Doha: The biggest challenge facing companies responsible for feeding Qatar Foundation’s 4,000 contractual migrant workers is making sure their food meets all the dietary requirements while also offering them a taste of home.
“The issue of food and nutrition among the migrant workforce is more complicated than it appears on the surface,” said Dr Nandakumar Pillai, Occupational Health Manager at Qatar Foundation (QF). “For even an extra dollar a day, a worker will sacrifice his food.”
“If workers are given a food allowance, it is very likely that they will eat unhealthy and inadequate meals with little to no nutritional value, saving what they can to send back to their families,” Dr. Pillai said.
Other challenges with workers cooking for themselves include poor cleanliness and hygiene in common kitchens, safety and fire hazards from in-room appliances and a woeful lack of nutritional education.
To sidestep the challenges that come with monitoring hundreds of small kitchens and ensure access to safe and healthy food for their workers, it is common practice for employers to turn to commercial kitchens to feed their workers.
Food means different things to different people. For some, it’s a means of survival, for others, it’s so much more than that. For migrant workers that are thousands of miles away from family, food is an important way of staying connected to their culture and eating together is their daily dose of socializing. Sharing food with friends from other countries is often the only way they will ever experience another culture.
“When people are far away from their home and loved ones, working in physically taxing conditions and with not much to occupy them outside of work, food often becomes a source of solace,” said Dr. Fatimah Isa, Assistant Professor of Psychology Teaching in Medicine at QF partner university Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q).
“Emotion is closely tied to motivation,” she said. “As humans, if we are happy and satisfied with the food we eat, it gives rise to positive emotions like joy and satisfaction which in turn motivates us, resulting in increased productivity. A win-win situation for everyone!”
Food for the Soul
Man Bahadur is a 34-year-old cleaning supervisor, employed by a contractor at Qatar Foundation. He comes from Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal. Bahadur’s favorite meal is chicken biryani – an aromatic South Asian dish of succulent chicken curry layered in fluffy rice. Famously dubbed the king of South Asian cuisine, it is served as part of the Asian menu every Friday.
“Eating it somehow dispels my worries, even if it’s just temporarily. I look forward to it the whole week, and the best part is we can eat as much as we want,” said Bahadur, a father of three.
When asked if it tastes like home. He laughs at the absurdity of the question saying: “It’s delicious, and I enjoy it, but the taste of home can never be replicated. I can go to a seven-star hotel, and it still won’t taste like home, just because it wasn’t cooked by my mother,” said Bahadur, who lost his mother two years ago.
“Health”, “Home”, “Energy”, “Taste” and even “Therapy” were some of the words used by workers when asked what food meant to them.
The Daunting Task
An average of 4,000 workers are present in Education City on a daily basis, all of whom are hired through contracting companies. These include craft and manual workers, cleaners, maintenance staff, and security officers. Each one of these workers have the right to three nutritious meals a day.
At Qatar Foundation, as with hundreds of local and international employers, food delivery starts in the industrial kitchens of Qatar’s major work camps. Barwa Al Baraha Camp in Qatar’s Industrial Area is one of the kitchens responsible for catering meals to workers contracted by QF. It has a total of five kitchens which prepare over 160,000 meals a day.
“The task of preparing freshly cooked meals for thousands of workers is daunting. Feeding a workforce of this magnitude means that every single aspect of the entire food supply chain must be carefully controlled for quality and efficiency, to prevent disruption to the operations,” said Noura H. Al Ibrahim, Workers Welfare Project Manager at Qatar Foundation, as we explored the kitchen facility.
Enforcing Standards
“Our answer to this challenge has been constant vigilance and a focus on clear standards and commitments from all of our contractors. The growth of these kitchens has been an important step in delivering all of the meals we need at the standards we set,” said Al Ibrahim. “QF sets out a stringent requirement to all of our contractors to ensure that meals are provided by licensed and certified food service providers.”
“These are ISO 22000 Food Safety Management certified kitchens,” she adds. “The central kitchen is a highly controlled space, with every person working there monitored and issued a license by the Ministry of Public Health, and educated in hygiene and food preparation. That’s a standard baseline that we have to start from.”
A Working Man’s Diet
“The daily caloric requirement of the average worker is 2500-3000 calories,” said Dr. Pillai. “But this can change depending on age, gender, role, and health profile. We also need to be aware that not all workers are educated on a healthy diet, and they may not be making the right choices for their body when they eat from a well-stocked cafeteria or canteen.”
QF food standards are aligned with the World Health Organization Global Strategy to improve workers’ healthy diets and prevent noncommunicable diseases that stem from unhealthy diets. Inside each contract agreement, Qatar Foundation mandates strict adherence to healthy diet standards, which even allow for workers to make necessary dietary substitutions like switching white rice for a more fiber-rich brown rice to address health issues such as diabetes.
According to Dr. Ravinder Mamtani, Professor of Population Health Sciences at WCM-Q, the obvious components of a healthy diet are that it should have a reasonable caloric intake and it should be balanced – have carbohydrates, proteins, fruits and vegetables, as well as a limited quantity of fats.
Dr. Mamtani is keen on developing a nutritional awareness program for workers. He thinks everyone should know, at least to some degree, what good nutrition means.
“I don’t mean doing caloric calculations but just simple stuff like what are healthy sources of carbohydrates, proteins, fats and micronutrients. How much of a plate should be composed of carbohydrates, and so on. Such awareness can empower them to take informed and healthy decisions when it comes to food.
“But nutrition isn’t the beginning and the end,” said Dr. Mamtani, “another important but less talked about component of a healthy diet is variety and taste.”
According to him, people will only eat food if it’s tasty. “If it’s not tasty, they won’t eat it or will only eat the bare minimum amount they need to survive.”
Variety is the spice of life and that holds true for food too. “We can’t eat the same thing every day, no matter how nutritious or tasty it is,” said Dr. Mamtani.
A Taste of Home
Sunil Ulak is a chef at the Barwa Al Baraha Camp, one of the kitchens responsible for catering meals to the accommodations where the contracted workers of QF stay. To him food is “a soothing balm for the struggles of everyday life.”
Ulak has been a chef for almost 10 years now, and said he understands the workers' feelings because he too stays away from family. “My team’s number one priority is to offer the workers a taste of home, and maybe make their time away from home just a little easier.”
A task much easier said than done when there are workers from so many different countries, each with a cuisine very different from the other.
When asked how he manages it, Ulak said: “We offer several different menus such as Asian, African, Filipino, Turkish and Arabic, and we ensure that the lead chef for each of these menus is from the same country or one of the countries it represents. This means they have a good understanding of what the desired taste from that country or region is, and are able to recreate it.”
He added that the kitchen is open to feedback from the workers. “If there is anything several workers collectively want adjusted, such as the spice level in a certain dish, we are open to receiving their feedback through a worker representative, and do our best to change it to their liking almost in real-time.”
Peter Nzyoki is a 35-year-old from Kenya who has been working at QF through a contractor as a cleaning supervisor for three years, and enjoys the variety in the menu. “It’s great that it gives me the chance to eat food from other cuisines.”
Nzyoki is a fan of spicy food and often finds himself enjoying Asian dishes. “The spicy mutton on the Asian menu is my favorite,” he said.
Commenting on the variety of food offered, Yousef Owaidah, catering coordinator at the same camp said: “In addition to having different menus that cater to different ethnicities, we also ensure that items on the menu are not repeated. What is offered for lunch is not repeated for dinner that day, or even the next day. In addition, the menus are changed completely every three to four months to avoid repetition.”
Special menus are available for those with specific diet requirements, whether it’s for religious or health reasons. “Those that don’t eat meat have access to a vegetarian menu. Those with diabetes have access to brown bread and brown rice.”
All the menus consist of either chicken, red meat, fish or legumes as the main protein source on a daily basis. Vegetables are also served every day and fresh fruit is served three times a week. Laban, a yoghurt-based drink, or fruit juice is available on certain days every week while carbonated drinks which are high in sugar are a strict no.
Special celebratory meals are offered on festive days like Eid, Christmas and Diwali. Similarly, every week on Friday – a day off for all the workers, a special meal followed by ice cream for dessert is served.
To Owaidah serving good food stems from the respect he has for the workers and their hard work. “We strive to ensure that the food is such that they don’t just eat it because they have to, but that they actually enjoy it.”
Christian Bartolome
42-year-old Christian Bartolome, from the Philippines, has been working as a safety officer with a QF contractor since 2019.
His favorite meal of the week is the Filipino-style fried chicken which is served on Fridays. “It reminds me of the time I was a little boy, both my mother and my grandmother used to make fried chicken. Even today, I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed it then. It always makes me smile because of the memories it brings back.
“Eating food I like makes me feel energized. It’s like recharging my batteries,” he said laughing.
