Sometimes you have to get lost to find yourself. Last week my team and I were deep within a maze of narrow lanes in Cairo, Egypt, well off the beaten track. We were filming scenes for my new series Chef Abroad and were pleased to discover that no westerners had ever visited the neighborhood. Along the way we discovered just how lucky we are at home.
Our mission was to document a typical neighborhood bakery. We found one that was producing a wonderful artisan quality flatbread known as ‘ish baladi’ From our western perspective the bread was exotic and worth celebrating but our gracious hosts were a little mystified by all the fuss. To them the whole grain pita-like bread was just a daily staple. A routine part of life as common to them as water.
As I asked questions and made friends I began to realize that the bread played a role in daily life beyond anything I have at home. As fast as it came out of the antiquated oven it would be carried out into a back alley and sold to a waiting crowd for roughly a penny a loaf. Most people bought ten or twenty loaves. It turned out that the flour used to make the bread was heavily subsidized by the Egyptian government. The bakery in turn was subject to heavy regulation because the bread was indeed a necessary dietary staple. Everyone relied on it as a daily source of nutrition so it had to meet certain standards for size and it had to be available for a certain period of time every day. In fact the bakery only made this one type of bread so in a very real sense it was a public utility.
It may be hard to appreciate the limited choices available to this friendly neighborhood. At home we have twenty kinds of bread at the bakery, most of them white and nutritionally vacant. No ingredient assumes the kind of daily importance for us that this bread had in that neighborhood. We have so many choices and we take them for granted. Like water.
As we focused on the hustle bustle of the bakery I noticed a sort of steel box with taps leaning against a wall in the alley. It turned out to be the water source for the neighborhood. During our time there many people came and filled up jugs with their daily water. Apparently many of the flats above us didn’t have their own water source. Instead they shared one with their neighbors.
I’m not trying to inspire some kind of rich western guilt trip but I must say as we left flush with success, pleased with the footage we had of this amazing bakery I realized just how much we have at home that we take for granted. Pantries full of ingredient choices and taps running with more water than we know what to do with. We are blessed. I hope I don’t have to travel 5000 miles to realize that again.