La Cocina Invisible: Los Trabajadores Nepaleses en el Golfo

The physical and cultural distance is almost vertiginous.

Bueno.

Well.

Pero la comida árabe también es muy buena.

But Arab food is also very good.

El mandi, el arroz con carne, es delicioso.

Mandi, the rice with meat, is delicious.

I'm not disputing that.

I had mandi in Riyadh once, years ago, when I was covering a story there, and it was extraordinary.

Slow-cooked lamb, the rice perfumed with cardamom and dried limes.

But the point is someone learned how to make that, and in a lot of Gulf kitchens today, that someone came from Kathmandu or Pokhara.

La verdad es que es curioso.

The truth is, it's curious.

Un nepalés cocina la comida de Arabia.

A Nepalese person cooks the food of Arabia.

Eso es el mundo hoy.

That is the world today.

It really is.

And this labor system in the Gulf, the kafala system, which ties a worker's legal status to their employer, has been in place since the 1970s oil boom.

When Gulf states suddenly had enormous wealth and almost no domestic labor pool willing to work in hospitality, construction, domestic service.

So they built an entire economy on imported labor.

And food service was part of that from the very beginning.

A ver.

Let's see.

Los países del Golfo tienen mucho dinero.

The Gulf countries have a lot of money.

Pero necesitan trabajadores para todo.

But they need workers for everything.

For everything.

And what's interesting about Nepal specifically is the timing of when Nepalese workers started going to the Gulf in large numbers.

It really accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s, partly because Nepal has limited natural resources, partly because of political instability, the Maoist insurgency in the early 2000s.

The Gulf became a pressure valve for a country that couldn't absorb its own workforce.

Mira, Nepal no tiene trabajo para todos.

Look, Nepal doesn't have work for everyone.

El Golfo tiene trabajo.

The Gulf has work.

Es simple.

It's simple.

Simple on the surface.

But there's a hidden cost here.

Because when hundreds of thousands of working-age Nepalese leave the country, who does the farming at home?

Nepal's agricultural sector has been hollowing out for two decades.

Fields that used to produce rice and vegetables are sitting idle because the people who would work them are in Doha instead.

Es que Nepal importa mucha comida ahora.

The thing is, Nepal imports a lot of food now.

Antes, no.

Before, it didn't.

Es un problema real.

It's a real problem.

No, you're absolutely right about that.

Nepal went from being largely food self-sufficient to importing significant quantities of food, including rice of all things, rice which is the foundation of Nepalese cuisine.

The remittances that people send home pay for imported food.

There's something almost circular and slightly tragic about that.

Bueno, el trabajador cocina en el Golfo.

Well, the worker cooks in the Gulf.

Su familia compra arroz de otro país.

His family buys rice from another country.

Triste, sí.

Sad, yes.

So now bring the Iran war into this.

Nepal suspended these work permits earlier this year because the region had become genuinely dangerous.

The Strait of Hormuz was a conflict zone.

Workers were stranded, families were separated, money stopped flowing.

And now Nepal has resumed the permits, citing guidance from the foreign ministry and, frankly, pressure from workers themselves who want to go back.

Mira, sin trabajo, las familias no comen bien.

Look, without work, families don't eat well.

Por eso quieren volver.

That's why they want to go back.

Which tells you everything about how precarious this system is.

A war in a country that most Nepalese workers have no direct connection to, Iran, disrupts the income that puts food on the table in villages in the Himalayas.

The interconnectedness is staggering when you actually map it out.

La guerra en Irán afecta la comida en Nepal.

The war in Iran affects food in Nepal.

El mundo es muy pequeño ahora.

The world is very small now.

Very small.

And here's what gets me about the food dimension specifically.

Think about what these workers must go through culturally.

You grow up eating dal bhat twice a day.

Lentils, rice, maybe some pickled vegetables, a little meat on special occasions.

And then you're in a professional kitchen in Abu Dhabi learning to make hummus, flatbreads, grilled meats with spice blends you've never smelled before.

That's a full sensory relocation.

A ver.

Let's see.

La comida de casa es importante para el corazón.

Food from home is important for the heart.

No solo para el cuerpo.

Not just for the body.

That's beautifully put.

And I've actually read about this, there are Nepalese restaurants in Dubai and Doha that exist almost entirely to serve Nepalese migrant workers.

Places where you can get dal bhat, momos, which are Nepalese dumplings, a little piece of home in the middle of the Gulf.

These restaurants are not for tourists.

They're a form of psychological sustenance.

Sí.

Yes.

Comes la comida de tu país y recuerdas tu casa.

You eat the food of your country and you remember your home.

Tu familia.

Your family.

Todo.

Everything.

Everything.

I think about this when I'm traveling and I suddenly desperately want a particular thing, something completely ordinary at home.

I was in Jakarta once for three months and I would have committed minor crimes for a decent bowl of black bean soup.

And that was just three months.

These workers are gone for years.

Bueno, tú no cocinas bien, Fletcher.

Well, you don't cook well, Fletcher.

Eso es otro problema.

That's another problem.

[laughs]

[laughs]

I cook fine.

I make excellent eggs.

Let's stay on topic.

The broader question here is about food security in the Gulf states themselves.

Because this isn't just a Nepalese story.

The Gulf has almost no domestic agricultural capacity.

It is desert.

It imports somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of its food.

The people who grow that food, transport it, prepare it in restaurants, cook it in private homes, are overwhelmingly foreign workers.

Es que los países del Golfo necesitan a los trabajadores para comer.

The thing is, the Gulf countries need the workers to eat.

Sin ellos, hay un problema grande.

Without them, there's a big problem.

A very big problem.

And this has been exposed, brutally, twice in recent memory.

First during COVID, when labor flows froze and Gulf food supply chains were suddenly fragile.

And now during the Iran war, when the whole region became a risk zone and Nepal, among other countries, said: we're not sending our people there right now.

La verdad es que la guerra afecta la comida.

The truth is that war affects food.

Siempre.

Always.

En todos los países.

In all countries.

Always.

There's a kind of historical rule here that I've observed covering conflicts.

Food disruption is usually the first civilian casualty of any armed conflict, even in places that aren't directly in the war zone.

Supply chains snap, workers flee, prices spike, and ordinary people who had nothing to do with any political or military decision find that feeding their family just became much harder.

Mira, un trabajador nepalés no quiere la guerra.

Look, a Nepalese worker doesn't want the war.

Solo quiere trabajar y comer.

He just wants to work and eat.

That's the whole story in one sentence, really.

And I keep thinking about the specific detail in the Reuters report, that it was pressure from workers themselves that helped push Nepal to reopen the permits.

These are people making a calculated decision: yes, there's a war nearby, yes there's a naval blockade still in place, but the risk of going is less than the risk of my family going hungry at home.

Es una decisión muy difícil.

It's a very difficult decision.

El peligro aquí o el hambre allá.

Danger here or hunger there.

Terrible.

Terrible.

Terrible.

And I want to zoom out one more time before we wrap this up.

Because there's a third level here that I think matters.

This whole system, hundreds of thousands of people leaving their home country to cook and serve food in another country, while their home country's agriculture declines, is not a natural phenomenon.

It was engineered.

By the kafala system, by development models that funneled Gulf oil wealth into construction and service economies, by the absence of alternatives for workers in countries like Nepal.

It's a food system built on human displacement.

Bueno, es un sistema injusto.

Well, it's an unjust system.

Pero la gente necesita el dinero.

But people need the money.

¿Qué hacemos?

What do we do?

I don't have a clean answer to that.

I'm not sure anyone does.

But I think the fact that a ceasefire extension in a war between the US and Iran immediately shows up as news about Nepalese kitchen workers being allowed to travel again, that chain of consequences, should make us think harder about how fragile and how interconnected our food systems really are.

La verdad es que la comida conecta todo.

The truth is that food connects everything.

Los países, las personas, las guerras.

Countries, people, wars.

Todo.

Everything.

Everything.

And look, the next time you sit down to a meal in a restaurant in Dubai, or anywhere in the Gulf, think about who made it.

Where they came from.

What they eat when they go home at night.

Dal bhat, probably.

Rice and lentils.

Power, 24 hours.

A ver, dal bhat todos los días.

Let's see, dal bhat every day.

Yo prefiero un buen cocido madrileño.

I prefer a good Madrid stew.

Pero los respeto mucho.

But I respect them greatly.

High praise from you.

That's basically a standing ovation.

All right, we'll leave it there.

A quiet story that turned out to be about migration, food, war, and what it means to feed a family when the world keeps getting in the way.

Bueno.

Well.

Comer es vivir.

To eat is to live.

Y vivir es complicado.

And living is complicated.

Hasta la próxima.

Until next time.