Here in the land of gentle weather and fertile soils you can grow just about anything. Without having any data whatsoever to back it up I would bet that this teeny, tiny country could be put under indefinite siege and no one would go hungry. Of course the growing and distribution of food would have to be properly managed and not commandeered by an immoral, money-grubbing politician, and all the marijuana crops would have to be ploughed under and replanted with wheat or legumes. But bellies would be filled. Beans would be eaten. Farts would ring out across the land.
The Lebanese diet is the healthiest one I’ve ever beheld -- mainly vegetables and beans, yogurt and olives. Meat is eaten too, but people still buy most of it from independent butchers who have earned a reputation for trustworthiness. The meat is local, usually raised on natural pasture, and fresh. When I say fresh I mean you can pick your beast out of a group corralled at back and return a little while later to collect your parcel of meat. That is not something I have done myself or ever plan to do but, like so much else in Lebanon, underneath this distasteful task is a bracing whiff of reality.
But it is the vegetables here that really hit the high note. They’re fresh, cheap and don’t require any moral struggles to butcher. The bulk and selection of fresh greens in my local Spinney’s supermarket is wonderful. Heaped on shelves and pawed at by Lebanese woman (who shoulder past me in that startlingly non-Canadian way) are parsley, cilantro, spinach, dandelion, purslane, giant-leaf thyme, chard, something posing as dill but milder, romaine lettuce, frizzy lettuce, green onions and rocket.
Those are just the leafy things. There are also potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages, beets, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, squash, zucchini, beans and peas of all manner including the beloved chick pea and fava bean, green peppers, red peppers, hot peppers, tomatoes, apples, oranges, clementines, lemons, watermelon, sweet yellow melon, peaches, grapes, plums, pomegranates, cherries; all locally grown.
There are the cheeses and yogurts, too, local and fresh; and walnuts, almonds, figs and honey. I just can hardly ever believe all this great food is grown within twenty miles of the store I’m buying it in. I don’t mean to boast. Goodness knows I spend a great part of each day bemoaning the crummier aspects of living in Lebanon so I feel I should be excused for tooting the Lebanese horn, as it were.
What perplexes me is the way the Lebanese often choose to eat something before it’s ripe. They do this with almonds – eating the soft nut along with its outer covering (which would later have become the shell) and also with little round plums, sour as lemons. Both of these you dip in salt to eat. I don’t understand this. I love almonds and I love plums. Eating them green when they have almost no taste and are very sour just seems like a senseless waste to me. The difference, I think, in the way I see it and the way the Lebanese see it is that they know there is no shortage. They can eat all the green almonds and green plums they like and there will still be more than they can eat left ripening on the tree for later. For me, forever trapped in the belief that fruit comes from I.G.A and only in small boxes at certain times of the year, the bounty of Lebanon is beyond comprehension.
Last time we were in M’s ancestral village I was fixing a salad with the coffee-table-sized Romaine lettuce we’d bought at the side of the road when I discovered there wasn’t any vinegar in the house.
“Darn. No vinegar. I didn’t buy any lemons because I thought your mom kept vinegar in the house,” I said to M. “I guess we’ll have to eat our salads with just olive oil and salt.”
“I saw a few lemons on a tree behind the house,” Dude said. “I noticed them when my soccer ball went back there.”
We went down and sure enough, in a forgotten strip of soil between the back of the house and the neighbour’s wall, dangling high in the branches of a leafless, winter-quiet tree were three or four beautiful, bright yellow lemons. M managed to get two of them down: one huge one and one tiny one. They had very bumpy skin, as though they’d recovered from a terrible case of teenage acne, but when I cut them open they were gorgeous and bursting with juice. I squeezed one of them onto our salad with a mild sense of disbelief. How much were lemons priced at last summer in the Newfoundland grocery store? Two for a dollar? And here they were forgotten on weedy trees that sprang up behind houses, certainly the progeny of seeds spit over balcony rails during long-ago breakfasts.
The ancestral village is thick with olive groves and every fall M’s mom calls me down to her place to pick up a huge jug of green, foggy-looking virgin oil she has set aside for us. It has come from their own plot of land and has been pressed right there in the village. The taste of this oil is not what you’d expect; it’s rich and full and a little bitter. Bitter? Yes.
The olives the Lebanese prize above all others – indeed, eat almost exclusively -- are bitter enough to bring tears to your eyes. We’re talking bitter as in coffee grounds would be sweet in comparison. You can acquire a taste for these olives, but my own has largely been sheer effort of will power. I try to like them. I try so hard I do succeed, a little, at times. They’re really good for refreshing your mouth after a garlicky meal (and every meal in Lebanon is garlicky). And I genuinely like the hotness they acquire from the hot peppers added to the brine. But what I really like are mild, Spanish olives. I buy them at the supermarket, imported and exorbitantly priced, and carry them home feeling like a drug smuggler and eco-failure.
M’s mom asks me about once a month if I need a refill on olives (she means her kind of olives). Like most of our conversations, this is one we repeat almost word-for-word every single time the subject comes up. I say thank you most kindly, but no, not yet, we don’t manage to get through olives very quickly. Then she reads her lines about how healthy olives are, and that we should eat more of them, and lists all the different times and ways in which we could eat them.
On the last occasion this happened I came right out and told her that I don’t like bitter olives (I’ve told her before, it’s not as devil-may-care as it sounds; she just chooses not to remember). M and his dad, sitting nearby, chorused along with my mother-in-law as one voice: “But bitter olives are where the real flavour is. Bland olives have no taste. Who would want to eat an olive with no taste when you can have an olive full of taste?”
“Me,” I said. “I want to eat an olive with no taste.”
Up until recently I had assumed the bitter, tree-sap-tasting olives were that way because they weren’t allowed to ripen on the tree. But M tells me that it is not so; it is the type of olive itself which is bitter.
“Good grief,” I mutter. “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like deliberately breeding a dog to have a tiny, under-sized head. Why? Why?”
Maybe I was overreacting a bit with the olives. People like coffee, after all, and it’s bitter. Heck, I drink black tea when a spoon can float on top of it. But now what about the Lebanese propensity for eating raw meat?
That’s right. If you didn’t know before, raw meat is a delicacy here. They take a big cut of fresh beef, grind it to a paste in the food processor, and serve it up like pink ice-cream. M’s mom mixes really nice tasting herbs with it and that’s about all you taste. I find it quite a pleasant dish. But again I must ask: why? Is it worth the ick factor and the risk of parasites?
People here would say yes, it is, it has a lovely flavour that you just can’t capture any other way, and while we’re on the subject have you tasted raw liver?
Oh yes. I forgot to mention the raw liver. Do you know they eat it for breakfast? Raw liver and onions. For breakfast.
“Live a little. Eat food with some taste to it,” M will say to me as he tucks in to a plate of dark, jiggly flesh that his mom has brought up.
“Don’t want taste,” I say, looking away and heading to the cereal cupboard. “Want soft, bland, processed North American food; obesity and bowel cancer.”
See, it’s not like I don’t realize how healthy the Lebanese diet is. Fresh food must always be better than packaged food. And as for the risk of eating raw meat, from what I’ve read and observed it’s minimal when you eat it as well-sourced and fresh as they do. Surely it’s better to eat that kind of meat than the pre-frozen, Brazilian feed-lot beef I buy in Spinney’s?
"I do try, you know," I say to M as I pour milk over my Weetabix. "Remember the time at that fancy restaurant when I ate the--"
"Sheep testicles," M finishes for me. "Yeah, I remember. But you wouldn't try the lamb brain spread."
"No, alas. Not the lamb brain spread."
"Isn't there a saying about that?"
"Hm?"
"All balls and no brain. That's it, more or less." M chuckles heartily. "Well I guess that's you, then. All balls and no brain."
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