So one of the things which are really nice about being in the middle east is that you have hummos all the time. I mean at least three times a day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You wont hear me complain. So yesterday night one the way back from dinner i suddenly wondered where all the chickpeas (which are the basis of hummos) come from. One would imagine that there would be chickpea fields or plantations all over the middle east but i have never really noticed any. Turns out nobody in our party knew either (Khalid was pretty sure that it grows on small bushes) which is a pretty amazing amount of ignorance when it comes to one of the most important ingredients in your regional cuisine. According to wikipedia almost all cickpeas do come from India. The percentage of india in the world chickpea production is so high that the rest of the worlds cickpea output seems to be measured in percentages of the Indian production:

To give the locals some credit, according to the same wikipedia article ‘Domesticated chickpeas are first known from the aceramic levels of Jericho’ (which is like 2 hours driving from Amman)