Goats and Oil

What do goats have to do with oil? Well, in Morocco, there are some goats that climb trees

The trees are Argan trees, and when we saw them in October, they were in a fairly dormant state, but that didn’t keep the goats from climbing them, looking for any remaining fruits and/or leaves. The trees produce fruit that consist of a thick peel covering a fleshy pulp that surrounds a hard-shelled nut. That nut, when properly handled, produces a highly prized oil.

Here is the young goatherd, 15 years old, whom we met while driving through the area where the trees grow. He told us that he had gone to school for 7 years, but then his father required him to quite school to help the family by herding the family’s goats.

So how do the goats come into it? Well, in many areas the goats eat the fruit, and the nuts pass through them and are retrieved in the resultant droppings. In others, the fruits are picked, and dried in the open air so as to able to remove the fruit and reach the nuts. (The pulp then is used as animal feed.)

But once the nuts have been extracted, the hard work begins, because the shells are very hard. And no mechanical process has been found to allow the kernels to be extracted, so the work is one by hand, mostly by Berber women, working in women-owned cooperatives.

Each woman seems to have her own rocks – one she uses as the ‘anvil’ and the other as the pounding implement:

One of the women in our group sat down to help and, after successfully cracking a nut, was rewarded with a happy smile:

The work is very arduous – it takes more than one strike to crack the nut, and the baskets of nuts fill up slowly

The cracked nuts look almost like raw Lima beans

They then go to women who grind the nuts into the oil.

We were told that the work is so arduous that the women trade off jobs – pounding them to break them open for awhile, then grinding the nuts on a specially made grindstone.

This last photo courtesy of Caroline Kingsley, with whom I traveled. I habitually bring along a small ‘instant’ camera, (like the Polaroids of old) and take pictures of people I meet. I was busy handing out pictures to each of the women in the shop, and therefore neglected to take pictures of any that were grinding.

We, of course, bought some of the cooperative’s products. We quickly learned that oil for cosmetic purposes is made from unroasted nuts, while oil for use in food (for example, it’s delicious when you dip bread in it, as you would do with olive oil) is made with nuts that have first been roasted before being ground.

Yes, of course I bought some!

Written & posted from London, England

On the way home 10/11/19