Wellness experts have recently extolled the benefits of a Mediterranean diet, but for Amnon Tubi, who has worked in Tel Aviv’s crowded, open-air Carmel Market for four decades, peddling produce and fresh fish, this is old news.
According to Tubi, 60, ‘I knew that Mediterranean food is the best. The legumes are healthy. There’s a lot of fibre.’ He adds that, though he’s no doctor, he would heartily recommend a daily diet of foods such as fish, vegetables, chicken, legumes and eggs to improve anyone’s wellbeing. If you take away the eggs, you have a similar list of recommendations from a comprehensive dietary study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. This study noted that a Mediterranean diet can reduce the effects of heart disease by up to 30%.
Yossi, another stall owner who has worked in the shuk for 30 years selling potatoes, onions and garlic, comments, ‘I always knew it, of course. Mediterranean food is spicy. In Israel, it’s healthy. American food is disgusting. It doesn’t have natural ingredients.’ One such healthy Israeli habit is a staple snack hummus ful, or bean hummus. Dror Zaidenberg, another stall owner who sells hummus, explains, ‘It’s made from a natural process without any chemicals. Jews and Arabs have been eating it for 5,000 years. Our day-to-day movement is better.’ However, even hummus is too processed for Yossi, who instead plumps for one of hummus’s core components, tahini, which is a sesame paste he calls ‘the original material, the most natural and the healthiest.’
But Yossi’s distaste for all things processed and American seems out of sync with the trend in Israel over recent years. American cuisine has been on the rise in the country, but Zaidenberg asserts, ‘Israelis aren’t influenced by American food,’ albeit admitting, ‘we sin sometimes.’ Tubi has no love for American food, claiming, ‘They don’t know how to eat. They just have sandwiches and steak.’ Chaim Bitran, who runs one of the shuk’s fruit shake stands, concurs with Tubi’s sentiments. ‘All of the Americans are fat, white and sick,’ he says. So, then, we may be a little late to realise, but perhaps there’s something we can learn from Israel’s diet.
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