Turkey is rife with urban legends about the kebab maker who slips donkey meat into his mince to lower costs or the sausage maker whose sucuk (spicy beef sausage) is actually made of horse meat. Turns out these tales are not just the product of the Turkish imagination, with recent inspections made by Turkey's Ministry of Agriculture indicating that several products found on supermarket shelves contain some very troubling ingredients.
The ministry's investigation first took aim at three brands of honey, which were selling at prices that seemed too good to be true. It turned out that what was being offered as honey was actually mostly glucose syrup. But the investigators' further discoveries were even more disturbing, turning up a "beef" product made of horse meat and several other meat products made with a kind of "white slime" (chicken bone and skin). From Today's Zaman:
The Food, Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Ministry has named six companies that its audits have discovered are deceiving customers by providing misleading information about the ingredients of the products.
In a written statement before the weekend, the ministry said laboratory analysis of the companies’ products had revealed that there was vegetable oil in “tulum” cheese, horsemeat in “fried beef,” white meat in “100 percent beef bologna” and undefined tissue as well as internal organs in “skinless sausages.”
One of the recently-stated goals of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which won its third term this summer, is to tackle the problem of childhood obesity in the country. Action has actually already been taken on that front, with a directive being issued a few months ago ordering schools to stop selling junk food and unhealthy snacks on their premises.
But now it looks like the government's plan to slim down Turkey's students is being thwarted by entrepreneurial shopkeepers located near schools, who have started selling contraband food to hungry students. From a report in Hurriyet:
The Ministry of Health and Education’s plan to combat obesity in schools is thwarted by outside vendors, who have begun to sell the prohibited items in their shops.
Some bookshops, located outside of the schools have now turned into cafes and begun to sell sandwiches, hamburgers,energy drinks and fried foods.Although the selling of such foods is prohibited in school canteens, there is no regulation to inspect vendors, who sell unhealthy foods outside of the school areas.
he joint efforts of the ministries of Health and Education to combat obesity by banning the sale of unhealthy foods in school canteens have been thwarted by many outside vendors who have now begun to sell the prohibited foods.
“We now grill even meatballs, rather than cooking them in oil. All the products we sell, such as meatballs, fruit juices and ayran [a Turkish drink made of salty yogurt] are guaranteed by the Turkish Standards Institution. Students, however, are buying products sold outside the school without any restraints, thinking they are cheap. Vendors within the vicinity of the school also need to be inspected,” said Mustafa Işık, a canteen operator at the Atatürk Elementary School in Istanbul’s Halkalı district.
Turkey and Iran have in recent years been rapidly expanding their economic and political ties, with trade between the two countries rising quickly. As the Treehugger blog reports, another statistic that has been ballooning in both countries is the obesity rate. In the blog post, Treehugger's Jennifer Hattam looks at the role food culture might be playing in this change. The post can be found here.
Feedback
We would like to hear your opinion about the new site. Tell us what you like, and what you don't like in an email and send it to: info@eurasianet.org
