The bread in Egypt falls mainly in the plain.

One of my many interests on this whirlwind trip of exploration has to see what sorts of carbohydrates people eat, how they make them, and what has influenced that particular staple becoming number one. In Mexico we had the tortilla, in India the chapatti (and in the South, less so, rice), in France the baguette, in Italy pasta. In Egypt it's baladi bread.

Baladi (an Arabic word approximately meaning 'local')bread is a rough-and-tumble pita. Once it was made in homes, but for the past forty years produced in bakeries at subsidized prices for the masses. Today somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of Egyptians eat subsidized bread (depending on who you believe and the amount of inefficiency you believe exists within the subsidy system). That bread accounts for between 30 and 60 percent of the caloric intake of Egyptians (the poorer, the greater percentage it takes), making Egyptians among the top ten wheat consumers in the world - even though they import almost half of their wheat.

The funny (and by funny, I mean tragic...) thing about this bread is how resoundingly bad it is. It is made with poorly milled whole wheat flour and receives a fair amount of bran on on top of that. By itself it is dry and difficult to move in the mouth. Most Egyptians eat it with a fava bean mixture, eggs, or herbs - but in my experience it has taken some serious sopping to make it go down smooth. The bread is so bad, eating it was presented as a test of worth for holding office, as reported in one academic paper I found on the subsidization system here:

"A member of Parliament charged the current and previous governments with the increase in the poverty rate where more than 30 million Egyptians are pushed to live on incomes less than $2 per day. He maintained, “The cash subsidies that the government allegedly allocate to the poor are not only just a drop in the ocean, but come in the form of low quality goods and services.” To prove this point, he introduced two loaves and dared the Prime Minister Dr. Nazif as well as the present supply minister to eat these loaves. He said, “I challenge you to eat one of these loaves and if you are not able to do so, you will have to submit your resignations”"

And as bad it is, the bread is getting worse. To try to offset the high price of wheat and a domestic surplus of corn, the government has begun adding around 10% corn meal to their bread. Soon, the bread will likely contain 20% corn meal. This will only continue to deteriorate what little structural integrity the bread has.

While this isn't the only bread available, alternatives don't provide much hope. Many bakeries will provide a choice of three shades of pita, a dark loaf, medium loaf (at twice the price) and white-ish loaf (for five times the price). Besides pita, many bakeries also provide a range of yeasted breads, fluffy, a bit sweet, and made with wheat that has poor protein quality, making it difficult to rip. I know this bread isn't one which has asked to be reviewed for it taste and flavor - its a food of last resort for many - but nonetheless taste still matters. Egyptians aren't just living on a diet of bread, it's bad bread. And presumably, at some point it will be so bad that people will refuse to eat it. Already rather than eat it some have begun buying this bread en mass to feed to livestock.

The prices vary. At subsidized levels, the bread goes for e£0.05 (or 1¢) per loaf. Street vendors will often sell it at e£0.25 (or 5¢) while supermarkets and bakeries will sell at e£0.60 (or 11¢). The street vendors are frequently persons who have bought bread from subsidized shops and sell it at a mark-up - a cheating of the subsidization scheme which has left many who wait through lines for several hour (sometimes to find no bread at the end) justifiably angry.

Grain here is in a bit of an uproar. In the somewhat distant past, there was a strong domestic market for breads made of sorghums and millets, but both have nearly disappeared with the dominance of wheat as an import commodity and a subsidized food stuff. Rice is a minor player, but overpriced for most Egyptians. While for a long time a staple in the diets of those living in the Nile Delta, those living in Upper Egypt have only recently begun to consider it a 'traditional' part of their diet after it was introduced by food aid in the past two decades. Corn is grown at high rates, and was once used to make a tortilla like flatbread, but the grain seems to be declining in direct consumption.

The paper I've quoted doesn't reveal if the prime minister rose to the challenge of eating baladi bread. It's hard to say what can be done to improve the quality of food available to the nation's poorest besides pouring more money into the already large subsidy system... so it's likely that is what will happen for now.

Video Adventure: The Pyramids

I admit it, the sunglasses were a poor choice.



Not revealed in the video... I had to pay off the fellow riding the camel to get rid of him...

The Situation

I am in Cairo to figure out what is going on regarding the food crisis here. I will be perfectly honest in saying I knew little about Egyptian politics previous to two months ago. I was sitting in my apartment in Paris filching internet and cruising the American media and I began reading news articles on the bread riots here and thought 'Egypt. Huh. That could be interesting.' I googled some things, begged contacts from friends, and bought a plane ticket.

So, the situation which drew me here is this. The Egyptian government is relatively authoritarian and a bit brutal, and while it is elected there is only one party which is allowed to put up a candidate for president. Law keeps people from organizing into most sorts of political groups, and there's pretty intense poverty here, and the situation has been like this for years, yet there's little momentum for revolution or revolt. Why? Because the people have bread.

While desperately poor many Egyptians who can still afford to eat because the government has subsidized a range of foodstuffs since the 1970s. The list has grown and shrunk over time - at its peak including almost twenty basics - today it only includes bread and flour, oil, and sugar. Other necessities such as gasoline and natural gas are also subsidized, which helps to keep the prices for just about everything considerably cheaper than they would be otherwise, but it's been harder and harder for the poorest of the poor to feed themselves.

One of the matters which is of considerable interest to me is the fact that bread isn't universally subsidized - there exist both subsidized bakeries as well as private bakeries. While the private bakeries operate just like any other bakery might, subsidized ones make only regulation bread - 3.5 ounce (100g) loaves in two shades brown and browner. Government bakeries make this bread, but also the government provides flour to some private bakeries to make standardized loaves which are sold at the subsidized price. Since April, when protests and riots began to occur - disturbing the tranquility of this relatively moderate nation - the army began making and distributing bread.

The effort to both increase production and increase outlets of distribution seems to have made a difference. Since efforts to expand distribution began two months ago, corrugated tin shacks have appeared around the city on street corners. They receive bread from the government production centers and sell it. Visiting bakeries throughout the city I have found lines, but nothing like the three hour waits like I had read about. People are still hungry, and if prices continue to rise on wheat, private bakeries will raise their prices, sending many of the people who currently eat unsubsidized bread into the subsidy lines, increasing demand and compounding the problem, repeat. The results? We shall see.

The Great Museum Caper

I am a great lover of museums. Put some stuff on a wall and light it, and I am there. Art, old stuff, whatever. I love it. Give me more. So, with my indiscriminate appreciation of the museum combined with the apparent plethora of museums relating to my passions, I have been to some wonderful galleries in the past few months. Somehow, I have neglected to write about it at all. So, in chronologically order:

The Indian Agricultural Museum
I literally walked into the Indian Agricultural Museum without knowing it. I was looking for the offices of an organization I was doing research with in a complex of buildings in Delhi and I walked in the front door. The guard seemed just about as shocked that I was there as I was. Due to its rather out of the way location and relatively uninteresting subject matter (how can it even begin to compete with the International Toilet Museum, also in New Delhi??), I got the feeling that this museum was not getting a lot of visitors - which is a shame - because it was actually a really well done and interesting museum.

It took some convincing to get the guard to allow me to leave for my meeting (I think he was afraid I would never come back) but when I returned afterwards, I did some nice browsing. Sadly, photos were not allowed, so I didn't get to record much of anything. The museum included good explanations about how Indians have been farming since the start of time to present with cute displays, good historical analysis of the British occupation, cultural significances of various harvests and accompanying festivals, and even thorough but understandable explanations about how various biological processes occur. A bonus was a good deal of stuff from a somewhat varied viewpoint on the Green Revolution. It was great.

La Maison du Pain
After my time in Paris, I took off to see a little bit of the rest of France. Specifically, I took off to see two regions - Alsace and Lyon. Alsace for its German influence and, less so - but more importantly for me - its bread museum. In the little town of Selstat, there is a living house of pain (museum of bread) which tells the history of bread, describes and demonstrates how and bread is made and has been made for the past couple of centuries, and gives some pretty awful tasters of French breads. The primary thing I learned there was that I could have saved myself a lot of time and rather learning than 'experientially' and working in a bakery and talking with folks for two months, I could have just gone to this museum for an afternoon. But that wouldn't have been nearly as fun or tasty. Right?

The Egyptian Agricultural Museum
This is how museums should be. The Egyptian Agricultural Museum was just every perfect thing for an old, post-colonial museum about a subject few people go to museums for. So, the approach for this museum is walking through urban Cairo, under a couple overpasses, I come upon the road where the museum should be. The road is covered with sand, broken tile, and rubbish - it looks like it is the set of a bad post-apocalyptic movie. After getting reassurances from the old man selling apricots on the curb that I was indeed heading in the right direction, I pass through some gates, dodge some taxis, and I finally get to the booth to buy my tickets. Price of admission? Two cents. Yeah.

The buildings were from the 1930s, but the displays all had their most recent entries for data listed as 1971. They had stuffed birds unlabeled and piled in glass cases with heaps of moth balls, making the smell whole thing near unbearable. As is relatively customary in Egypt, the way you see the good stuff is by paying baksheesh (a sort of combined tip and bribe) to the guards. The guard who came upon me decided I would want my picture taken with various mannequins around the museum, and as he didn't speak any English, that's what happened. When I eventually indicated I wanted to see the rooms which were on nutrition and soil (soil had a padlock on its door, nutrition literally had a board nailed across the double doors - but I could see through the cracks in both that exhibits still existed), he simply laughed, and told me no. Then asked for more money.

The museum had an enormous collection of traditional breads (which, eerily, had not rotted, but had made their cases have foggy glass) and a good section on various types of grain which are grown and/or consumed in the country. Sadly, much of the museum was in Arabic only, so I didn't understand near as much as I would have liked, but it was still nice. Big halls of dead stuff, curious displays of plants, and lots of miniatures of things to make food with. Lighting was poor, smells were a lesson in themselves, and everything was jumbled, but it was still a winner to me - especially for the end price (including baksheesh to three guards) being a dollar - and two cents.

So, this is Egypt

It can be pretty amazing how quickly time can pass... especially when you are sleeping in a new place every couple of nights. I still haven't finished writing all my thoughts about France, I haven't even started on talking about Italy and I am already off in Egypt. Starting to think of things outside of a chronological framework, here's what's going through my mind at this moment.

Whoa. Egypt. Walking around, it feels like an odd mix of Thailand and India. It has the climate and look of India, but the quiet kindness of Thailand. Things are calm-ish and organized in a scattered sort of way. It's amazing that there there is a relaxed feel to even the chaos of people running about the biggest city on the continent.

Lots of oddities:

• The 'main tourist office' was a woman with brochures in French watching Arabic soap operas. She didn't have a map of Cairo. She seemed uninterested in much of anything.
  
• Somehow getting a phone number was really, really easy and cheap. While in India I had to give multiple passport photos and a photocopy of my passport, addresses, promises to get a phone card (which they ultimately canceled because somewhere in the mess someone didn't get my photos when they should have), here I was able to just walk up to a man leaning against his shopping cart full of electronics to get one.
• Good golly it's hot. I am drinking water all the time, but still rarely peeing.
• The food really tastes like the desert. Everything is pretty simple and a bit dry, but not in a bad way necessarily.
• The most notable of things to strike you right away is crossing the streets here. Cairo seems to have more cars than anyplace I have been this past year - and oddly there seem to be no traffic rules. I have been here for three days and I am still not quite sure which side of the road cars are supposed to be driving on. The way you cross the street is a great example of the notion that 'he who hesitates is lost.' You need to walk out into traffic (it never completely stops, somehow intersections manage to have traffic constantly moving with flashing yellow lights and the occasional police officer sticking out his hand to hold back the tide for a moment) and place yourself in the gaps between speeding cars. They will swerve to avoid you, but not by much more than a few inches. My first thought when I began wandering about was 'if my mom (ever the safety conscious woman) were here, she would be stuck on the block she began on.' And it's true.
• Other than crossing the street, it feels really safe here. Reports I have gotten thus far is that the brutal behavior by the police (human rights not a strong point here...) make it so that people don't step out of line much. Erm... on the plus side, walking alone late at night is apparently a-okay.

Video Adventure: Florence Duomo

Franchising in France

So, though I left beautiful Paris a month ago, my thoughts are still mulling over my time there and my guts are still digesting all that I ate. When I arrived on the murky shores of the Seine in late January I was under the impression that all the little bakeries in France have somehow managed to remain independent while still producing quality baked goods. Turns out I was wrong. You can find every shade of bread imaginable - from the appalling to the mind-blowingly good. There are small bakeries, big factories, and everything in between. Regardless of quality, probably the most interesting matter to me is that today in Paris roughly eighty percent of the bakeries have some sort of contractual relationship with a franchise. While I am generally an opponent of things getting bigger in the food business, it seems that franchises are both part of the problem and the solution for keeping good bread traditions alive.

I have long been intrigued by franchises. For those unfamiliar, the idea is essentially this: a company (in this case a food company) has products it wants to sell and it wants to keep profits good. Say that Carl makes croissants. Carl makes croissants in his croissant shop, and does well. But he wants to sell more croissants, so he opens a second shop and he starts selling twice as many croissants. He opens a third shop and triples his original profits. Then he opens his fourth shop and things get out of hand - there's too much for Carl to manage, he chose a bad neighborhood to open up in, and he's feeling stressed. So, rather than opening more company owned Carl's Croissants, he decides to franchise. Rather than keeping complete control - and risk - over additional outlets, he lends his franchisee, Caitlin, the Carl's Croissants name, its products, recipes, and perhaps even financial assistance in exchange for a cut of Caitlin's profits. Carl's Croissants can now expand limitlessly with the help of new investors and franchisees and Carl still gets some profits.

Pretty much any major restaurant you can think of franchises. A company like McDonalds happens to both franchise and run company owned restaurants. Their rules are tight to maintain company unity, but the franchises are generally quite successful. Restaurants like Dairy Queen are also franchises, but give a much greater amount of flexibility to the individual restaurants to do as they please - hence the greater variety of items on the menus and layout for stores.

So, getting to Paris, I was intrigued to learn that franchises are big in the bread business but incredibly flexible. The franchises of Paris are not bakeries which decided to get bigger, but largely millers who decided to expand. In the 1980s large millers and millers cooperatives realized that they needed to do something about the decrease in bread consumption in France. In the preceding eighty years, consumption of wheat had decreased eightfold. Part of the blame for this decrease in flour consumption was the decreasing quality of bread. So, the mills started into new territory to try to save their products. While initially controversial and risky, just twenty years later it is the norm rather than the exception.

Unlike franchising done by a bakery, the franchising done by millers is all about moving product. French franchises give a wide variety of options offering varying degrees of commitment about how bakeries can join up. The weakest commitment can mean nothing more than promising to buy some flour from a miller, others contract exclusively, others still take recipes which are designed to work specifically with the miller's flour that the baker will use. Franchises can offer flagship products which bakers can receive instruction and training on how to make. With further commitment, bakers can receive signage, take the name of the franchise as their own, or even remodel the entire store to be a part of the franchises branded look.

Walking through Paris, it's tough to figure out who is a franchise and who isn't. Some stores give no indication beyond their napkins - others advertise their affiliation loud and proud. The effects on the bread are mixed - while being part of a franchise is intended to guarantee a certain standard of quality, there is a lot of variation between individual bakeries. If behaving poorly enough, bakeries can be asked to resign from the franchise - but if they do well, they can be rewarded with perks from the company. The biggest franchise are Ronde des Pains, Retrodor, Banette, Baguept, Le Greniet a Pain - and though these names are everywhere, it would be easy to live in Paris and not notice how prolific they really are.

Overall, none of the best bread I had in Paris came from a franchise - but the worst didn't either. Being part of a franchise seemed to mean that you would be getting something which was solidly middle ground. While some independent bakers have done fantastic baking, some small bakers do as little as needed to get by. From what I could tell, franchising seemed to be a good thing for most bakers - but the bakers who join into these schemes are often the ones who needed it. It's hard to imagine these bakeries out of context - the variety of millers to for this variety of franchises is a bit unimaginable in a North American context. An odd little difference in this crazy world of baked goods...