A Thousand and One Dates

Oh my! In Tunisia, men keep offering me dates.

Usually, but not exclusively, of the palm tree variety.

It’s date season, the date palms are heavy with fruit - sometimes hanging in the tree inside netted bags to stop birds from eating them.

Dates are served for breakfast. Dates are served for desert. Dates are baked into local sweets. And dates drop at your feet as you walk in oasis. Or else they are tossed to you by date-pickers from passing pickup trucks loaded high with crates of this local staple. 

I’m on a fast-track learning curve regarding dates. Date palm are one of the most important fruit trees in southern Tunisia and an important cash crop for many farmers. You can’t find an oasis without them round here.

I now know that there are several varieties of date grown in Tunisia (a.o. Alig, Kenta and Khouat dates). However apparently the traditional Tunisian date palm is theatened not only by climate change, water shortage and disease, but by genetic erosion as well, as a consequence of the predominance of the Deglet Noor variety of date in modern plantations. Though Deglet Noor dates are prized for their honied taste and elegant and smooth form, monoculture always has its dangers.

At markets, dates are sold at a variety of prices depending on which variety and how fresh they are and whether they are still prettily attached to the stems or not.

I have also learnt that when wandering around under date palms, it’s worth scraping clean the bottoms of your shoes before going back indoors. The sticky mess stuck to sole is not unlike dog shit in texture or colour, though imminently better in odour.

Also, maybe needless to say, date palm oasis are really rather beautiful.

These palm oasis are also the perfect place for practicing one’s fledgeling French! Just ask the local pickers over the fence in broken French if you can take their photo and you seem to become a part of their extended family. They’ll invite you to come into the date field and shoot photos to your hearts content - even kindly pointing the way to the gate so you don’t get lost on the way.

These pickers are incredibly skillful at climbing date palms. Then again they get lots of practice during harvest time!

First the tree is scaled by four agile date-pickers. They climb up unaided in their stockinged feet. 

The picker who goes up to the very top of the palm needs to reach out to catch the furthest bunches of dates, so unlike the other pickers, he has a bit of rope to tie around the palm tree, while he’s cutting down dates - therefore insuring absolute job security (I think not!). 

The pickers then proceed to hang on for dear life with one hand and pass down heavy bunches of dates from one picker to the next and finally to their colleague on the ground - one supposes this labour intensive method is to stop the fruit bruising as it would if it were dropped straight down from the top of the tree.

There is a tarpaulin on the ground on which the fruit is placed. After dropping down a sufficient amount, the the fruit-filled tarpaulin is carried to the sorting station, where different quality fruit is sorted. 

The best and most beautiful stems of dates remain whole, while the rest of the dates are picked off the stem and thrown into crates for transportation.
I must say dates not only provide raw materials for traditional candy, but provide one with lovely eye candy as well. Even the discarded date stems are beautiful! 

As a going away present from the friendly date-harvesters we got a huge bunch of dates on the stem. Since then we’ve been eating our way through this stash at an impressive pace. Dates are rather a good snack on the road - though admittedly slightly heavy on the digestive system, when they constitute a major part of the  daily diet.