<
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/sweet-sticky-history-the-date-180980983/>
"It’s possible to divide the world in two: the part that venerates the
humble-seeming fruit known as the date, and the part that does not. The part
that does is home to hundreds of millions of people, from the Atlantic coast of
Morocco across North Africa and Egypt to Mesopotamia and east to India. In this
part of the world there aren’t really “dates,” because only a philistine would
speak in such generalizations. There’s the plump sugar-bomb
medjool, the
chewy
khalas beloved of Emirati connoisseurs, sweet and sticky Saudi
sukkary, tart yellow
barhi peeled and eaten fresh, the varieties picked
early, called
rutab, and served frozen with coffee at the upscale cafés of
Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. There’s
ajwa from Medina, said to be the favorite of the
Prophet, the dark Persian
kimia, the translucent
deglet noor, and many
others with evocative names like
halawi or
Sagai VIP.
I grew up in the part of the world that doesn’t care (in my case, Canada),
where supermarkets banish this queen of fruit to remote corners of the
health-food aisle with the lowly prune and the most obscure nuts. But I’ve
spent the last three decades living and writing in Israel, part of the world
where the date reigns. Now when I visit North America and see these fruits
languishing on their remote shelves, it feels like climbing into an Uber with
that Washington, D.C. driver who was once finance minister of Afghanistan. You
can almost hear them whispering:
Don’t you know who I am?
In Israel, I was first drawn to eating dates mainly because they were around
all the time, served plain or stuffed with walnuts to guests in living rooms.
Then I began to see them less as a fruit than as a kind of cultural marker.
There are so many forces pulling apart the people of the Middle East and North
Africa. But the date and its magnificent tree are woven through thousands of
years of common history, rising elegantly above the dividing lines. The date
offers a different view of the region than the one we’re familiar with, and the
best place to start its extraordinary story is at the top."
Via
Future Crunch issue 191:
https://futurecrunch.com/
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
