Traditional mooneh regains its glare with the spiraling health hazards

In a special feature last week, Al Mustaqbal daily highlighted the return to traditional food provision (mooneh) in most households in Lebanon as a result of the increasing health hazards that have been exposed by the food safety campaign. The newspaper shed light on the mouneh culture in Rashayya which has supported the livelihoods of hundreds of families relying on agriculture, including the processes of drying, steaming and carefully preserving the products with no added preservatives or artificial flavors. During a tour on a number of villages across Lebanon, Al Mustaqbal noticed glimpses of back to the roots trends. Most housewives, the newspaper wrote, were busy preparing an assortment of conventional home made items, like tomato paste, village koshk (dried yogurt), winter eggplant, cucumber and snake cucumber and all sorts of pickles. Other basic rural foods, include, village cheese and labneh, fruit jams and comfitures (molasses, figs, apples, pumpkins, quince) as well as all kinds of grains and cereals (chickpeas, beans, corn, lentils, soya, burghol). Al Mustaqbal in its feature noted that after relinquishing their celebrated role and developing more and more into folklore decorative items, the job of the old family mishmash of jars and pots has been smartly taken over by a number of productive cooperatives. One of the coops, "Nejmet al Sobeh7" cooperative association located in Mh7aydsseh, has become a hub to households flocking from the cities to buy a variety of homemade delicacies, as said its owner and mayor of the town, Marwan Sharuf. The cooperative, Sharuf boasted, is currently exporting its international standard products to countries in the Arab Gulf and Europe, stressing that the association has distanced itself from the tricks of customary trade. Profits, he maintained, go to support dozens of women working in the coop. At the same time, they help farmers and peasants of the village and neighboring towns who sell their harvest to be processed by the women at the coops. The processing of food, he said, while benefiting from modern technology, yet sustains the traditions in the preparation of pollutant-free end products.(Al Mustaqbal, September 20, 2016)