Bekaa Pumpkins

byHabib Battah
Oct 29, 2012

This weekend, I was fortunate enough to stumble across the freshest farmer’s market I’d ever seen.

It’s just off the highway heading down into the Bekaa from the Chouf Cedar reserve:

Families were lining up to get a good pick:

But most of all, I loved their advertising strategy, which consisted of lining the highway with stonehenge-like pumpkin formations.

Now that’s eco friendly!

Habib Battah

Habib Battah is an investigative journalist and founder of the news site beirutreport.com. Battah has covered Lebanon and the Middle East for over 20 years and teaches journalism and media studies at the American University of Beirut. He is a contributor to Monocle, The Guardian, BBC World, Al Jazeera and others, a former fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and two-time recipient of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award. Battah's investigative work was recently recognized for outstanding local reporting by the Columbia University Oakes Award for Environmental Reporting. Battah earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Near East Studies and Journalism from New York University.