Rural women rescue ancient, healthy recipes in fast food Egypt

Located halfway between the pyramids of Sakara and Giza, on the fertile limit of the canal of the Nile, Happy Farm welcomes women from the Egypt rural, who work to disseminate the ancient cuisine of a country with serious nutritional and health problems. overweight.

Fifi, 31, delicately prepares the loaves of ‘baladi’ (country) bread, before putting them in a large blue oven, while her companions finish cooking the dishes for ‘iftar’, the breaking of the fast during the month of Ramadan.

In collaboration with chefs and nutritionists, women like Fifi prepare a seasonal menu with food from the farm itself, which they serve to visitors in one of the grounds’ gardens.

Among those essential for dinner are Bekhero cheese and the traditional Kishk Saedi, a dough made with fermented milk and wheat, a highly nutritious and endangered food.

“Egyptian gastronomy has practically completely disappeared in the last two generations,” Laura Tabet, the founder of the NGO Nawaya and owner of Happy Farm, explained to EFE, a project that began a decade ago and that to date has involved more than 300 women.

The organization employs a dozen women and trains many others on their farm, where they grow their own organic vegetables and raise their own livestock, as well as organizing private meals and traditional Egyptian cooking workshops.

Of Egyptian and British origin, after studying nutrition and the environment in Canada, Tabet moved from one of the neighborhoods of the capital to Sakara, a town famous for its archaeological tourism, “but whose benefits almost never reach the local community.”

A feminine project

“When we launched Nawaya, the first step was to reach rural women”he explained, and “We realized that they had practically no knowledge about healthy eating.”

To this end, popular screenings of videos with traditional cooking recipes were organized, followed by discussions where “women also shared their knowledge“, and thus they located “to local leaders willing to actively collaborate with the idea.”

Tabet assured that “in rural Egypt, women practically never leave the house,” they do not participate in the harvest and, at most, they raise chickens on the roofs.

“10 years ago it was very difficult to convince them to come”he explained, ““But the current economic situation means that they need income to support their families.”since all the cooks receive a salary for their work on the farm.

New forms of tourism

Nawaya now seeks to promote other initiatives linked to gastronomic and ecological tourism, practically unknown in a country that, in 2023, was visited by 15 million foreigners.

Part of the problem, according to Tabet, is “the nonexistence of cooperatives” that allow small farmers “compete on prices with large food producers,” which “are used to using large amounts of pesticides.”

The increase in prices in recent years has made a large part of the inhabitants of megacities such as Cairo, whose metropolitan area is estimated at 22 million people, ““They do not have access to fresh products and prefer junk food, much cheaper but terrible nutritionally.”.

Because of this, overweight problems have skyrocketed in Egypt, with the 44.7% of women and 25.9% of men with obesity, and where diabetes affects the 23.4% of women and 18.8% Men’s.

“We believe that returning to the origins of Egyptian cuisine, exceptionally delicious and healthy, is the key for the next generations to grow up in a healthy way”Tabet concluded.

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