Water Boils: Demystifying Brown Bagging

Deniz’s comment on the Netherlands lunchbox ethic of single ingredient sandwiches made me think about my Tyler Durden side, who is always trying to oppress my middle-class hedonist tendencies. Those who know me for a long time also know how much time I have wasted on trying to reconcile my obsession with food with my left leaning world view. It is not really easy, especially thinking that on more than one occasion, I had been harassed and bullied by my comrades, just because I wanted to write about food and politics at the same time. Apparently you have to be pure and clean of worldly pleasures to do politics right. I tried. I literally spent months trying to get rid of my “sinful” tendencies, but it was second nature to my middle class position. I realized that it would never happen. Then I realized it doesn’t have to happen. The latter took longer than I could have imagined, but well it did happen.

This Friday, I had my first real conversation with my butcher. Bear in mind, he doesn’t know that he is my butcher yet. We have that kind of relationship you have with a high school crush that you think is your boyfriend while he has no idea who you are. I go there every week, sometimes twice, to get something like a chicken breast or a tiny saucisson, or just three strips of bacon. Things I buy are a dead giveaway of my living conditions: one little piece of merguez cry “hey I live alone”. But they don’t complain. They put three extremely thick pieces of bacon inside a butcher paper, write 80 cents on it, and draw a smiley with a “merci!” scribbled next to it.

Perhaps saying that you have a butcher sound slightly pretentious (what next? “my butler”?) but take this: Being friends with your meat supplier also gives you some perks that most people don’t have, such as getting a special cut of meat, or an honest “perhaps, not the lamb today madam” confession. But come on, who has a butcher anymore unless they live in a big metropolitan city? Our meat comes in boxes, prefrozen, preportioned. Our younglings think that chicken grows on styrofoam trays (and only as breasts), and that sausage is a kind of root vegetable. The means of production has shifted in massive scales. No petit bourgeois butchers are in sight in most American cities, because all we have is some poor alienated meat factory worker who actually has no means to acquire the goods he helps to produce, nor has any idea what he is making to start with.

Over the last two-three decade, the culinary traditions of many centuries have reduced into the capitalist agro-industrial complex. As a secondary consequence, one of the biggest cultural creations of humankind has become a ridiculous status game. Labor intensive arts of curing, smoking, pickling, drying, salting cheaper cuts of food as well as game and offal has been pushed into esoterism, just because they are not profitable to sell; and hence became only accessible to upper classes. The food as we know it has been reduced into a meat patty and a blue box, and those who seek further are ostracized as snobs (or god forbid, “gourmets”). Cooking became a tedious and puritanic task. Boil chicken, add rice, don’t put garlic, “it stinks”. Vanity contributed to this decline further. Please. No salt, no butter, no cream. Just “Fat free fat”, a tiny bit. With a tub of olestra on the side.

So how does this rambling tie back to my atrocious fight against my own obsession with the things that taste extremely good but questionably inaccessible to the masses? This Friday, while trying to pick a piece of saucisson (a little dried sausage) and contemplating leftover rice instead, I started a conversation with the shopkeeper whom I learned later was the owner’s relative. He started telling me all the differences between the duck and the rabbit and the turkey sausages and how they are made. My eyes literally started sparkling. That minute, I understood that I wasn’t doing anything wrong by buying something esoteric, in fact it was the right thing to do. Always. Historically. Supporting artisans that make their own food, craft their own food, and most importantly know this food is our only weapon against the fat free salad dressing and the rib sandwich that is not made out of ribs. It is also the only way people could make a decent living just by producing and selling food, like my butcher who also takes three weeks of vacation every year. I wanted to ask him, “when did sausage become decadence?”, but decided to save it for a less busy day.

After this brief episode of mis-enlightenment, I got carried away and bought some duck for my Sunday dinner. I served it over some pureed mashed red lentils that were enhanced by some of the duck’s fat, garlic (yeah it stinks, and it is fantastic) and fresh rosemary from the garden. Then to balance this indulgence I decided to take a simple lunch to work next day. Some salad with leftover lentils and tomatoes, cucumbers and feta cheese was all I needed. I did this not because I wanted to be clean in a metaphoric and spiritual sense, but I realized that all fat and no grains makes missy an unhealthy girl. So, no more Tyler Durden trying to take my butter from me because it is a sin! Only my arteries can tell what I should or should not eat. Afterall, The Fight Club was a juvenilistic and misogynistic attempt of social criticism, and honestly, Tyler Durden was a jerk.

I’m on the subway after a long, hard day in the kitchen, my feet swelling up like twin Hindenburgs; my back killing me; fourteen hours of hot, sweaty, uncomfortable toil and two hundered eighty dinners under my belt; and I want to sit down. There are three seats in front of me in the crowded subway car. Unfortunately, one miserable, fat bastard is taking up all three of them. As he sits glumly but defiantly in a center seat, his gigantic butt cheeks and thighs spill out of the molded plastic bucket onto the seats on both sides, and his beady eyes dare me to try and squeeze my bony ass into one of the narrow spaces next to him.

Dream sequence: I’m on a packed commuter flight and we’re going down for a forced landing in a Midwestern cornfield. Engine one is on fire, the cabin fills up with smoke, panicky passengers overturn their meal trays as they rush the emergency exits. The pilot manages to plow the plane belly-down onto soft earth, but the the plane - in flames now - comes to a full stop and the emergency doors pop free, the three-hundred-pound ectomorph in the window seat becomes lodged firmly and inexorably in the small doorway. At the dead of the aisle, another giant fuck collapses wheezing onto the floor, blocking egress. As my hair catches fire, the last thing I see is jiggly, crenulated back fat.

Whose fault is it? Who made my fellow American obese - if not morbidly obese? How did the age-old equation that poor equals thin and rich equals fat change so that now our working poor are huge and slow-moving and only the wealthy can afford the personal trainers, liposuction, and extended spa treatments required, it seems, to be thin? In whose evil snail tracks across the globe can we watch thighs expand, bellies pooch out over groins, so that fewer and fewer every year of the flower of our youth can even see their own genitals without benefit of a mirror? Who is making each generation from once normally proportioned countries swell up like grain-fed steer?

We know the answer. America’s most dangerous export was never nuclear weapons or Jerry Lewis - or even Baywatch reruns. It was, is, and probably always will be our fast-food outlets.

The Evildoers of the major chains live nowhere near their businesses. Like crack dealers, they know what they sell is not good for you, that it makes neighborhoods uglier, contributes nothing but a stifling sameness to society. Recently, with Eric Schlosser, the author of the brilliant and terrifying Fast Food Nation, I debated two representatives of the fast-food industry at a “multi-unit food service operators” convention in Texas. Our position, unsurprisingly, was that everybody in the room basically sucked. The opposition countered with tortured reciattion of numbers and statistics, mostly to do with what a valuable service their industry provided, employing - for a few months at a time - hundreds of thousands of people who (they implied) might otherwise be sticking up liquor stores, setting fires, and sodomizing pets. They neatly deflected Schlosser’s own accurate and sobering numbers, mostly to do with workplace injuries in the meat-cutting industry, average length of employment, bankrupt “nutritional” value, the quantifiable path of balooning thighs following in their businesses’ wake across the globe, and so on. But when I asked these folks, one by one, if they would live anywhere near their own overlit, maniacally cheery looking restaurants, I got, more often than not, a stunned look and a “Fuck, no!” When I mischievously suggested (opportunistically taking advantage of the current fervor of flag waving) that their chosen enterprise was basically unpatriotic; that they were deliberately targeting children with their advertising, then knowingly raising them to be no-necked arterially clogged diabetics who’d “never in a million years make it through basic training. God help us if we ever have to hit Omaha Beach again, those doughy overfed punks’ll drown like rats!” - they looked, actually…guilty. They know, you see. You think they eat their own gruel anywhere near as frequently as the average rube? I don’t.

But is fast food inherently evil? Is the convenient nature of the beast bad, in and of itself? decidedly no. Fast food - which traditionally solves very problems of working families, families with kids, business people on the go, the causally hungry - can be good food. If you walk down a street in Saigon, or visit an open-air market in Mexico, you’ll see that a quick, easy meal, often enjoyed standing up, does not have to be part of the hideous, generic sprawl of soul-destroying sameness that stretches from strip malls in San Diego, across the USA, through Europe and Asia and around again, looking the same, tasting the same: paper-wrapped morsels of gray “beef” patties with all-purpose sauce. The unbelievably high-caloric horrors of beef-flavored-sprayed chicken nuggets, of “milkshakes” that contain no milk and have never been shaken, of “barbecue” that has never seen a grill, “cheese” with no cheese, and theme monstrosities for whom food is only a lure to buy a T-shirt, is not the way it has to be.

There is delicious, even nutritious, fast food to be had in the world - often faster and cheaper than the clown and the colonel and the king and their ilk produce. In Japan (and increasingly in the West), there are quick, affordable sushi joints. In Tokyo, you can purchase yakitori, small skewers of grilled poultry and meat, from yakitori vendors clustered around business districts to serve executives looking for an easy after-work snack. In Spain, tapas (or pinchos) are served standing up; you grab something good at one tapas joint, then move over to another, a movable series of snacks, inevitably delicious - and again, usually good for you.

In Vietnam, fast food is everywhere, right out in the street: freshly made, brightly colored sandwiches on homemade French bread; steaming bowls of pho, noodles served from a portable kitchen carried on a yoke on the proprietor’s back; grilled shrimp kebabs skewered on sugarcane; tiny bundles of rice and pork wrapped in banana leaves; spicy calamari; crispy little birds; hunks of jackfruit; caramelized bananas and mango - all of it made and served by individuals, lone entrepreneurs for whom pride is not a catchphase or a slogan but an operating principle. In Mexico, one is likely to find happy swarms of people slurping posole, a sort of soupy stew, or menudo, a similarly delicious concoction, around primitive cars right out in the street, electric power provided by a chugging gas generator. A few pesos and a few seconds and you’re eating better than at any place run by evil clowns or steroid-overdosed action movie front men. Turn right and there’s an old woman making absolutely fresh quesadillas of zucchini flowers and farmer cheese, turn left and a mom and pop are slicing up a tender head of pork and rolling it into soft tacos with salsa fresca so fresh and wonderful you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven. Total time elapsed from time ordered to actual chewing? About twelve seconds.

Even in Russia they’ve got blintzes and piroshkis, served on fire-engine-red plastic trays - in the worst American tradition - but again, made by a human, fresh, on site, from real, recognizable ingredients, not shipped in frozen, pre-portioned vacu-seal bags from some meat-extruding facility near a far-away turnpike. And that cherished idea of the Russian as stocky, Krushchev-like babushkas is way wrong, friends. Most of the Russians I saw recently? The guys all looked like Dolph Lundgren and the women were tall, slim, and hard-looking enough to handle themselves in a street fight.

In Cambodia, a desperately poor cyclo driver, munching on a crispy little bird at a market, engaged me in conversation. “Is it true,” he asked, “that all Americans eat only hamburgers and KFC?” He looked truly sorry for me.

I wouldn’t really care what they put in those burgers - if they tasted good. And though I do care that the rivers of Arkansas are clogging up with chicken shit to satisfy the world’s relentless craving for crispy fried chicken fingers, I don’t believe that we should legislate these cocksuckers out of business. My position is kind of the Nancy Reagan position on drugs: “Just Say No.” Next time you find yourself standing slack-jawed and hungry in front of a fast-food counter - and a clown is anywhere nearby - just turn on your heels and head for the lone-wolf, independent operator down the street: the pie shop, a chippie, a kebab joint, or in New York, a “dirty-water hot dog,” anywhere that the proprietor has a name. Even that beloved British institution, the chippie, is preferable to the the clown’s fare; at least you are encouraging individual, local business, an entrepreneur who can react to neighborhood needs and wants, rather than a dictatorial system in which some focus group in an industrial park in Iowa decides for you what you will or should want. Deep-fried cod or plaice with vinegar, haggis with curry sauce; these may not be the apex of healthy eating, but at least they’re indigenous to somewhere - and washed down with enough beer or Irn-Bru, they’re quite tasty. The kebab shop makes food that is at least fresh, and a beef shawarma does not require the addition of beef flavor to make it taste like food.

Whenever possible, try to eat food that comes from somewhere, from somebody. And stop eating so fucking much. A little portion control would go a long way in slimming down our herds of heavyweights in their tent-like T-shirts, Gap easy-fit pants, and baggy shorts. (Apparently taking body-sculpting cues from some of our more humongous rappers, these guys ignore the fact that many of their heroes probably have to wash themselves with a sponge at the end of a stick.)

You may as well stop snacking on crap while you’re at it. You don’t need that bag of chips between meals, do you? You’re probably not even enjoying it. Save your appetite for something good! Take a little more time! All that rage and frustration, that hollow feeling so many of us feel - for so many good reasons - can be filled up with something better than a soggy disk of ground-up assholes and elbows. Eat for nourishment, yes, but eat for pleasure. Stop settling for less. That way, if we ever do have to get in there and “smoke the evildoers out of their holes,” at the very least, we’ll be able to squeeze in after them.

from The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006: Bloomsbury Publishing):

A statement from The Coalition of Immokalee Workers:

The CIW is asking you to join them in demanding fast food industry to stop exploiting their farmworkers to the extent of modern day slavery. The mobilization tour will start in Immokalee, FL (where about 2,500 farmworkers reside) and take a long stop at Chicago to challenge McDonald’s in their own corporate backyard:

Rally at McDonald’s Headquarters
Friday, April 13th. 3pm: McDonald’s Headquarters 22nd St & McDonald’s Dr, Oak Brook, IL

Parade and Carnaval for Fair Food, Real Rights and Dignity
Saturday, April 14, 10am: Federal Plaza, Downtown Chicago

Check here for more details to see if they will be coming close to where you live.

There is a strange taste in my mouth and I do not know where it is coming from. Can you find it in this picture?

Today I went to the office to work for the first time since I got sick. There was a cute bag of easter chocolate on a desk in the common area, gifted from someone who had more power than all of the inhabitants of the room. We thought we were lucky. I was particularly happy because they were perfectly sized for my bento, so I brought some home. But then something made me think again about whether I was really really lucky. You’ll see why if you have the patience to read all of this post.

It was a particularly long day for me. When I came home, I almost decided not to eat dinner and just go to bed. However, I had to do something for lunch tomorrow. This sounds funny for people who are not lunch-box crazy, but: because I needed to make a lunch-box, I made dinner. For the non frequent readers of the blog I have to reiterate: lunch is the main meal of my day, then breakfast comes. Dinner is never special, unless it is an intentionally special dinner: a date, a celebration, a self gifting ritual after a deadline. Most of the days my dinner is leftovers of my lunch-box for the next day, or scrambled eggs, quick salad, something like that.

Since I gave myself only fifteen minutes to prepare the lunch, I decided to make a version of zaru soba. I boiled some water, put a bunch of soba noodles, and added some tofu that I’d previously frozen a minute before the soba was done (note to self: freezing leftover tofu wasn’t a bad idea). Meanwhile, I chopped some cucumber, reconstituted wakame with some water and made a quick sauce out of soy sauce, hot pepper flakes, rice vinegar, ginger powder and sesame oil. Mixed soba+tofu with wakame and cucumbers and I was almost done. I put some sauce in a container rather than pouring it over all of the noodles to prevent leakage during transportation. I poured the rest on the portion I reserved for dinner. I was done. Good thing I washed some strawberries this morning. They were 2.50 per pound; and for that price during March I could ignore that they drove all the way from California. Please tell me, if you’d like to eat fresh fruit in Midwest when nothing is in season, what else can you do? A piece of Babybel cheese, and all I was missing was some kind of treat. I looked at the cream eggs that I brought from the office and asked “Why not”. I’ll tell why you should not.

I do not consider myself a food snob, but I can say that my preferences are skewed towards what most Americans consider snobbish. I don’t look down on people who eat food that I consider inferior; but yes I consider a lot of food, or better yet “industrial food products”, inferior. I do not pick food for its symbolic value, nor for its price, rarity or which part of the world it comes from; and I try not to make friends with people who do so. I have a particular aversion towards the gourmet culture which overlooks majority of the third world food culture (Have you ever tried searching biryani at Epicurious? Try it, please!), and undermines the real heroes of the food industry. Still I sound elitist every time I open my mouth about food. People hate me, they have even systematically harassed me in the past in other mediums. Perhaps because I tell the inconvenient truth?

I try not to act like an elitist asshole, but sometimes it just happens. Especially when it comes to processed food, factory produced “food products” and anything that is designed to resemble something other than itself. I gag when I see the ingredients of most standard grocery store items, and I haven’t eaten at a McDo since 2001. Yada yada, standard food snob bitching. Middle class abstraction process that prohibits a real understanding of the Kraft blue box subaltern. Bla bla.

I am sorry, this will sound another self righteous bull-crap but, I think if I had only 50 dollars per month for food, I would still not eat the blue box. In fact I think it could be an expensive way to eat. Rice, bulgur, beans and pasta cost around a dollar per pound, sometimes less depending on where you shop. Eggs tend to be cheap as well. Of course I would have to forgo fruit, fish and vegetables most of my days, which is a luxury that I take for granted with my current budget. Still, I believe that the real problem lies in the perceptions and accessibility regarding food. Most of the preferences of Americans below poverty are unfortunately learned preferences, class conditioned dispositions; more importantly, such dispositions directly harm them. And again, unfortunately, they are also stripped from the information that helps them to get out of those learned dispositions. As elitist as this might sound, most people don’t know any better and have no consciousness of their options. So yeah, you are right that I have no authority to talk about the subaltern, because I have power and agency; I can chose and I can decide. A lot of people can’t. They are stripped from knowledge, power and agency. They are alienated, they are dictated to think that the blue box is their only option and that there is no harm in eating it every day. Do you also know that poorer urban neighborhood grocery stores sell lower quality produce sold at a higher price because none of the big stores with cost advantage find it profitable to open a store in the area? Do you also know that less healthy food options are more heavily promoted in poorer non-white neighborhoods? But what about the blinded suburban kids with SUVs and their moms who have a weekly food budget that equals my monthly stipend? Why do they think you care about them when they are handed something that contains Yellow#6?

In addition to “demystifying brown bagging”, I intend to use this blog not only to inform people about the amount of unnatural stuff in their food, but also to monitor, track and improve my own eating. I might even sound hypocritical in this post, since frequent readers of this blog also might recall that I use lots of convenience items (Trader Ho anyone?). Well because it is a learned disposition. I do possess those dispositions, unfortunately. A year from now, and hopefully done with school, I hope to eliminate all things processed; for now, leave me be an hypocritical asshole. The thing is, mainstream ideology regarding what we put in our bodies, especially the one dominant in the USA, is so messed up that sometimes there is no way to escape. What are you going to do when your school cafeteria serves meat which is actually a sort of “meat product” (a.k.a meat with lots of synthetic fillers and preservatives). Do you have to shop at Wholefoods to avoid high fructose corn syrup? Why do I have to defend myself every time I refuse to take a painkiller for a headache? To avoid eating nuclear weapon grade materials, you really have to become an obsessive compulsive person who reads all ingredient labels; or if you have time and motivation to make everything from scratch, just ignore anything that is packaged. I don’t; I have successfully convinced myself that I can’t.

Now, the chocolate easter eggs. The first thing that I sensed when I put this egg shaped food product was an unpleasant sense of sweetness. There it was, the ubiquitous corn syrup. There was also something cold and metalic, think about licking a piece of steel. But that sugar, it was overwhelming. Then I remembered, sometime in last century per capita consumption of sugar hit 150 pounds (pdf file), per year. I don’t know how big or small you are, but this is basically equal to the number on my scale. I can even imagine a pile of sugar that is 150 pounds. In fact, I am pretty sure tonight’s nightmare will be a giant monster made out of sugar, running after me, shouting “I will catch you and make you diabetic”.

Anyhoo, no wonder we all became sugar junkies; we were sinisterly fed it. But I wasn’t, or more appropriately I had gone cold turkey. Since I was watching my sugar intake for the last six months, the taste of the cream egg, a favorite product of many, was disgustingly sweet. It was also too chemical. By saying this I will probably offend millions who like this product but honestly it tasted like aluminum foil and burnt sugar. So I wondered what it was that contributed to this impeccable taste? What tasted so chemical that I can still feel it in my mouth 2 hours after dinner? Unfortunately, Hershey’s web site didn’t list the ingredients for the said product. Instead they said:

Nutrition information for this flavor is not available online at this time. Please consult the package label or call us at (800) 468-1714 for further information.

I almost called them, but I was suddenly lazy and tired and kind of foggy minded. Then I realized, there was probably some form of corn syrup in that thing. I rarely show this kind of reaction towards real chocolate; but how much chocolate was in this chocolate? Quickly, my blood sugar rose, then my insulin; suddenly I felt like fainting. Perhaps my insulin hit 200?. Yay, bullseye! “They should use this product instead of that flat orange soda thing that they force feed me every time I get a glucose intolerance test”, I said to myself. How many of these would you need to supply 75 mgs of glucose? I still needed some answers, but nutritional info was not available.

Instead of driving to the nearest convenience store and checking the labels, I decided to to try my chance with google. The closest information I got was this, which shows a portion of the nutritional labeling. Corn syrup? Present! Unidentified artificial flavorings? Present! Rest was cropped from the picture. Thank you dear senior departmental person who gave me this. You must really dislike me, or that, like millions of Americans, you are truly blinded by the agro-industrial complex.

America wake up! They are feeding you crap. And because it is so cheap, you look the other way. When one pound of oreos cost less than a pound of fruit, there is something wrong.

Why do organic potatoes cost so much? Why do all fruit look the same? What is in a bag of salad, other than salad? What about organic milk?

Not that you cannot find this at google video by yourself, I just like to finish what I started.

We will be back with regular lunchbox programming after the weekend.

No lunch box for tomorrow. There IS such a thing as free lunch, but I am not even sure if I can eat.

I made two meals for tomorrow, because I had so many leftovers from the weekend. This is a good excuse to work late and stay in campus until after dinner time. We see some borek, apple slices and almond butter for some protein. As usual, this should cost around 2 dollars. Everything is organic, well except the plastic.

When one needs to make some borek, it is almost impossible to find no. 10 phyllo, the thick kind, in small town USA. Of course you can use no. 2 phyllo, the common variety available in most supermarkets, but it doesn’t fit the purpose as finely. I guess this is my vulgar cultural bias, but I don’t like borek made with thin phyllo. In fact, Turks never use this type of phyllo at home, except for making baklava. And other than grandmas of the rare kind, no-one bothers to make baklava at home anymore. As a result, you cannot even find this product in supermarkets. You have to go to an old fashioned phyllo store, a phylloist I would call. Crazy as it is, we still have artisan shops that exclusively sell phyllo and kadayif, albeit decreasing in numbers. The one in our street corner would work through the night most weekends; and I would see his lights sometimes, coming home late at night, from a leisurely night of drinking and eating at the meyhane. I would feel embarrassed, concerned that if he sees me he will think lowly of me. The guy is working his ass off for my Sunday brunch borek while I am doing what? “Growing my ass” the Turkish idiom would state. The phylloist does overtime because some borek needs to be made. In Turkey, the issue of borek cannot be taken lightly. It is so central to the cousines of Turkey that, there are at least two dozen varieties, categorized by their ethnic affiliations, fillers, or the way the pastry is shaped.

For example, there is Kurdish borek which has said to originate from kombe, or possibly katmer which literally means layered. This is a south-eastern Turkish specialty but occasionally is seen in central regions as well. Since anything related to Kurdish (or any ethnic minority) culture has been taboo until very recently, it is hard to find any records on the etymology of the Kurdish borek and how it relates to the boreks of the region; but this guy claims to be the inventor of the concept. The article is in Turkish, but in summary this person got the rights of the name “Kurdish Borek” in Austria, and is complaining that he cannot do the same back home because of century long anti-Kurdish position of the state. See, like all ethno-political issues, even a piece of borek creates such controversy in my dear home country. You can write a full-on doctoral dissertation deconstructing the discourse around the issue, and I guarantee that you will lose your mind while doing it. For example, since no-one knows it with that name in Diyarbakir (a predominantly Kurdish city), some people claim that it has no roots in Kurdish culinary history, and hence is a misnomer. Oh, yes dear, there are similar types of food in the south, not known as “Kurdish borek”, but as katmer (qetmer in Kurdish); a version far superior than its impostor nouveau-Istanbul-Kurdish borek. Turks make it, Arabs make it, Zazas make it; in fact everyone in the region makes their own version of it.

Unlike katmer, which usually has clotted cream in it, the Kurdish borek has no fillers, just layers of pastry served with confectioners sugar atop. You cannot find it in the most casual of restaurants, because it is traditionally sold at street corners. It is the poor mans borek, just a step up from white rice with chickpeas, and the whorehouse fritters (another item that probably deserves a blog entry due to its name), again sold at street corners. For the majority of white-Turks -the popular moniker for the upper middle class secular population- the word Kurd bears meanings that resemble the ways “ghetto” is used in US. Naturally, an empty borek, an archaic form of food, deserves such a name in the eyes of the dominating elite. I bet most my friends from the private high school I graduated from would see the name fit, not historically or etymologically, but normatively, pertaining cultural inferiority. Things get even more complicated when we want to hear the take of the nationalist right. I’d rather not, but they speak anyway. For example, the Turkists would go in the opposite way and deny the existence of a concept like Kurdish borek. They’d rather die than use the word Kurdish, even the case is describing a piece of pastry. For them, there is no Kurdish borek, just “plain borek”. “How can it be?” as some radical nationalist in Eksi Sozluk (Turkey’s collaborative hypertext dictionary, encyclopedia and a fertile breeding ground for never-ending flame wars) would say: “Kurds have no culture, even their language is an ersatz one”

And then there is Laz borek, a specialty of the Laz people of the Black Sea. This is a sweet one as well, similar to the katmer, but this time, it is filled with custard. Like my obsession with custard donuts, I have a soft spot for this and I would marry any man, woman, drag king, drag queen, grandma, or perhaps a Republican (only if the borek is really good) if he/she/zhe would make some for me. Tatar borek, Bosnian borek and Albanian borek have their own intricacies (see I am getting too lazy to write the details), but perhaps the most ingenious ethnic labeling of borek is the Chinese borek, which entered the Turkish culinary lexicon in the early 90s. You guessed it, this is plain old egg roll. Name calling of boreks is a crazy game, it is as if all neighborhoods would like to have their own borek. Take for example, Sariyer borek and Karakoy borek, which get their names from respective districts in Istanbul where they are predominantly made and sold.

Categorization through fillings is equally complicated. The traditional ones are spinach, meat, cheese, and potato. The Aegeans like theirs with courgette, purslane, eggplant and lor (Turkish ricotta) while the central Anatolians who suffer hardy winters are partial to ones with dry goods: lentil-poppyseed and chickpea are favorites. In Thrace, people buffer their raki with pachanga borek made with pastrami and kasseri cheese. Nice pairing, a sommelier would say. Finally, there is the confusing su boregi, or the “water” borek, the most labor intensive of all kinds. No, it doesn’t have water as a filling; that would be silly, honey. See, the water is involved in the making. The pastry is rolled by hand, then sheets of pastry are parboiled before assembling the whole thing and baking it in the oven.

If this wasn’t enough categorization, perhaps you can define boreks by their shape. A kol (arm, branch) borek is shaped like a long thin log; a cigarette borek, as you might guess, is shaped like a cigar; rose borek is a round cinnamon roll type rollup; and talisman borek has a small triangular form. Then there is puf borek, which is a distant cousin of samosas and empanadas. When fried, it puffs up. Hence the name.

Borek, alongside with comparably labor intensive dolma, is a sign of traditional domesticity, care, hospitality and culinary competence. A good mom is the one who makes borek, as often as she could. A good host will serve borek to her quests with afternoon tea. Even my mom, who barely cooks anything edible, had made boreks once every other weekend when I was a kid. And she made them well. Because in reality, borek is not that hard to make unless you roll the pastry by hand. But it has the aura, a mystery that most comfort foods share. Like the matzo ball soup, the baked ziti and the dumpling, the borek becomes the metric of the good motherhood. In fact, the best moms are known to make their phyllos by hand; store brought phyllos are for “modern” and corrupted wifes. But I am neither a mom, nor a wife and rather corrupted; so I’d prefer get my hands on some phyllo dough and save time.

As I mentioned before digressing into the socio-politics of borek, the conventional store bought phyllo is unfit for my idea of comfort food. You need to add lots of fat to make it flaky, or else it gets brittle outside and sticky inside. Unlike spanakopita, which consists of a thick layer of spinach sandwiched between oily clusters of phyllo, traditional borek is multi-layered, akin to a sauceless lasagna. One layer phyllo is spread, one layer filling goes in; there is much more balance and stability. So if you wanted to use no. 2 phyllo, you need to use at least 2-3 layers stuck on top of each other, and provide some structure for the weight of the filling.

But there are alternatives. During my first week in the US a friend (then my newly made, later my best) started telling me about how one could make borek using flour tortillas. She was particularly excited about the fact that it tastes like rustic homemade borek; one that you make by rolling your own pastry; one that we never tasted at home since both our moms would never imagine rolling one. Yes, we talked about borek before most other things that you need to talk about when making friends; this is how things were between us. For the following years, we kept doing this, and gave each other 20 pounds of body fat as gifts.

Through my first year in grad school, I made a couple of dozen trays of borek for friends, visitors and classmates. It was my potluck dish. I used flour tortillas, they surprisingly tasted authentic to my clueless friends. Those who didn’t find it authentic had nothing better to eat anyway, they were too lazy to cook their own borek. No-one complained, no-one knew, or no-one attempted to make one better. I occasionally found my way into Devon Avenue and got the thick phyllo, but that was rare. When bored, I switched to thin phyllo, but always came back to a bag of good old Aztecs.

My interest wore off after a year, until the great borek backlash of this weekend, when I came home having no idea what to do with big bunch of kale. I was bored with kale, yet I kept buying it every week. Even the cashier recognized my patterns, he started recommending recipes. I didn’t want to make soup, I didn’t want to sautee it, and I definitely didn’t want to try that raw kale salad that the anemic cashier at Wholefoods kept talking about. “I am going to make whole wheat borek appropriate for my volatile insulin levels”, I wrote to one of my friends. “This time, I will use whole wheat tortillas”. And I did. It was my borek. I could name it.

Sabetaic Greko-Turk’s supposed spinach borek (wholesome diaspora remix)

Software

• 6 whole wheat flour tortillas (of course dear, you can make it with white tortillas but then please take the “wholesome” out of the name)
• 1/2 cup of feta (pick one: Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek, Serbian, Israeli, Persian, Romanian or even “fake” Danish feta)
• 1 bunch of kale (or any other green leafy vegetable)
• half a small onion
• 1 egg
• 1 cup milk
• 2 tablespoons of yogurt (Optional. Most people don’t use this, but it helps with the golden color.)
• 1/4 cup olive oil, and some more for sauteeing (like butter? fine)
• red pepper flakes, salt, pepper

Hardware

• an oven proof casserole or a tray and other standard stuff

This makes one rustic borek. The end product is heftier and thicker than the way it is usually made in most households, if you want, you can adjust the recipe using 4 tortillas, but this is the way I like it. It serves four-five normal people or a single person suffering borek withdrawal.

Heat the oven at 400 degrees. Wash the kale, cut the leaves away from the veiny central stalk. Throw away the stalks. Chop chop chop. Chop the onions as well. Sautee onions until translucent and then add kale. Cook 10-15 minutes until the kale becomes very dark and loses most of its moisture. Season with red pepper, salt and pepper. Set aside to cool.

Mix egg, milk, oil and yogurt well into a thick liquid.

Put one tortilla in the greased tray/casserole. Wet the tortilla generously with the milk mixture (3 of tablespoons at least). Layer 1/5 of the cold kale mixture, sprinkle 1/5 of the feta. Spread a little bit more of the milk mixture. You need to ration your mixture here, you will do this five more times. Put another tortilla on top of this, repeat until you run out of tortillas. Spread the last of the egg mixture on top and the sides, ensuring all periphers of tortillas touch and stick to each other. Bake for about 15-20 minutes or until the top gets golden. Let it sit for at least 10 minutes, so that you don’t burn your esophagus. Slice like a pizza, or cut into squares and enjoy! I would say fresh orange juice or lemonade will be perfect with this.