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to make. a Mersin desert.
gosh, what a cool site, much will be learned from it.

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"I was fascinated by Marina’s approach to food but found it way to eccentric initially – how could anyone spend so much money on food and effort on sourcing it after all? In a country like Turkey that, according to most of the travelers and people living here, is a bounty of natural produce and healthy food made of it.
The first alarming sign for me was the Greenpeace study of the Turkish produce sold in Germany last year: among 23 other countries that export their produce to the EU Turkey had the highest number of crops in the “red light” category, implying a heavy use of pesticides. I was when I started looking for the produce coming from smaller farmers and organic, when possible. I also started taking closer look at what I eat outside, observe and chat with cooks about their food. I had more and more reasons to be concerned: fish sandwich, iconic Istanbul street food of Istanbul made of frozen Norwegian mackerel, pastry with margarine instead of butter, baklava with glucose syrup, olive oil dishes cooked in the cheapest grade of olive oil (riviera).

I realized that more often than not we have no idea of what goes into our food or even beverage. The other day as I was shopping from my spice vendor in Kadıköy a cook from a renown local meatball eatery walked in and procured a kilo of high-quality black raisins. I asked what he was going to do with it, and he said it was for şira, a lightly fermented grape juice. Of course, he shared, he was going to add a bit of wine into the mix to speed up the making instead of leaving it to the natural fermentation. What a pity those who don’t drink alcohol by choice but “sin” without knowing because of the cooks trying to play it smart!

With the modern food chain where origins are hard to trace, and such large-scale food frauds as the recent horse meat incident in Europe or honey laundering in the US it is hard to be sure where our food is coming from and whether is as organic, natural and ethically grown as we wish it to be. And it becomes more and more expensive to shop for higher quality food even in the city like Istanbul where we are blessed with amazing farmers’ markets and opportunity to shop from vendors that have their 90-year old reputation at stake. So I started to see how Marina was right. And how people like us are minority.

What makes us so conscious? We both share the memories from our Soviet childhood when gardening was a norm for every family as a way to cope with the food rationing: you could grow and preserve food and feel less deprived with the limited quantity of essentials such as butter or sugar available per head. Produce from our own garden or purchased from a neighbor has forever set a high standard of how fruits and vegetables should taste. Our mothers were trying to treat their families to absolutely the best in the absence of proper kitchen utensils (Marina’s mother whipping egg whites into stiff peaks with a fork) and lack of high quality staples (my mother massaging butter to get out the access of moisture before she’d use it for the cake cream). I think it was the effort of our mothers that has made us take food seriously."

(loving Olga) se fosse livre, ai sim, mudava de vida também.