Vegetables are often omitted from their diet because nomads do not have gardens, or vegetable patches, and shops are usually at least a day away. They have populated the steppe for millennia and are one of the world's last remaining nomadic communities. Italian photographer Michele Martinelli, 41, captured the images of this rare community during a day trip to the Mongolian steppe in April Hundreds of Mongolian nomads live on the country's vast steppe where they subsist off their animals and survive on a diet of milk and meat.
Migration: Nomads migrate with large herds of animals, including sheep, goats, cows, horses, camels, and yaks, between two and four times every year. Nomads survive on a diet of only milk and meat. Another of Michele Martinelli's pictures shows a woman taking care of her flock of sheep and goats.
Horses were first prized by Mongols under Ghengis Khan because of the advantages they offered in warfare, such as being fast and flexible in combat. Nomadic life revolves around yurts, or ghers, meaning home or household, which are compactible and easily transportable circular houses. Mongol nomads transport these houses across the steppe between two and four times every year when they migrate to find the best pasture for their animals. Between February and April, nomads typically brave temperatures of C to make a mile trek across the Altai mountains in western Mongolia.
Dates in the market at Biskra. The women milk their animals every morning and evening, and those with sheep and goats also make butter and cheese. Camels do not need to be herded like sheep or goats, but will return of their own accord to be watered and milked by their owners.
Young camel nursing courtesy: jordanjubiliee. Today trucks are sometimes used instead, carrying the women as well as their tent and their possessions. Food in its most basic expression always comes with physical exercise—a lot of it. Cross-legged, we sit on the dusty floor of a yurt.
Our host is making chapatis. From the yurt next door comes a bucket-full of steaming goat meat. My neighbor slices a piece of fat and hands it over to me. Fat is the pride of the herder, the candy of the steppe.
He leers at me with piercing green eyes, wipes his large greasy hands on his leather boots and pushes the felt door wide open as he leaves without a word. The harsh sunlight on the snow inundates the yurt and for a moment, I am blinded. Next, seal and polar bear: The all-meat diet of the Inuit. Follow Paley on Twitter , Instagram , and his website. All rights reserved. Winter-Summer Being French, all we ever talk about at the family dinner table, through delicious mouthfuls, is what we have eaten, what we are eating, and what we will be eating.
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Epic floods leave South Sudanese to face disease and starvation. Travel 5 pandemic tech innovations that will change travel forever These digital innovations will make your next trip safer and more efficient. But will they invade your privacy? Go Further. The cheese had about the consistency and taste of Greek feta cheese made from goats' milk.
Presumably if this cheese were dried in the sun, it would become qurut. A drink called shubat is prepared from camels' milk. Today, almost all the people who extract cream from milk use modern separators. Raw milk is first heated in a cauldron, then poured into the bowl of the separator.
Although some people make qurut from the skim milk, it does not taste as good as that made from whole milk. Before the advent of mechanical cream separators, people just boiled the milk and then let it cool. When the milk had cooled they just scooped out the thick layer of cream on the surface.
This traditional way is still practiced among some people who do not have a separator. Here is another view of a woman separating cream from milk, in this case inside of her mountain hut. When he saw how the photographer seemed to be interested only in what she was doing, her young husband just had to get into the picture to show off what was important to him, his boom box.
That and his Adidas-imitation track suit give some idea of the degree to which the traditional culture in the mountains of Southern Kyrgyzstan has been penetrated by the "modern world. Usually, milking of a mare is done by men, whereas milking of a cow is done by women. Most of the work associated with the processing of milk and making of milk products is left for women. Cooking, baking bread, laundry, and making felt are all done by women.
Men usually give help in making felts for it requires strong arms to soften the wool with smooth sticks and then press the rolled felt with forearms. Men take care of cattle and sheep and make sure that all the cattle come home safely in the evening. They count their sheep every evening after they come back from grazing to make sure that they are not missing or eaten by wolves; men also wash sheep and sheer their wool with a traditional iron scissor called juushang.
If they have many sheep, they usually use modern electric clippers. The girl is wearing a scarf, which is common for Kyrgyz living in the mountains as well as in some traditional Kyrgyz villages influenced by Uzbek or Tajik Islamic culture.
The tradition today is that only married women, not girls as young as the one here, wear a scarf in Central Asia. However, in this case, the girl wears her scarf for the practical purpose of keeping her hair from falling into the milk she is stirring while it heats in the qazan.
Here we see a detail from the background of the previous picture--sacks of yogurt draining. The number and the size of these sacks tell us that this family owns several milking cows.
Herding cows in at least the lower mountain valleys of Kyrgyzstan is now quite common, and they serve as the primary source of milk. Usually only those people who have more than three cows take them to the summer pasture to make butter and qurut. After the milk is boiled, as shown in the previous picture, it is poured in a big container in which it cools until it is warm. Then a certain amount of yogurt is added into it and covered with layers of blankets to sit overnight, after which the thickened yogurt is poured into such bags to drain.
It usually takes two or three days to drain. One needs to guard these bags from dogs and calves, because they like to lick the sacks from outside.
Here is another view of processing of milk products, in this case among the Kyrgyz in Eastern Pamir, Xinjiang. Here too the milk is being heated in a qazan. The woman was mixing perhaps preparing the qurut in the wooden bowl and insisted on wiping off her arms and standing to pose formally rather than be photographed at work. In the background, as is typical in this region, the draining bags are suspended from a wooden platform, on top of which qurut was drying.
This was an area where the families had a few cows and a large herd of yaks. Behind her qurut is drying in the sun on the reed mat atop a platform. It is necessary to keep an eye on drying qurut to prevent birds from stealing it.
The qurut dries in three or four days and then is ready to bag. As the second picture shows, the qurut may simply be laid out on a mat or plastic on the ground to dry.
As a rain shower came in this family hastily covered it with plastic sheeting. This view is in the famous market in Samarkand next to the Bibi Khanum mosque. Among the man's wares is qurut.
Qurut can be found in markets of Central Asia sold together with other dried food products such as fruits and nuts. The merchant here is an Uzbek; it is also common among the Uzbeks to make qurut. However, its taste is generally not as good as that produced by nomadic Kyrgyz or Kazakhs, because Uzbeks, who only have one or two cows, make it from non-fat milk.
Moreover, they usually add flour into the thickened yogurt to get more qurut, in the process destroying its taste. In the past, including the Soviet period, the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs, both nomadic and sedentary, did not themselves engage in selling and buying food products such as qurut in markets.
However, they made qurut in large quantities for themselves, for their friends and relatives. One of Prof. Waugh's former professors recalls how eagerly his roommate from Central Asia, who was then studying in Leningrad, opened a package of qurut from home--it was a real treat for the homesick.
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