family – Eating Research

The First Food

The first food I ate after giving birth six months ago was toast and jam. Plain, fairly boring toast, with one of those little sachets of jam that you get in a budget hotel. It is basically flavoured glucose syrup. I got to choose between jam and marmalade, and I chose jam. The NHS tea and toast is a classic. What isn’t talked about is what comes next.

Five days of hospital food followed. Naively, I thought that Bristol, a city which prides itself on its food culture, might have achieved a basic standard of fresh food being available in its hospitals. That wasn’t what I found.

The food was presented in metal take-away containers that could be put straight in the oven. It wasn’t just ready-meal type main meals that were in these containers, but also the vegetables, mashed potato, chips, baked beans and almost all the elements of the lunchtime and main meals.

As I could eat only some things on the menu, I was given a cardboard box of frosty frozen meals from which I chose two for each day. It wasn’t special food, just the same meals as already existed jumbled up in order. When I asked about the food, what was really noticeable was that I was talking with someone who didn’t know what was in the boxes, so she couldn’t really help.

It turned out that the cook was on holiday, and the cleaning staff had been left to run the kitchen. This didn’t matter too much, the woman explained, because there wasn’t much cooking involved, all that she had to do was put the boxes in the oven and throw away the left overs. So, even in normal times, there was no-one cooking whose job it was to deal with ingredients. Cleaning, in this context, was almost certainly a more specialised and skilled job.

I might be coming across as a privileged want-to-be food critic, but after several days with no sleep at all, a long labour, and a very small new baby to look after, all I wanted was something that would be kind to my digestive system. Simple hearty freshly made soups would have been lovely.

One of my genuine favourites. The lentil stew worked well with a baked potato, but this was hardly freshly made.

I’d read the ‘First Forty Days’ by Ou, Greevan and Belger and learnt about the ancient Chinese wisdom of zuo yuezi which includes only eating warm nutritious food in the first days after birth, and I had vague notions of trying to put this wisdom into practice. It wasn’t to be. The frozen metal containers were put in the oven at 3pm every day and were then available to eat from 5-6.30pm.

I found time difficult to manage in those early days, with doctors stopping by, a baby I didn’t yet know, and news to break to people again and again. The breakfast-lunch-dinner menu is just an indistinct feature of the background of the whole maternity experience, but it should be a supportive one, not an added worry to newly anxious parents. I know one new mother who after giving birth had to trek to the neo-natal ward every day to visit her critically ill baby. When she arrived back to her ward and the dining room 10 minutes after the 6.30pm dinner cut off, she found her meal that she’d gone to significant effort to pre-order, had been thrown in the bin. If there is ever a time when the reassurance of a good meal is needed, regardless of ancient Chinese wisdom, it is in the days after giving birth, be that at home, or in hospital.

A frozen metal box of baked beans is a pretty unappetising sight. Although there might be nothing ‘wrong’ with some of the meals, there is nothing right about them either. I chose five of the twelve cardboard boxes I’d been offered for the days ahead which worked with my allergies. I hoped that they might taste better than they looked and wondered how many I might replace with food that my partner could bring in. Yet there was nowhere to heat up food on the ward and it was Christmas, so we couldn’t expect much.

There was another option that was mentioned a lot, especially by midwives who were tired of despairing at what was on offer in the kitchen: this was to get take-aways. But take-aways are not a realistic option for people who are stuck in hospital for days, weeks or even months on end.

Take-aways as an alternative is also a way of individualising the problem, shifting the cost onto the patient and privatising the solution. It is a way of distracting from the problem of poor food and creating a division between those who can afford to pay someone less well-off to bring them food to their bedside, and those who need to recur to what has been provided as standard.

There was also a sadness to the ‘dining room’. Hexagonal tables and the large kitchen evoked a time when women perhaps went together from their wards, got lunch at the canteen and sat together in the dining room to eat. If this happened it was probably some time ago. Now, in a post-covid era, the standard of the food, and the attitude towards it, was instead fostering a culture of each-to-their-own deliveroo, behind individual blue curtains.

This seemed like a big waste of food and a big waste of an evidently large kitchen. It was designed for people to chop, slice, grate, boil, steam and roast food. Now all it was being used for was defrosting and disposing of food. It’s true that some fruit was available. But an over-soft satsuma does not really lift the spirits.

Helping women to breastfeed is one of the roles of a maternity ward, but women need to eat well and drink well to breastfeed successfully. There was a ‘drugs trolley’ that the midwives brought around the wards several times a day. This was well-stocked, replete with everything from paracetamol to highly specialised and personalised medication, but there was nothing equivalent in terms of food.

If this is the standard of food available to new mothers at St Michael’s Hospital in Bristol, a University associated hospital that prides itself on being at the cutting edge of research and practice related to birth and maternal care, in a city that has a very strong food awareness, culture and even an award for being a Gold Sustainable Food City, the standard is unlikely to be significantly higher elsewhere. We heard that down the road at Southmead Hospital there was also a lack of freshly prepared food and friends complained of ‘potatoes with potatoes’ being served for dinner.

This is likely to be the result of large contracts being awarded on the basis of cost only and in the context of a cash strapped health system. It would make sense though, if healthy Mums and babies are the top priority, to invest in more than throw away food and equip the kitchen at least as well as the drugs trolley.

Potatoes with potatoes also featured in my best hospital meal.

Coffee

coffee-to-go Coffee to go. I went. But I didn’t go without passing through the tourist Morocco that allowed me go to get here in the first place. I bought the presents, had the breakfast on the terrace, and in the airport I had a… coffee.

Coffee isn’t really a girl’s drink in Morocco. We’re supposed to drink tea, or perhaps a very milky Nescafe infusion. The modern Moroccans will disagree with me here, and they’re right, of course anyone can have a coffee, what decade are we living in!? Any woman who knows her place however, will also know to use discretion when choosing a coffee shop.

Coffee shops in Morocco are like pubs (were) in the UK. They are the place where men go to smoke, talk, get away from the house, relax after work, watch football and drink… coffee. At the language school last year I had to read a text which started, ‘between coffee shops and coffee shops, there are coffee shops’. A Moroccan joke which sums up the sight of rows of men in plastic chairs smoking and watching the world go by in small and large town centres. So of course we are allowed in coffee shops, but like a rough pub in the UK (a couple of decades ago?), or a dirty little bar somewhere else in Europe, you reflect on your gender before going into this particular ‘public’ space. I’ve been into a few of these coffee shops but being allowed in doesn’t mean you are comfortable. I’d far rather have a tea in someone’s (or somewoman’s) house, thank you.

So the airport coffee isn’t just a caffeine boost before a journey, it’s a place where my gender loses some significance and my mind begins to relax. Even the coffee cup speaks to me in English. It’s also a moment of loss. All that work, all that miming, all those words I’ve struggled to understand and build into comprehension, all that work is about to languish unused, for months and months. The rewards and sense of accomplishment after everyday interactions aren’t there when you return to your default self. But we are entitled to time off for a reason, and I think I need some.

I wasn’t going to write about coffee until I came back to work. It’s something I associate more with work friends and old friends and new friends, and even supervision meetings. Perhaps it’s fitting though that despite travelling between Morocco and the UK, two countries famous for tea, it is coffee is what comes across the globe with me. Not very original, I know. I was going to write about Harrira, a lovely warm soup with tomatoes and chickpeas and herbs. It’s cheap even when everything else is expensive, and would probably keep you alive if that was all you had. But I didn’t have my camera on me for the last bowl of Harrira. And somehow it hasn’t made the shortlist of ‘local products to be made available in the airport’. Not high-class enough, too much work, not admitted to ‘global’.

So coffee, with an imperfect colonial past (tea being no better), and an imperfect addictive future. Culturally though, it’s become a means, a code, a facilitator of better things, some of them really great, even precious. A means to connect, to think, to wake up, and most importantly right now, to have a break.

Out of Office

Thank you for your e-mail. I will be on an extended coffee break until the New Year with friends and family. Thank you for keeping me company with my research in Morocco.

All the very best,

Lydia

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Tagine

all-in-together

In English ‘tagine’ means to me a big brown plate with a cone shaped lid. I would probably imagine the dish itself sitting empty on someone’s shelf from a trip they did five or six years ago. In Morocco that earth coloured dish is filled with food.

If you go to someone’s house at a mealtime and it isn’t Friday you are most-likely served tagine. It’s not a fast-food, it takes a while to cook, but it’s practical. For example, you don’t actually need a cooker to cook a tagine, you just need one of the ‘buta-gas’ cans and a small clay or metal stand on top of it. Then everything else can be cooked directly in the tagine. First the meat and spices, then the vegetables, then the potatoes, then any olives or dried fruit. So if you come looking for work and you need to buy something to cook with quickly and cheaply, you are pretty much there with a buta-gas can, a tagine and bread.

Tagines are always round. This is also practical. You can fit as many people around a tagine as you can fit around the table. The food is supplemented by bread so whether you get a little tagine and a lot of bread or a lot of tagine and a little bread, overall you get a more or less balanced meal.

The worst tagine I ever ate was on a rooftop in Fez last year, it was a vegetable tagine which consisted of potatoes a few peas and a carrot. The best must have been the first that I ate in my friend’s house who lives in a small house in a small village outside Thursday. What can I say, personal relations get you further in Morocco than how much you pay to sit and see the view.

At this point I should come clean. I might be giving the impression that I’ve been visiting houses and eating tagines for the last couple of weeks. In fact, I’ve been in Spain. I had a week and a half break from my fieldwork, for several reasons, mostly work-related and an opportunity to see wonderful friends. So you can imagine I was tempted to write this blog-post about that first glass of wine when back in Europe… or about jamón, something considered worse than divorce in Morocco. The words didn’t come. Getting back to my flat, I then nearly wrote a blog called ‘the last of the oatcakes’ because like every good mountaineer, I’d come prepared for the empty-cupboard moments, and one little pack of oatcakes was still in my flat when I came back hungry.

Yet it was quite honestly the tagine the day after I got back that made me think a bit more. Seven people, one plate. It could have been designed by Taylorists or management experts for the efficiency of the idea. Wikipedia calls the tagine a stew, but it seems more baked to me, inside it’s little cone-shaped hat. The meat and potatoes remain in-tact, any olives or dried fruit sit beautifully on top, as they have been placed. Only the onions and any other veg underneath have disintegrated into a stew-like consistency. More to the point, the tagine feels like a great leveller in Morocco. Rich or poor, north or south, east or west, a good tagine in within reach.

Bread

bread-coooking

Bread. Or ‘hobbz’ to anyone in the Arab world, including Morocco. I was sure I’d heard ‘Hobbs’ in relation to bread before, was it a brand? Here, in any case, it is much more than that.

Women in Morocco make bread. Clearly not all women, but a lot more women than I would have expected. A mother of five children, with a family shop that sells bread, nevertheless makes her own bread. The husband says it’s her job. The bread in their shop is just bought in for selling to customers (like me). My neighbour who often works a 10-hour shift packing peppers to go to Europe, makes her own bread. This isn’t just the occasional loaf, it’s enough to eat with every meal, every day. When I say eat with, I mean instead of a fork, and as an accompaniment to the meat, veg and dried apricot if you are lucky. Even an academic with two children, a full time job and writing her thesis, makes her own bread.

Obviously the double shift for women is nothing new to us. Although just because it isn’t new, it doesn’t mean it isn’t worth noticing. That’s what I’ve been doing recently, noticing things. Other people work and make bread. I notice things. People also notice me. So it’s not a one-way process. Sometimes I notice people noticing me. In every country I’ve been a foreigner there is a word, you just have to listen for what it is. I’d recognise myself as ‘la Gringa’ in Latin America, ‘Guirri’ in Spain, or ‘Gainjin’ in Japan. I now recognise myself as “l’Goeriya”. Or, in the Spanish pronunciation even better: “Goerilla”. In hindsight, I think Gringa sounded pretty good!

If you want to understand something I sometimes think it’s worth skirting around the edges first: what is not the thing you want to understand? I want to understand seasonal work. So what do people do when they aren’t at work? Maybe that’s what I’ve been noticing recently: the bread-making, the floor sweeping, the hand-washing of clothes (I get to take part in that one). It means things are coming more into 3D. You don’t just see a worker you see a person in their context.

The same goes for the Goerilla. I’m fast losing novelty value, so if I expect people to continue having patient conversations with me, I’d better get 3D fast. People don’t want to talk about their work all day. The art of staying put is quite different to the art of travelling and arriving. For a start if I’m not making bread I can at least make some salad. However, I have found something that is more interesting to people than my (lack of) bread-making. I have found a job.

I was tempted to go for a job picking veg, but I think that could lead to trouble and I’m told to be careful several times a day. So English teacher it is, only a few hours. It costs me nothing to share my ‘goerilla-ness’ in Thursday and it doesn’t cost them either. Languages are the currency of social mobility in Morocco. In all major cities middle class children go to bilingual or trilingual schools and have private tutoring and classes in the evenings, adults too if they want to. There is no after-school tutoring in my town, people with good language skills tend to socially move themselves elsewhere. So you could argue that I’m helping a process of westernisation and globalisation, which would be true. I might contribute to people understanding the terrible songs that are on the radio. However, this isn’t preaching in an untouched village, it’s sharing words with people who don’t want to pick Europe’s tomatoes forever.

There’s one more thing about bread. It gets recycled. It’s the one thing. Other things might be re-used, if they are put in the bin and perhaps taken out again. Or more likely all the disposable stuff will just begin to blend in with the rubbish and rubble on the streets. So the bright pink yogurt pot will slowly fade as it’s trampled into the sandy ground. That’s not the case with bread. Bread is separated and saved. It has a detectable ecological cycle. The crusts and end are collected up, dried out in the sun, collected on a horse driven cart and taken to be eaten by the ‘bugra’ – the cow – as I was told my landlord, but I think the horse gets a bite too.

Conflict of interests: The writer admits to disliking yogurt, and enjoying her daily bread. Personal preferences may therefore have affected the analysis above.

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L hawli

It bleats, it pants, it kicks, it smells, it is: ‘l hawli’. As I pass by the market with my clearly French face, this is helpfully (and without my asking) translated for me as: ‘le mouton’. L hawli, le mouton, the sheep, has arrived in central Rabat.

The holy festival of Eid l’Kbir (big Eid), officially known as ‘Eid al-Adha’ is this Monday. The celebration remembers Ibrahim’s sacrifice and is a major festival in Islam. The exact date is determined every year according to the lunar calendar, and in Morocco the feast is accompanied by two days of public holiday. Public transport is packed as everyone goes to join their families. The festival seems to be a joyous time for everyone and I’ve never seen some of my teachers looking happier. It’s just the horned protagonists who don’t get to join in with the smiles and celebrations.

For me, the festivities started when the taxi ride to school suddenly got more interesting. Normally you hail down a little blue cab, see whether it’s going in your direction, and whether your journey is compatible with the journeys of anyone else already in it. Then, like taxis anywhere, there will be a speedy journey with strange music or chat about the weather.

This week though, as the empty land which hosted an international music festival in the Spring was turned into a different kind of living hubbub. As we pass by the market the conversations change: ‘have you bought your hawli yet?’, ‘no, not yet!’, or, ‘l hawli, no! In the market they’re too expensive! We have them in the countryside, my uncle buys him cheaper’.

At the language school where I’ve been trying to remember my (Moroccan) Arabic, hawli is clearly the word of the week. I have never seen so many sheep impressions. My first curiosity and question (to a taxi driver) was, ‘do people buy their hawli dead or alive’. The question worked better after I’d actually learnt the words for dead and alive, but by the end of the week I didn’t really need a verbal answer. These sheep were going home in-tact. My teacher confirmed my conclusion: the hawli goes home, it lives in the garden or on the balcony, the children feed it grass, and then a few days later, ta da! The adults have done their work, and no need for any more grass.

I don’t want to romanticise the hawli market. The sheep going home on hand-pushed carts are the lucky ones. A lot of them get a cord around their legs and are then instead headed for a car boot. Be that car a swanky brand new white four by four, or the boot of a small taxi.

Nor do I want to make it sound unreasonable. Perhaps if in Europe we went to the effort of going and choosing a live bird for Christmas, we would value more the life and sacrifice of that animal. Perhaps. In any case, the reality of the provenance of meat is being made painfully clear in the streets of the capital this week.

Unfortunately, I’m going to let you down at the end of this post with no actual food (again!). As an outsider, on this occasion, not wishing to impose on any families and their quality time together, I am not sharing in the festivities and the sacrifices of Eid. Instead I will do what’s expected of me as a French, white, Christian tourist and have a couple of days off too, on the beach. The sea is one thing that doesn’t close for Eid.

Pop-up hawli market

Hawli goes home, I catch a taxi

Men sit and watch over the animals they have bought to market

I wasn’t the only window-shopper

A woman takes a reluctant hawli home