Whetstone Audio Dispatch
Episode 1
The Tunisian Baguette Revolt
Stephen Satterfield (00:00):
Welcome listeners to Whetstone Audio Dispatch, a series of one off podcasts about what food tells us about ourselves. I'm Stephen Satterfield, founder of Whetstone Media. In these dispatches, you'll hear me in conversation with journalists from around the world, on topics at the intersection of food, conflict, climate politics, and more.
Our first episode is about the baguette revolt that took place in 2011 in Tunisia. And to tell the story, we're speaking with journalist Layli Foroudi, who was based in Tunis for many years and interviewed several locals affected by the uprising.
Hi Layli, thank you for joining us on our inaugural episode of Whetstone audio dispatch.
Layli Foroudi (00:45):
Thanks so much for having me, Stephen.
Stephen Satterfield (00:47):
So can you tell us what was happening in Tunas during the Arab spring of 2011? And how did the baguette become a symbol of resistance?
Layli Foroudi (00:58):
Yeah, so the uprising started in December 2010, as a revolt in one town in an inland region of Tunisia and it was a revolt against injustice and marginalization. It was sparked by a young man, Mohammed Bouazizi who set himself a light after he was publicly humiliated. When, uh, a police officer tried to confiscate the fruit that he was set and his death just kind of sparked public anger. And so people started protesting in his town. The police tried to crack down and then this made the protest spread even further.
And then eventually it became a national revolt, uh, reached the capital. The demands became as much about freedom and an end to dictatorship as it was about marginalization and, and ending kind of material struggles. And then eventually this led to the, the toppling of the president, Zen adine Binali
Stephen Satterfield (01:55):
And specifically the baguette. Why is the baguette so richly important in Tunisia?
Layli Foroudi (02:02):
The baguette was very, very present in the uprising. It was symbolically you could see people, they were holding the baguette when they were marching the streets and actually tracing the history of how this loaf came to be kind of Tunisian staple can really help understand the, the roots of revolution and its main demands and why people are still demanding better today.
Bread has come to be bread means to be able to live and eat, to provide for your family. So it signifies a kind of material well being. And that was one of the main demands of the revolution. So, bringing up baguettes to the street is your, you're demanding a better material situation. Being able to have food on the table, um, being able to live in dignity.
Well, firstly, the baguette is just everywhere all the time. It is by far, the most widely consumed type of bread is eaten alongside every meal, even couscous and pasta and tracing the history of how this came to be, how this loaf became a Tunisian staple can really help understand the roots of the revolution, its main demands and the reasons people are still demanding better today. The uprising started in December, 2010 as a revolt in one town in an inland region of Tunisia.
Layli Foroudi (03:42):
It was a revolt against injustice and marginalization. And when the police tried to repress it, it just got bigger. The protest spread and became political against the police state asking for freedom and an end to dictatorship. One of the main slogans you could hear in towns and cities all over the country was work freedom, national dignity, or sometimes even bread, freedom national dignity
Layli Foroudi (04:17):
On January 14th, 2011, the move top of the president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. This was something no one thought would happen. And it galvanized people across the middle east in north Africa to demand change in their own countries. These mass uprisings, which toppled dictators and sparked civil wars came to be known as the Arab Spring.
Bread means to be able to live and eat, to provide for your family. It signifies work and is colloquially used that way in the Tunisian dialect; kind of like how we say “the breadwinner” in English.
This material wellbeing and sufficiency is keenly felt as an essential part of human dignity. During the revolution, people would brandish baguettes on the street during marches; bread featured in the slogans.
There is a particularly iconic photo of a lone skinny man with a cigarette in his mouth on the main avenue in Tunis, bravely pointing a baguettes at the anti-riot police like a machine gun. This man even inspired a social media superhero. Captain Khobza. Khobz means bread in Arabic. Khobza means this big baguette type of bread, in particular.
Layli Foroudi (06:00):
The big baguette, the khobza, weighs 450 grams before being baked. The smaller size known in Tunisian simply as baguette, weighs 250 grams pre-baked. The khobza and the baguettes are made with the same type of flour, a white soft wheat that is imported and is sold to bakers in 100 kilogram bags, which are subsidized by the government. You pay around 9 cents for a big baguette and around 7 cents for a small one. The loaf has shrunk over time, the pre baked weight for the big khobza used to be a kilo back in the day.
Ahmed Ben-Massoud (06:35):
Well, I have good memories about the big bread, the kilo bread. I remember going to the bakery in the morning in a small town. So we smell all this bread. There were bakeries. They were not really mechanized, so they do everything by hand.
Layli Foroudi (06:53):
This is Ahmed Ben-Massoud. He's an audiologist from Douz, a town in the south of Tunisia. He spent 17 days in prison in the eighties for the sake of bread, among other things. We'll talk about that more later.
Ahmed Ben-Massoud (07:07):
We prefer the warm bread as I think, all Tunisians. We don't eat next day's bread, even. That's why we throw away bread here in Tunisia. We like always in the morning, we go to either the bakery or grocery store or to find, uh, fresh breads. In the afternoon. We don't eat it just to throw it away.
Layli Foroudi (07:31):
I think most people prefer warm breads, but this baguette really needs to be eaten hot because as soon as it cools down, it goes dry and hard. A baker told me that this is to do with the amount of water in the dough. There is very little of it so that the dough comes out quite hard and can be molded into a baguette shape by a machine. But the throwaway attitude Ahmed mentions doesn't apply to the traditional tabouna bread, for example.
I met a lady called Halima who makes this tabouna her home in Tunis. She told me that she sells around 25 pieces a day and that none of it will go to waste.
Halima (Translated) (08:10):
A lot of people will keep this bread. They will heat it up and eat it. The baguette, no. The baguette, you throw it all away, They eat this one because it is made with oil. The other one, no, the baguette you throw the whole thing away.
Layli Foroudi (08:27):
Actually, everyone I spoke to said they would rather eat this bread. It's tastier. It actually fills you up. And it keeps for more than one day. The first thing they say to differentiate it from the baguette it's that it's made from semolina flour, as opposed to soft wheat. It said like self evidence that semolina flour bread is better.
Halima (Translated) (08:52):
It's another world, another world, not like the baguette. You leave the baguette to the side behind you. This you eat with mulukhiyah, salata meshwiya, with the best food.
And for the Eid holiday, when people have a grill with the lamb and salata meshwiya that is with tabouna.
Layli Foroudi (09:13):
Yet, it is the baguette that dominates Tunisian diets. To get an idea of how this bread, an imported and actually less appreciated product took off in Tunisia. I spoke to Max Ajl, a postdoc researcher on national liberation and agrarian questions at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and author of a People's Green New Deal. When we met in Tunis, I asked him about this wheat dichotomy, the soft wheat used in the white baguettes and the hard wheat used for semolina flour.
Max Ajl (09:43):
So on a global basis, soft wheat is the overwhelmingly planted and harvested and processed and consumed type of wheat to the point that most people actually don't really understand that there's these two types of wheat that exist in the world, soft wheat and hard wheat.
In essence, they are, although they have the same name in terms of their kind of overall social and elementary function, you can kind of consider them separate cereals, even though they will often be able to grow very similarly and similar ecological conditions and the similar amounts of precipitation so forth.
Although hard wheat does a little better in, uh, low precipitation areas. And so this is, uh, an extremely cheap source of more or less empty calories, but there's no iron there's no, there's a lot of the vitamins or lacking in this type of be as compared to barley or a hard wheat or even a, a higher quality, uh, soft wheat.
Layli Foroudi (10:44):
The baguette form was inherited from the French who colonized Tunisia from 1881 to 1956. And it was also the French who started cultivating soft wheats. While today Tunisia is highly reliant on imported cereals. It is said that during the Roman empire north Africa was known as the granary of the empire, as crops were grown here and exported to Rome and other places.
The French colonial government was particularly keen on this idea and styled itself as a new Rome, when the French arrived, they found that Tunisian farmers grew hard wheat and viewed soft wheat as an undesirable product, often throwing it away. So in keeping with European tastes and habits, the French started introducing different varieties of soft wheats in the early 1900s. And by 1940 Tunisia was a net exporter of mostly soft wheats at first. And the majority of which were sent to France.
Layli Foroudi (11:45):
In the same neighborhood as Halima, I met a 62 year old baker called Taoufik Khedhri. He has a small bakery with a big rotating oven to make the industrial baguette using the soft wheat. The bakery was set up by his father who had moved to Tunis aged 18 from a small town in the south of the country to find work.
He started making baguettes, which was a good business because they were increasingly in demand. As more people arrived at the city like he did looking for work and eating cheap, quick food. Meanwhile, Tofi grew up eating tabouna made by his mom, which he liked better. He still likes it better, but he now sees the baguette status quo just as the natural way things developed; part of progress.
Taoufik Khedhri (Translated) (12:32):
No more. Bye bye. Rarely, very little. We started to buy the baguettes. Mostly we get baguettes from the bakery bag. That's it. We don't have time for tabouna. Give me the baguette. Give me the sandwich. The time. The times have changed. He works. He comes and grabs the baguette and goes and works for himself. I have a wife and two children. My wife works in a bank. She has no idea about bread. She's with the pen and typewriter.
Layli Foroudi (13:13):
The consumption of soft wheat, though, was actively encouraged in Tunisia, and Tofi was on the receiving end of that. When he was a child. Here, he is sharing some of those memories
Taoufik Khedhri (Translated) (13:31):
In school, We would get the petit pain, take this baguette and cut it into petit pain, like a sandwich. You put cheese, butter in it. It was the Americans that would bring bread before.
Taoufik Khedhri (Translated) (13:51):
At school, they would give us a coffee, milk, chocolate, and petit pain and cheese. We were young. It was in 1975. When you weren't even born. It was breakfast at school. The state used to give people bread. People were poor. The state used to help people. The government will give them training
Taoufik Khedhri (Translated) (14:26):
fatma, from down the road. She passed away now. Bless her soul. She would come in the morning at nine and bring the bread, the butter and everything to make a sandwich. I would leave my coffee at home and go to school because the milk and chocolate was incredible. It was amazing. The chocolate milk.
Layli Foroudi (14:49):
What Taoufik is describing is the PL4 80 policy, a humanitarian aid program launched by the US government in the late fifties, which was called Food for Peace. The initiative for this program came when the US had a wheat surplus. Farmers were producing too much wheat and the government was buying and storing it as part of new deal air protections, which was pushing prices downward.
So the US government wanted to shift this grain and PL 480 provided a way to do that, which was in both its political and economic interests.
Regarding the surpluses, one US Congressman even said, “with proper use, these surpluses can be made of far more potential means of combating this spread of, of communism than the hydrogen bomb”
Max Ajl (15:36):
Making people rely on food. I mean, they're also very cynical. They were thinking about food as a weapon. For sure. We see this in the modern day, you know, in places like Palestine and Yemen, but food is being used as a weapon. Of course they were definitely thinking, okay, we're gonna habituate people to this. And then it will be a future market for cereals.
So this is certainly part of how they're conceptualizing the PL 480, but it's also just it's these multiple strands that combine into all the benefits that can accrue from that the US can accrue from deploying the wheat it has piling up in its silos and setting it to work in controlling the trajectory of third world development, especially in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, India, which were not aligned at that point, right? Which were not part of the second world, which were not adopted in a Soviet or Chinese style command planning, where there was a contest over what the shape and form of development in these countries would be.
And the US wanted to make sure that this would, these would look as much like so-called market economies as was possible.
Max Ajl (16:51):
What happened with the US is, uh, a series of programs that were very subtle in their offense, you know, and basically every country in the post-colonial world, you had two developmental options, right? Two ways to try to turn your country into a country that was no longer afflicted with extremely widespread poverty.
And when I talk about two developmental options, I mean that there were two paths that were taken. Not that the two paths were equally successful. I mean, one was immediately set out by China in 1949. I mean, you had a widespread redistribution of land.
The other option was a system of agricultural development, which would essentially leave the medium to large landholding class in place and rely on them to provide the agricultural and the, the elementary needs of the population while counting out some form of industrialization. Now, of course, these weren't necessarily two separate paths.
Layli (18:00):
How did the importing of wheat from the US to Tunisia play into this?
Max Ajl (18:05):
So it's against this, that the Tunisian government has to make a fundamental choice, right? It's like, okay, we don't want to redistribute the land to deal with the hungry people. You don't wanna do that. So what you do, you can't just let these people go hungry because hungry people have, uh, propensity to, to disrupt social structure. So they were very worried about a revolution. So this was kind of the pivot for a huge dietary transition, a huge developmental transition, a huge process of social containment. That really was a kind of pivot that, uh, made Tunisia very much into what Tunisia became after that.
The Food for Peace is basically what allow out the Tunisian government to carry out this entire type of process of social planning with an agriculture that's based on large farms and also medium farms with an agriculture that's based on capitalist agriculture, then agriculture, that a lot of it is oriented towards export that is not oriented towards like the human development of the population. And that's also assisting an industrialization process that's based on keeping low wages in the industrial sector, right?
The reason you subsidize cereal, uh, products, is to keep social peace, of course, but it's related to wages, right? Because the cereal, the cost of cereal, the cost of the loaf of bread is legible as a percentage of a wage. So it's a way of controlling the amount of money that goes into the wages. Uh, it's a way of controlling the wages of the working class too.
Layli Foroudi (19:45):
So in a way, the baguette has been a weapon of social control and foreign policy. A way to quell revolution. Yet in 2011, this same baguette was being pointed like a gun at the police. It was being waved in the air in defiance of dictatorship .
To find out more about the baguettes as a tool for resistance. I went to Douz, a town on the edge of the Tunisian Sahara, the starting place of what became a national revolt in 1984.
It sparked the decision to remove the bread subsidies, raising the price of bread by 110%, from 80 millions to 170 millions. The reform was made to get a loan from the International Monetary Fund. It wasn't just Tunisia similar food riots were provoked across the region and beyond during the seventies and eighties, following IMF austerity reforms,
The protest in Douz started on the 29th of December, 1983, right after the price hike. It quickly spread to neighboring Kebili and Gabès in the south. And by the 3rd of January, 1984, it was a national revolt and had reached the capital. The police were brutal and some 100 people killed, but the opposition became too much for the regime. And on the 6th of January, Habib Bourguiba, the president who had ruled Tunisia since independence, backtracked.
Ahmed Ben Massoud (22:04):
My knowledge, yes was the first time and was the first time that the system, political system, Bourguiba started realizing that he doesn't have carte blanche to do whatever in this country. First time that Bourguiba says stop. Now you cannot destroy the system that he was dreaming of building. And first time, Bourguiba took really very strong measures to stop something, refuse to go with all laws, measures, eliminate the government. He changed all these, his staff and his political bureau. And so was,
Layli Foroudi (22:56):
This is Ahmed Ben Massoud, who we heard at the beginning. He was 26 at the time of the bread revolt and was one of those rallying people in dues. He gave a speech in the center of town near to the governor's building, right by the main roundabout where traffic could pass.
Layli (23:11):
And the speech was about, yeah, that this was unacceptable.
Ahmed Ben Massoud (23:14):
This is speech- this is unacceptable. This is a police violation. This is insulting people. This is, uh, publishing people, this obeying to the international funds and international monetary funds. And this is stealing people of their resources. This is more money in the pockets of, of the government, of the rich people.
Layli Foroudi (23:40):
But Ahmed sees bread and the bread subsidies to represent much more than just the baguette. Often when speaking to people, I found that conversations about bread seamlessly flowed into conversations about a lot of other things like other food essentials and fuel, but also healthcare and education.
Ahmed Ben Massoud (24:00):
Well, the bread is in our culture. Uh, you can say it started to be a metaphor and say, “I'm working for my kids” bread. We say bread is bitter. Means you have to work hard to get the bread. When say “Khobza…” means the prices are flying. We say khobz…, or I live on just bread and water, and I won't accept this system.
When we talk about breads, it means our food, our decency, our dignity. If you don't have food on the table, you have no dignity in front of your family.
If you beg to bring food to your family, you are losing your dignity, and bread comes with work.
We say, we want jobs because the young man doesn't want to ask his mom or dad to give him some money (packed money). He demanding yeah. More ambitious, but you touch my, my food.
Ahmed Ben Massoud (25:29):
You can making me hungry. We're not talking about bread, only. We're talking about fuel. We're talking about electricity. We're talking about war. We're talking about essential medical medication that it's offered in hospitals. The subsidies all or this measure is when attach everything.
When you raise the cost of energy, you can raise everything else, transportation, whatever it's happening with it, food and everything else.
I think the question is not bread. We're just talking about using it. But the government in a few months won't find salaries for the workers, for the government laborers with this pandemic. It's now revealed that we have no strong sanitary system. Hospitals are, they have nothing. Most Tunisians, even their education, their way of looking at life. A lot of people start not eating the white bread. I say, they'll start looking health wise. If they eat less bread, less pasta, less heavy meat, stuff is better for their health. So it's not question of bread, but it's symbolic means, “Don't touch my very low level of living”.
Layli Foroudi (27:04):
On the 25th of July last year, the president Kais Saied ceased total power, suspending parliament and dismissing the prime minister. This was undemocratic and in violation of the constitution. Yet that night there were celebrations on the street. As people were happy to see the back of the parliament, which had done nothing to improve the economic situation and which had overseen a disastrous management of the COVID 19 crisis.
The coup came following a day of intense protests across the country. This was a continuation of unrest earlier in the year, particularly in January, starting on the 10th anniversary of the revolution and continuing day and night. At one protest around this time, a year ago, that marched from a working class Tunis neighborhood, Ettadhamen, to the Tunisian parliament in Bardo. I saw a protestor holding a baguette in his hand. I didn't manage to speak to him that day, but I had photographed him and knew which neighborhood he was from.
When I asked around, I was directed to the roof of the house of a woman called Fatma Jegham, a teacher and activist who lives in Ettadhamen and whose roof served as the protest preparation point that day. The baguette on the street had come from her kitchen. It seems that along with painting slogans on banners, sourcing a baguette is now a standard part of preparation. It has become a prop that is embedded in Tusnisan protest culture.
fatma (Translated) (28:36):
It's true that day, they took the bread to say, our come is the bread, but in general, in every protest, you'll see someone with bread in the south, on the coast or in whatever region, because bread is bread. We eat a lot.
In Tunisia, the word bread means clothes, life, bills for water and electricity, rent.
Bread is the symbol of life. The history of bread is the history of the 14th of January also. So in January, there were problems with freedom, but the fundamental problem is about bread.
What will we eat? What will my child eat? What will he wear? How will he study? How will we pay the rent? That is bread.
Layli Foroudi (29:34):
Right now in Tunisia, the parliament is still frozen. And the president is talking about rehauling the constitution. While freedoms gained are being eroded, and people are struggling to find bread in bakeries and flour in the shops. The economy is in crisis and the government doesn't have money to pay for wheat imports.
Global grain prices were already increasing. And now with the war in Ukraine, a major wheat producer, they have exploded. To launch the post COVID economic recovery, the last government had been negotiating to secure a $4 billion IMF loan. And one of the proposed reforms to secure the loan was to cancel food subsidies, which would have doubled or tripled the price of bread.
Layli Foroudi (30:18):
This was interrupted by Saied’s power grab in July, but the new government is now in touch with the IMF to, again, negotiate alone. When leaked document suggests that the government is looking to gradually remove the subsidy on basic goods like bread, but then the ministry of commerce stated that there will be no increase in the price of bread this year. Even though with global prices rising, the bill weighs heavier and heavier on the state budget.
Touching the price of bread is controversial and potentially explosive. This was fatma's reaction to the previous government's negotiations and something those in power now will be aware of.
fatma (Translated) (31:00):
The government will be finished. If they, the subsidies, they know that it would be the end of them.
Stephen Satterfield (31:22):
So Layli obviously there's a lot to unpack with this story, but what's not lost on me. Is that the events that began the uprising of 2011 also have relevance in the news of today. Can you break down this connection for us?
Layli Foroudi (31:42):
When I went back to Tunisia a couple of weeks ago, the situation was really alarming. There's a very serious wheat shortage. Bakeries are not able to find the quantities of flour that they need. They're decreasing the size of their baguettes or closing early due to the lack of products to sell. And I went back to the neighborhood Jbel Lahmar to see Halima.
And she's told me that she's barely been able to make tabouna, this traditional bread, for the last two months, because she's not been able to find the semolina flour or because it's too expensive to buy in the smaller quantities that are available now. And this was in the capital Tunis. So in more rural regions, it's even, it's even worse.
Layli Foroudi (32:28):
These shortages are, it says something about how Tunisia has become so incredibly reliant on imports for their basic needs, like grains, like wheats to make bread. What's led to these shortages is, is the kind of economic crisis that Tunisia is going through. So the government's not been able to pay for their wheat imports, especially as the global price of wheat has been rising.
And then now due to the war in Ukraine, wheat prices are at a record high. I mean, yesterday Tunisia tried to buy wheat and had to cancel the tender because the prices were just too high. It was $500 per ton, which is kind of double what it was in the middle of last year.
Russia and Ukraine together supply almost a third of the world's wheat and all of those exports are currently at a standstill because of the fighting Ukrainian farmers are not planting. And we've seen in history that a shortage of bread is very consequential and can provoke revolts.
The year that preceded the Arab spring 2010 was also marked by steep increases in the price of wheat. And Ukraine is, uh, bread baskets. Some of their biggest buyers are sort of Tunisia, think more than 50% of its, uh, around 50% of its wheat supply is from Ukraine. Libya, also, hugely reliant on Ukraine as is Lebanon. Yes, it’s dramatic.
Stephen Satterfield (34:08):
You know, it's obvious to me, the ways in which bread is a symbol for what is essential and in Tunisia, a baguette and its ubiquity became a way of saying this. This is the bare minimum. And the best of times it can seem like even the most vulnerable among us have access to a loaf; or in the parlance of the colonial residue of Tunisia, a baguette.
But in the worst of times, even bread is scarce and nothing speaks more loudly than a hungry stomach. Food is more expensive than ever. And war will undoubtedly destroy this year's wheat harvest, not just for Ukraine, but also Morocco and even Tunisia who rely on this wheat. It will be hard for the symbolism not to stick, especially the next time I'm holding a baguette in my hand. I will be reminded that the flip side of the gratitude that I am experiencing, is revolution.
Stephen Satterfield (35:37):
Thank you, Layli, for bringing us this story. Thank you listeners for tuning into this story. We will be back soon with more Whetstone Audio Dispatch. In the meantime, you can subscribe to Whetstone Audio Dispatch anywhere you get your podcasts.
Thank you to producer and reporter Layli Foroudi; Audio Editor, Kat Hong; Whetstone Head of Podcast, Celine Glasier; Whetstone sound engineer, Max Kotelchuck, and Associate Producer, Quentin Lebeau.
You can learn more about this podcast on Whetstone radio.com on Instagram and Twitter @Whetstoneradio and subscribe to our YouTube channel, Whetstone Radio Collective for more podcast, video content, you can learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at whetstonemagazine.com.