Mayalen Zubillaga

 

            This extract is about the way a Marseille dairy, faced with a declining demand for fresh milk, began to produce fermented milk for its North African customers. This creamy, slightly granular milk, fermented with strains of bacteria different from the ones used to make yoghurt, has been drunk and used in many parts of the world for centuries. A very old product which extends the conservation period of this precious food, it is particularly present in the eating habits of the southern Mediterranean countries. In the Maghreb for example during Ramadan, the fast is broken by drinking a glass of fermented milk (lben or raib).

  In France of course, Marseille is a cross-roads. It has welcomed, since time immemorial, people coming from the every corner of the globe. The Italians at the end of the 19th century, the Armenians in 1915 and 1923, Greeks as from 1916, the Spanish in 1936, North Africans between the wars and Africans after 1945. In the second half of the 1960's there was a resurgence of immigration from North Africa, altering the breakdown of the town's foreign population: while the percentage of minorities from Europe had already weakened and that of the populations from Mediterranean Europe was diminishing, immigrants from North Africa and notably Algeria were considerably increasing. Their presence was even more remarkable since the older established groups had tended to melt into the indigenous population. The Belsunce district, which we see in this report, is an emblematic place. One should add to this wave of immigrants the massive arrival of the white French from Algeria (known as the pieds noirs because they wore black polished shoes) in 1962.

This cosmopolitanism was generally seen as positive until the 1970's, but as from 1973, in the economic depression following the first oil crisis, aggravated in Marseille by the end of France's colonial empire and the crisis in traditional (heavy) industry, the new arrivals became easy scape-goats. But the immigrants were also sometimes seen as economic opportunities for local businesses. That is the case of this news report in 1980.

Among the immigrants, cooking is closely linked to identity. By moving, they bring with them a whole range of new tastes, products and recipes, retaining their sense of community and rebuilding the national or regional identity where they happen to be. Although usually migrants lose their mother language during the second generation, eating (and therefore cooking) habits remain until the third or even fourth generation, even longer for festival foods. Cooking and eating habits are often adapted to include the products and customs of their new country, but at the same time the migrants share their dishes with the local people either though friendship or food shops. So although Provence is not traditionally an area for sheep's milk, the Mediterranean remains one of the large areas where fermented sheep's and goat's milk products are consumed, especially in Muslim countries.

 

« Cuisines et dépendances », dossier de la revue Hommes et migrations n°1283, janvier-fevrier 2010.

BESSIS Sophie (dir.), Mille et une bouches. Cuisines et identités culturelles. Autrement, Coll. Mutations/Mangeurs, N°154, 1995.

Gastaut Yvan, « Marseille cosmopolite après les décolonisations : un enjeu identitaire », Cahiers de la Méditerranée [En ligne], 67 | 2003, mis en ligne le 25 juillet 2005, Consulté le 29 mai 2012. URL : http://cdlm.revues.org/index134.html.

TEMIME Emile (dir.), Migrance, histoire des migrations à Marseille, 4 volumes, Edisud, T1:1989 - T2: 1990 - T3: 1990 - T4: 1991.

CRENN Chantal, HASSOUN Jean-Pierre et MEDINA F.Xavier, « Introduction : Repenser et réimaginer l’acte alimentaire en situations de migration », Anthropology of food [Online], 7 | December 2010, Online since 25 December 2010, connection on 30 May 2012. URL : http://aof.revues.org/6672