Tourists Told To Find Best Hummus In Shuk Unaware Stores All Use Same Stuff

The teens argue over which found the actual best hummus, all of them simultaneously right and wrong.

Jerusalem, August 17 – This city’s busting open-air market teems with teenage visitors from abroad every summer, as their organized groups seek to give them a taste of local culture and history, and a common activity for those groups involves a scavenger hunt through the market’s alleys on a quest to find, among other secrets, “the best hummus in Mahane Yehuda,” but which no one tells them all the stores order from one supplier.

Busloads of adolescent tourists split into small teams to experience the Mahane Yehuda market, each armed with a list, at best broken Hebrew, and at least one member bold enough to ask proprietors and passers-by where they can find various items. The tour-company-provided lists invariably require participants to locate the best hummus, a holdover from more austere, pre-gentrification days when all the shopkeepers and patrons – indeed, nearly all Jerusalemites – were solidly working-class or poor, and industrial mass-production had yet to fully supplant the variety of family-made, idiosyncratic formulae.

The visitors spread through the market, or Shuk, weaving via various alleys between the two main avenues that connect Jaffa Road and Agripas Street. “S’liha,” excuse me, “Eifo hahummus hakhi tov?” Once they have deciphered the accent, smiling locals – or veteran tourists – point the inquisitive teens to any of the ten or so establishments that still deal in such prepared foods, stores that once numbered in the dozens; economic development has seen the proliferation of upscale coffee shops, restaurants, bakeries, even jewelers, replacing many of the merchants who eked out a living selling trinkets, souvenirs, spices, or pickled produce. Those ten or so stores all buy large tubs of hummus from some industrial supplier such as the Strauss conglomerate, and spoon it into smaller containers for individual sale.

The teens then argue, once reconvened, over which of them found the actual best hummus in the shuk, unaware that they are all simultaneously right and wrong.

On occasion the tour guides initiate the same exercise with the sesame-based treat halva. That game generates less debate afterwards than the hummus quest, given that three of the four shops in Mahane Yehuda devoted to the delicacy are branches of the same establishment. Locals have noted that the actual best halva in the shuk comes from industrial production and is sold in one of the cheese and prepared food establishments, not from the dedicated halva shops that boast of local production and show off their sesame seed press.

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