Anyone who's ever eaten in a school cafeteria has been exposed to mystery meat, the strange substance used to make hamburgers and other dishes that are staples of the classic school lunch. Turkish officials, though, may have just added a new item to the school lunch repertoire: mystery milk.
According to reports in the Turkish press, a newly-launched government effort to distribute free milk to Turkey's 7.2 million schoolchildren started off on a disastrous note, with more than 1,000 kids going to the hospital on the program's first day after complaining of food poisoning-like symptoms. The reason? According to some doctors who treated the kids, it was a case of drinking spoiled milk. A member of the main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), went even further and suggested government-affiliated "partisan" milk firms were to blame.
In Turkey, the victim often gets blamed when something goes wrong, even if that victim is a child. Not surprisingly, government officials quickly dismissed the possibility that the children drank tainted milk, saying instead that many of them simply were not used to drinking the liquid or were allergic to it. Turkey's Education Minister even told reporters that perhaps some of the sickened students simply drank their milk too fast. Either way, samples of the supposedly long-lasting ultra pasteurized milk, which was distributed in individual cartons, were taken to a lab and results are expected on Friday.
Being a doctor in Turkey carries with it a certain amount of prestige. But, increasingly, the job is also proving to be one that comes with a high level of danger. The last month has seen a string of violent attacks against doctors and health professionals in Turkey, from the murder of a doctor by the 17-year-old relative of a patient of his who died to attacks against ambulance crews that were accused of arriving late. Things have gotten so bad that Turkish doctors went on a nationwide strike earlier this month to protest the violence they are facing, while the Health and Justice ministries have been forced to step into action and come up with a plan to protect the country's medical workers.So what's behind this upsurge in violence against doctors? Some suggest that because of a recent expansion of universal health coverage in Turkey, the country is now facing a severe shortage of doctors, resulting in poorer care and more angry patients and relatives. Some doctors, on the other hand, believe that they are the victims of government rhetoric that they say portrays them as lazy elitists. Reports the Financial Times:
Istanbul is probably one of the few cities in the world where a person armed with little more than pluck, a tuxedo and a set of four-foot-long skewers can build an empire out of selling grilled intestines (or kokorec, as they are called in Turkish). That is the story of Vahap Usta, a nattily dressed Turkish culinary entrepreneur who, starting with a single food cart in the heart of old Istanbul, went on to own a mini kingdom of some 33 stands selling kokorec and drive around town in a white Mercedes. After peaking in the 1990's, though, the legendary Vahap Usta somehow lost it all and ended up disappearing from Istanbul's culinary scene.
That is, until now. Istanbul Eats recently caught up with what they describe as the "Willy Wonka of kokorec," finding him once again slinging intestines dressed in his trademark tuxedo and trying to make a new start with a new cart in one of Istanbul's tonier neighborhoods. From their report:
The legend of Vahap Usta lives on in Facebook pages (“Vahap Usta Neredesin?/Where are you Vahap Usta?” asks one) and through claims of recent sightings and nostalgic blog posts of encounters long past. But for quite a while no one seemed to know what exactly happened to the kokoreç King himself. Our attention was brought to this story by friend and fellow trencherman Salih abi, author of the great food blog Harbi Yiyorum. We followed false leads for a year before we finally found Vahap Usta, working at his kokoreç counter on a commercial strip in the Sisli neighborhood.
If there's one thing everyone in Turkey's deeply divided political scene can agree on, it's that the country desperately needs a new constitution to replace the current one, written in 1982 by the generals who led a coup two years earlier. Although that constitution has been amended several times, it remains a woefully inadequate and undemocratic document, one that is completely out of touch with Turkey's current realities. Here's how law professors Serap Yazici and Mustafa Erdogan describe it in a 2011 report they wrote for the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV):
The 1982 Constitution was not only anti-democratic in terms of the method it was made, it also did not fit the ideal of a democratic and pluralist-liberalist society in terms of its content. Indeed, with characteristics such as its official ideology, its hierarchical model that renders the society subject to the state, its unionist-uniformist structure that sees differences and diversity illegitimate and its sacrificing freedom for authority, the 1982 Constitution is far from the standards of today’s democracies, and goes against the structure and needs of the society in Turkey.
As the French presidential election heads into a run-off, it's probably not surprising that Ankara is quietly but emphatically rooting for Socialist candidate Francois Hollande to defeat the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy. Under Sarkozy, Turkish-French relations have been extremely strained, with the French President expressing his strong opposition to Turkey's European Union membership bid and also helping introduce a few months ago an ultimately unsuccessful bill that would have criminalized the denial of the Armenian genocide. On the foreign policy, front, meanwhile, Paris and Ankara have also frequently clashed in recent years, in particular with the two vying for influence in the Middle East. For example, after the end of the NATO operation last year in Libya, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Sarkozy were in a race to see which one of them could make it to Tripoli first and become the first major foreign leader to visit the newly liberated country. Sarkozy ended up winning the contest, arriving in the Libyan capitol only a day before Erdogan.So what would a Socialist victory in France mean for Turkey? The National takes a look:
In a previous post, this blog linked to a great Boston Globe article that told the story of doner's rise in Germany from a simple and affordable meal for Turkish guest workers to a fast food juggernaut that is now giving McDonald's and other international fast food chains a run for their money.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal takes a further look at the big business of doner, visiting a trade fair devoted just to this fast growing industry, in which Germany has now become a heavy weight player, producing some 400 million tons of meat cylinders a day and sending them out all over Europe. Naturally, big business breeds innovation, with the best example being the somewhat terrifying "doner robot," a machine does away with centuries of tradition and lets for a machine, rather than a knife-wielding mustachioed man, slice the doner. The WSJ, meanwhile, found all kinds of interesting new products at the fair, such as the curiously named "Doner Streaker," a truck specifically designed to deliver the logs of meat without them rolling around.
The full article can be found here, while an Istanbul Eats roundup of where to eat the best doner in Istanbul can be found here.
Perhaps one of the most quoted Wikileaks cables to come out of the American embassy in Ankara is one from 2009 in which the ambassador at the time, James Jeffrey, describes Turkey's Middle East policy as based on "Rolls Royce ambitions, but with Rover resources."
Many in Ankara interpreted the ambassador's comment as an indication of Washington's discomfort with Turkey's increasingly autonomous and high-profile Middle East foreign policy, but a new study released by a Turkish think tank confirms a simple truth that lies at the base of Jeffrey's assessment: Turkey, at this point, simply lacks the human resources and institutional capacity to back up many of its lofty foreign policy goals. Reports Today's Zaman:
The Foreign Ministry’s present infrastructure in terms of its corporate body and personnel is insufficient for Turkey to become a “regulating actor” or “central country” in the Middle East, according to a new International Strategic Research Organization (USAK) report.
Osman Bahadır Dinçer, the think-tank’s Middle East researcher, has said the shortcomings in terms of personnel are being felt more deeply since Turkey has started to follow a foreign policy in the last 10 years that is multiple-lane and multidimensional, with Turkey often being cited as a role model in the region.
At a press conference at USAK headquarters in Ankara on Wednesday Dinçer said, “Only six out of 135 people in Turkey’s 25 diplomatic missions in Arab countries can speak Arabic.” He stressed that the capacity of the Foreign Affairs Ministry as a corporate body and the competence and sufficiency in number of the ministry’s staff are key factors in obtaining the desired results in a foreign policy initiative.
Tbilisi-based photographer Uta Beyer has a thing for pig carcasses and other assorted cuts of meat. A previous post on this blog featured her lovingly rendered photos of pig heads on display in Tbilisi's main meat market, but Beyer appears to have been so captivated by what she saw at the butcher's that day that she's started an ongoing project called "Flesh," a collection of meat-based still lifes. Here's how Beyer describes the project:
Animal still lifes are one of the oldest genres in art history.They touch upon questions of transience, mortality, and death, and are, at the same time, among the most masterful paintings, always with a clear focus on the aesthetic presentation of the depicted dead animals. This photo essay is a modern, photographic interpretation of the animal still lifes genre, an exploration into this sphere between beauty and death.
Helvetica, Caslon, Times New Roman, Ataturk. Yes, to the list of the fonts found on your computer, you can now add one named after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey's secularizing founder, and inspired by his handwriting. Reports the Hurriyet Daily News:
An entrepreneur in the northwestern province of Bursa has developed a digital font for Microsoft Word documents that mimics Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s handwriting.
It is a deficiency for Turkey not to have a font in the style of Atatürk’s handwriting, when thousands of fonts exist, said Murat Özbalcı, entrepreneur. “I have answered more than 200 phone calls just today, and thousands of people have visited our website to download the font. I am not attempting to copyright the font, and am not demanding royalties. I just want to be remembered as the one who transformed Atatürk’s handwriting for use online,” Özbalcı told the Hürriyet Daily News today.
Ataturk's most famous piece of handwriting -- which may have served as an inspiration for the eponymous font -- is his distinctive signature, found on everything from statues and marble plaques to the tattooed forearms of young Kemalists and iPhone cases. Interestingly, it turns out that the signature doesn't actually belong to Turkey's founding father, but rather was the creation of an Armenian high school teacher who was asked to design a unique John Hancock for Ataturk in 1934. From another HDN report:
Having played host over the centuries to Greeks, Romans, the Byzantines and other great cultures, the land that comprises modern-day Turkey is filled with numerous and valuable archeological sites. To view some of the more extraordinary finds from many of those sites, though, requires going to museums in other countries. For example, the altar of Zeus from the ancient city of Pergamon, dug up by a German team in the late 1800's, resides in Berlin, while other valuable artifacts originally found in Turkey are housed in assorted European and American museums.
Filled with a renewed sense of political and economic self-confidence, Ankara is now looking for ways to regain those antiquities, resorting, if need be, to playing hardball. From a very interesting recent Newsweek article on the subject:
The Turkish government has decided that it can score nationalist points by launching a vocal campaign to recover ancient Anatolian artifacts from foreign museums. Over the last year the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism has resorted to ever-more aggressive measures, from threatening to suspend the excavation licenses of foreign archeological teams to blocking the export of museum exhibits. Last month, for instance, the ministry announced that it would not issue export licenses for several dozen museum pieces due to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. As a result, important exhibitions—Byzantium and Islam at the Met, The Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam at the British Museum, and The Ottomans at the V&A—have either had to scramble to find alternative artifacts in non-Turkish collections or delay the exhibitions altogether.
