It’s all about Camel Cheese
I was taken aback and intrigued by an email that arrived over the weekend. It really grabbed my attention.
A film crew are preparing a documentary film on camels and I was asked if I had any advice for them.
Now, there’s nothing new or surprising about this. Over the years we’ve been asked to help quite a lot of people in a quite a variety of different ways. Sometimes the questions are quite specific, for example we’ve been asked for help locating tourists who have apparently gone missing; if we can help someone born in Kyrgyzstan but now living abroad get a copy of their birth certificate; even if we can list of speeds of flow for various rivers in Kyrgyzstan;
It’s not the first time we’ve been asked for help and advice by journalists and film crews either. We have been approached by a number who have been doing background stories on Central Asia in general and Kyrgyzstan in particular, but also on specific issues, such as a photographer who researching social issues and film crews working on a documentary about German cyclists traveling in the footsteps of Marco Polo and trading Kyrgyz horses.
As I said, this request grabbed my attention and really intrigued me. The focus of their film will be camel cheese – yes, that right camel cheese! The project as a whole, however, will explore wider issues: the gastronomic, cultural and economic ramifications of the camel in pastoral communities.
Now we do have camels in Kyrgyzstan – not that many of them, to be fair, but it is even possible to buy Kyrgyz camels over the internet! (Honest! click the link and see for yourself.) Indeed, farmer Christopher Oates bought seven in 2004 for his 600 acre mixed organic farm on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, where they are a great attraction and used for camel trekking.
The native habitat of Bactrian, (or two humped camels), which are found in Kyrgyzstan, is in the barren and rocky deserts of China and Mongolia, although it is thought that they and their distant cousins the dromedary camel, (or Arabian camel, with a single hump), originated in the Americas where their more distant relatives, (the llama, alpaca, guanaco, and vicuña), are still to be found, and that they crossed the Bering Strait into Asia long ago.
Nowadays, virtually all the camels in the world are domesticated. The only wild camels are about a thousand Bactrian camels wandering the Gobi Dessert in North Western China and in Mongolia and they are listed in the Red Data Book as a critically endangered species. It is thought, apparently, that there are no wild dromedaries at all. There are however a large number of feral camels in Central Australia which escaped from captivity from those brought in as beasts of burden – so many in fact that the Australians have a programme of culling the animals.
It seems that the camel was domesticated quite early on, (although there is some argument about when and where this happened).
They proved to be excellent beasts of burden – a camel can carry 170-270kg at a rate of about 47km per day traveling at an average of 4km an hour. The ancient Persians, for example, used camels for their baggage baggage trains for arrows and equipment when their armies went on campaign. They are also a symbol of the caravans that used to travel the Great Silk Road.
As well as being for transportation, domestication also brought mankind a source of meat and milk, and their hides and hair would also have been put to good use.
Because they are so valuable, they are rarely killed for meat, but when they are they can provide a tremendous amount of meat. The carcass of a Bactrian camel, for example, can yield anything between 250 and 650kg. Apparently, however, it is low in fat, so I not sure how popular it would be amongst the Kyrgyz as Kyrgyz cuisine tends to prefer fatty meat … indeed there is Kyrgyz proverb or saying the “cheap meat has no fat”.
The milk is quite different from cows milk, richer in fat and protein. It is highly nutritious and can be used to treat auto-immune deficiencies; has ten times more iron than cow’s milk; has more B12, and more vitamin C. There is a lot of research underway about how camels, (with their incredible immune systems), can help us treat diseases from autism to cancer to HIV/AIDS. Camel milk is even said to be a great beauty treatment … remember that Cleopatra was supposed to have bathed in the stuff! I have been told that the use of camel’s milk is a feature of nomadic Kyrgyz cuisine, but to be honest, although I can see the possibility, I have never come across it. However, due to it’s composition, it does not curdle easily and is very difficult to skim, consequently it more difficult to produce the range of dairy products, like ice cream and yoghurt, that it is possible to obtain from cow’s milk. Difficult, but not impossible … or else they wouldn’t be making a program centered around camel’s milk.
The European Union have recently allowed camel milk and derived products to be traded in Europe (it took ten years to enact the legislation).
This filming is a research project. They aim to find out whether it could support the nomadic communities that have been forced to settle and farm because of global warming and increased populations; to discover cheese-eating communities and if they don’t exist in a country – to find out why.
As part of the project the film crew will be visiting 12 countries across both Asia (Afghanistan, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Tajikistan) and Africa, (Egypt, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Western Sahara) over three months. It seems to me there are some countries missing from this list – for example, what about Saudi Arabia? It’s probably a stereotype, but I grew up with Peter O’Toole playing Lawrence of Arabia and somehow camels and Arabs seem to go together.
This film is a project of the “What Took You So Long Foundation”, which is a team of documentary makers, dedicated to filming grassroots NGOs, untold stories, and unsung heroes in some of the more remote corners of the globe. Their films are screened all over the world in order to bring these messages to as many influential movers as possible.
Last year they organized an expedition across Africa which explored a variety of stories, and as well as the Camel cheese expedition, this year they also have one crossing through one of the world’s most culturally diverse and least explored countries – Papua New Guinea.
If anyone is interested, then can I suggest that you go and have a look at their pages on http://whattookyousolong.org/. “What took you so long” also have a Facebook page and one on YouTube.
There’s also a promotional video for the Camel Cheese expedition on http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/353808285/what-took-you-so-long-to-find-camel-cheese – yes, they are looking for sponsorship … anything from USD1 to, well, you name it … and, yes, I have signed up!
Bishkek