Fruit and veggie heaven comes to Doha

Snake gourd, red bananas, Jack fruit, kohlrabi, yams, pak-choy … and the list goes on and on. Fruit and veggie shopping in Doha is both a visual feast and geography lesson.

Well, it is if your fruit and vegetable fare has been confined to common old garden varieties of potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, apples, oranges, cauliflower, bananas (yellow), carrots and the like.

After four months in Doha, I still delight in the variety of fruit and veg on offer, most of which is flown in daily from around the world to feed the 2.8 million multi-national residents and locals who live here. (About 90% of those who live here come from outside of Qatar.)  

In fact, to support the multi-ethnic communities living here, there are whole aisles dedicated to certain nationalities and their particular food preferences. Sadly, none for South Africans, but that’s okay because I am pleased to share that we make an excellent showing in the fruit and veg sector of supermarket.   

Sustainability

While large quantities of fresh fare is jetted in to the Middle East travel hub of Doha, the Qatari government is hard at work to ensure future sustainability in terms of food security by enhancing local food production and diversifying its food imports.

Qatari produce

Tomatoes, pepper, eggplants and melons do well in Qatar’s harsh Summer climate, providing there is water. In fact, they can produce pretty much everything as long as they have a plentiful supply of water. (The water supply comes from the many desalination plants across the country.)

They grow their own potatoes, mushrooms, onions and fodder beets on farms. There’s a combination of open-field and green-house production, as well as hydroponics. Most of this happens North of Doha.

The latter soil-less (or sand-less) culture technology which uses less water can, as you can learn at the annual agricultural exhibition, yield up to ten times the crop grown in an open field.

Our supermarket grows its own lettuces using aquaponics.

And, of course, there are dates aplenty.

Agricultural exhibitions

As part of its efforts to become sustainable, Doha hosts local produce markets and large-scale agricultural exhibitions for the Middle East market. 

Visual substance

Confession alert: There’s much more substantive information that I would like to share, but we’re moving home again, so please accept a visual veggie feast instead.

If it doesn’t trigger a resolve to eat more veggies – even of the common garden variety type – may it at least expand your geographical knowledge and delight you visually.

On this note, here is a map of Qatar again. I share it because there is a tendency to mix up Doha with Dubai or Abu Dhabi. They’re both almost next door in the United Arab Emirates. I make the same mistake in muddling up the Middle East before I landed here in February 2022.