbage.

Unsurprisingly given this system, Tunis is a fairly dirty city. The streets are littered with everything from coke bottles to plastic wrappers. None of this helped by the fact that there are basically no garbage cans, so if you want to throw something away while walking around you basically have no choice but to toss it somewhere random.

I’m not entirely convinced it even matters where you put your trash anyway. One of the first nights I was here, me and my roommate decided to walk downtown. On our way past a certain empty lot, we smelled one of the worst smells I have ever encountered**. Unlike the usual gross smells you find in Tunis (normally something decaying, another byproduct of not having a garbage disposal system), this was clearly some sort of burning chemical. I figured out later that the empty building lot was actually a sort of landfill, and we were smelling burning garbage.  I have since become very familiar with this lovely scent, as I have walked past several burning trash piles throughout the city. This problem is even worse in the countryside, where there are no other garbage disposal options.

The other major pollution problem in Tunis is the traffic. I don’t think I really understood the importance of emission standards until visiting North Africa. Unfortunately, they simply don’t exist here. I don’t know how many times I’ve been walking down a street and some motorcycle will blow pass me spraying out piles of black smoke. My morning walk to work is down a crowded street during rush hour, and it often feels like the air I am breathing came directly out the back end of an exhaust pipe. Last summer I had a friend who actually had lung problems because of the air quality in Tangier.

Again, I’m sure Tunisia is nothing compared to the United States in terms of overall pollution problems. I’m not writing this post to brag about how clean America is, or to criticize people here.  Mostly I think its interesting to see the consequences of being a developing country a hundred or so years after the industrial revolution. When the United States was polluting up a storm, we simply didn’t have many of the technologies we do today. As we developed more stuff, we also developed more ways to deal with the problems it created***. Tunisia didn’t have to develop any of the stuff-- the technologies it needed were already around by the time people here could afford them. As a result, while Tunisia has most of the things that we take for granted, it doesn’t really have a system for dealing with their negative side effects. Based on what I’ve heard from friends/read, the same is true for much of the developing world. My roommate’s boyfriend was just in Nepal, where he says it was even worse. Apparently there was a river that was so polluted that just walking across it made him want to vomit.

Anyway, thats all I have for this week. Next week I think I’m going to talk about food, so if you are still reading this blog Adria, get excited.


*Example of a chore that is harder: washing my clothes. We don’t have a washing machine, so I get to do this by hand. Lets just say in the daily battle between hygiene and laziness, laziness is often the victor.

** To anyone who has been to Morocco, you understand this is saying something.

*** I’m talking about garbage disposal, ect. Not overall pollution/emissions management or clean energy. Obviously we still suck at that.