Connecting to the world with camel’s milk

culinary cultures — By Bob Riel on September 1, 2006 at 12:34 pm

Great article in the Christian Science Monitor about how nomadic herders in Mauritania have a newly thriving business in selling camel’s milk to the world. It’s a story about how sometimes the best economic aid is simply an idea that helps a local population become more self sufficient, as well as how globalization has provided newfound links between rural farmers and urban consumers.

The herders milk by hand wherever they happen to be. If they find themselves down the road from the dairy, they send their milk in a bucket; others use donkey carts or a network of pickup trucks to deliver their churns. That done, the nomads continue on their way, following the clouds by day and the stars by night.

There are cultural benefits for the residents of Nouakchott, too, as the dairy bridges the gap between their urban day-to-day life and their nomadic roots.

“We are the in-between generation with one foot in the town and another staying in the desert. We are part urban, part nomad,” Seydou Sall, a local government official, explains at an evening tea party where guests sprawl on floor mats, their elbows propped on cushions as they sip from small patterned glasses. …

Many of the suited businessmen and bureaucrats plying the avenues of Nouakchott were born in tents. They smile in anticipation at the thought of the hot rainy season, when they have an excuse to head for the dunes, where they will rent a camel to provide a steady stream of fresh milk. But at least now, during those months when they are confined to town, the pasteurized Tiviski camel milk fills the void.