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In Jerusalem, in the old city, there are bakeries. As you walk down the narrow, roofed-over streets, occasionally you'll catch a wafting smell of fresh baking. Follow your nose. Most of the bread being baked is pita - puffy and dusty-sweet. If you can see into the oven, you can watch as the dough goes from a raw, flat, white round to a toasty-tan balloon in about 30 seconds, before either it tumbles from the oven's mechanical conveyor belt or it is yanked skillfully from the brick oven and tossed onto a large wooden tray to cool. 
The bakeries were of all sorts. A basement of a basement with what looked like a kiln built into the back wall at the very bottom - stacks of trays of dough on one side and fresh pita piled high being hauled up and out onto the street for delivery as soon as the tray was piled high enough. Or a one-room workshop on a side street with an ancient (though not on the middle-eastern timescale) mechanical pass-through oven with a metal-plate conveyor. 
And that doesn't even consider the semi-industrial operation I saw in a Jordanian bakery where the pita oven was on the upper floor and the pitas cooled as they whizzed down a chute to land on the counter next to a man who had to package them up in equal-sized bags - very quickly, I should add. 
I found the baker with the conveyor-belt oven because of the trays he had arranged outside his workshop from which he was selling fresh pita and what he called Palestinian Pizza. Basically pita dough topped with stuff and sent through the oven, he had two kinds: a "normal" pizza with tomato, cheese, and olives, and "the real thing" topped with a paste of za'tar and olive oil. 
The real thing, reheated briefly in the oven, was sweet, salty, oily, hearty. And hot. It tasted like a hot day in Jerusalem - dusty, and even a little gritty, but with that perfume of eucalyptus and olive. It tasted old. And it was just right.
Apparently I have a food allergy. This is tragic. I am used to being able to try most any food without being afraid that it would kill me, only that it might, at worst, cause me to pull a funny face and shudder in disgust before I spit it out. Now I am trying to avoid being afraid of fruits I do not know. If you think this reaction is a bit extreme, here's the story:
I arrived in Israel at about lunchtime after flying all night and eating what politely can only be called "food-like semi-nourishment" along the way. I was to stay with a family friend named Ian who generously prepared a delicious Israeli-style salad (cucumber, tomato, olive oil, salt, and feta, though the presence of feta supposedly means it is called a "Greek salad") for lunch. After lunch, we spoke for a while about family, etcetera, and then were to go walk the resident dog. Just before going out, I was presented with a fruit that looked like an apricot. It had been washed, peeled and seeded so the only thing I ate was the flesh. On the upside, it was delicious - like a firm but sweet apricot that had been drizzled with lime juice.
On the downside: I left the house and walked across the street and my ears started itching. I got to the end of the block and felt like I'd just swigged some bad vinegar. I walked another fifty feet and I was coughing and it hurt to swallow. And I had to work very hard to stay calm enough to breathe. I walked quickly back to the house, grabbed a bottle of water, and took two Benadryl and an Allegra (my other antihistamine) though, in retrospect, I should have taken more Benadryl. At this point I was trying not to panic and not to pass out from panic. I could breathe if I did so slowly and deliberately, but I couldn't swallow. My tongue started feeling funny so I looked at it in a mirror. It was covered with little blisters. Ian had returned just after me and I said something along the lines of "If I'm not feeling better within five minutes I think I should go to the hospital." The poor man was understandably mortified. Five minutes later we got in the car.
We got to the emergency room and I tried to communicate to the receptionist that I was having an allergic reaction and having trouble breathing. I must have succeeded because within the next 5 minutes I had been taken in, sat down in a chair, my veins plumbed for an IV, blood drawn, two nurses and a doctor consulted, IV fluids hooked up and some serious steroids pushed into my bloodstream. And then I sat there with Ian for several hours under observation to make sure the drugs worked and I didn't die. Coming down from panic plus IV steroids plus ridiculous jet-lag made me very loopy and sleepy for the next few hours even though I tried to stay awake and conversant with Ian. I do remember several moments where I was in the middle of a sentence and then the sentence just carried on into a very bizarre dream for the next indeterminate length of time. And then I'd wake up and not realize I'd been asleep.
Eventually, an E-N-T specialist came to inspect me. An older man, built like a troll, with magnifying-glass eyes, he grabbed my tongue with a gauze pad and peered down my throat and then said yes, I'd had a reaction to something, and yes, I'd be fine, and yes, I could leave. Amazingly, for the pleasure of much time and care in the Israeli emergency room, the total bill came to $250. I was very pleased not to have to die of shock at the bill after being saved in the ER, like would be typical in the US.
But the most bizarre thing about the whole episode was that none of the doctors, nurses, specialists, receptionists, or even anyone else I met over the entire course of my trip had ever heard of someone being allergic to the fruit known in Hebrew as "shessek" and in English as "loquat." Lucky me. Here's the offender:
Of course there's always the possibility that I was allergic to something microscopic on the fruit or in the water or in the air or anywhere. But the reaction was consistent with a food allergy, especially the way that all of the surfaces in my mouth reacted where they had touched the fruit. I'll go get allergy tests to confirm that it was the fruit so long as they can find essence of loquat with which to test me... So now I'm supposed to carry an emergency epinephrine shot, just in case.
Ah, food, the things I do for you.
p.s. If you're not allergic to them, loquats are delicious. Well, they're delicious even if you are allergic to them, but death rather takes some of the pleasure away, I think. I prefer to live to eat another day!
The bakeries were of all sorts. A basement of a basement with what looked like a kiln built into the back wall at the very bottom - stacks of trays of dough on one side and fresh pita piled high being hauled up and out onto the street for delivery as soon as the tray was piled high enough. Or a one-room workshop on a side street with an ancient (though not on the middle-eastern timescale) mechanical pass-through oven with a metal-plate conveyor. 
And that doesn't even consider the semi-industrial operation I saw in a Jordanian bakery where the pita oven was on the upper floor and the pitas cooled as they whizzed down a chute to land on the counter next to a man who had to package them up in equal-sized bags - very quickly, I should add. 
I found the baker with the conveyor-belt oven because of the trays he had arranged outside his workshop from which he was selling fresh pita and what he called Palestinian Pizza. Basically pita dough topped with stuff and sent through the oven, he had two kinds: a "normal" pizza with tomato, cheese, and olives, and "the real thing" topped with a paste of za'tar and olive oil. 
The real thing, reheated briefly in the oven, was sweet, salty, oily, hearty. And hot. It tasted like a hot day in Jerusalem - dusty, and even a little gritty, but with that perfume of eucalyptus and olive. It tasted old. And it was just right.
