Lowfat Lachleeb

In the high-end supermarkets of Gueliz, you can find pretty much anything you’d expect to seen in the States. In the small grocers of the Medina however, the perspective is a bit different. Yesterday I set off to buy a carton of lowfat milk for our breakfast cereal, only to be met with a series of blank stares. The difficulty of the search was compounded by my limited, if improving, French.

I ask for milk by its Arabic name, lachleeb, and the shop owner pulls out a box of parmalait-stlye whole milk. I compliment the milk, but then explain how I’m looking for “low quality milk.” He’s totally puzzled now, and goes to his fridge for a plastic bag-full of local milk, also whole milk. No, that’s not it, either. Your milk is very high quality, too. I want low quality. He looks at the foreigner in front of him, sure I’ve misspoken, and points to the box of milk. Top quality, he assures me, you want top quality. Taking the box, I turn it over and find the small print with nutritional information in French and Arabic. Lipides, that seems to be what I’m looking for. “Milk with fewer lipides,” I ask for. The shop owner and another customer look over the box and the nutritional chart, but I can sense this is going nowhere. “Same price,” he tells me. “Same price, top quality.” Well, what can I say to that? That we’re trying to cut a little fat from our diets? By this point the word for fat has come to me, but nevertheless, I thank him and buy the whole milk.

We might have to head out to a fancy supermarket to find lowfat milk, but at home we’ve got something that can’t wait. We found a cereal with a name that showed such unheard of honesty in advertising we couldn’t pass it up. And frankly, it seemed a bit silly to be eating it with lowfat milk. Gotta love those Sugar Coaties!