[ I posted this to alt.support.food-allergies, alt.culture.turkish.travel, and rec.food.historic in 1998. (Message-ID: <3746@purr.demon.co.uk>). Minor changes September 2005. ] Holidaying with food restrictions (independent travel in Turkey, 1998) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin We (me and Marion) have just come back from a two-week holiday in Turkey. Both of us have intolerances to certain foods; Marion has a quite severe problem with wheat and alcohol, and some degree of intolerance to dairy products and eggs; I cannot tolerate egg at all, have a minor problem with wheat, and some sort of dose-related metabolic problem with tannins and anthocyanins (in tea and most red or purple fruits and vegetables, other than beetroot) that mimics arthritis or RSI. Since the Turkish diet is heavily wheat- based, and we hadn't tried working within these restrictions before (we hadn't diagnosed them all on our last trip four years ago), it wasn't quite obvious how we'd manage. In the end it worked out reasonably well. Maybe some of our experiences might help other people plan holidays around similar restrictions; much of it will apply to other relatively poor countries in southern Europe and the Middle East. We went there on a bucket-shop flight, taking a cheap seat-only deal on a plane mostly full of British package-holiday tourists. These planes are flying cattle trucks and no sort of individual dietary regime is going to fit the airline's budget. (Nor does any sort of individual preference fit the way these operators think; we got the in-flight video soundtrack blasted at us full volume all the way - it even got through the earplugs I wore on the way back - with a repertoire of lounge lizard jazz, the Spice Girls, the Teletubbies, and a muscle-and-loud-bangs action movie starring Americans with big jaws. The Teletubbies provided the greatest intellectual challenge). Nonetheless they fluked into providing half a meal we could eat. If we'd been vegetarians as well we could have eaten almost nothing. We don't prearrange anything; we had a vague plan to travel round the western Aegean region, but only settled on where to go first once we were on the plane. We'd flown into Dalaman airport before, so knew the way it worked; you get a taxi into the village, then a minibus into the nearest city (Fethiye one way, Mugla the other) or beyond them to one of the resort centres. We didn't fancy a resort packed with Western tourists, so we went to Mugla, a modern university town with a relatively small traditional core (old-style houses and a typical Turkish market). From there I planned a loop of bus journeys that took us about a thousand miles through a variety of different cities: Afyon (another middling-sized town with a much more traditional Islamic culture, wonderful urban architecture, and some strange ancient sites nearby), Bursa (with a splendid historical centre surrounded by explosive urban development and probably the most infernal example of how the automobile can turn paradise into a shithole this side of Los Angeles), Ayvalik (a sleepy seaside town mostly frequented by Turkish tourists from Istanbul and Izmir), Bergama (a small town with an immense ruined classical city towering over it), then back to Mugla and home. What this meant was that, while we went through a wide range of places, none of them was a Western oasis; we hardly ever encountered a menu translated into a Western language (and when we did we almost invariably went elsewhere). We never encountered other Westerners at meals except in hotels at breakfast. Nobody was pre-processing the information about what we were eating for us. Nor did we do more than look in the door of any of the few Western-style supermarkets. However, there were no unwelcome surprises, for three reasons: - I know enough Turkish to name pretty near any food, read all the fine print on any label, and ask the person selling the stuff what's in it; - Marion's a good enough cook to be able to make an intelligent guess at the contents of almost anything in a serving dish; - Turkish food is by far the most visually analyzable of any major cuisine. There are no tricky processes that make the primary ingredients unrecognizable, as is the case with French, Indian or Chinese food, and even more so with Anglo-American commercially packaged cuisine. The last is the most important. There are good dictionaries that cover food terminology (the Berlitz/ABC pocket Turkish dictionary has a particularly good section on food terms) and the language is easy to pronounce for most English speakers (the only sound that doesn't occur in English is the dotted-u vowel, and the only hard intonation pattern is the one for questions). The script is modified Roman and accordingly easy for an English speaker to handle. Food labelling on packages is not quantitative, but gives thorough lists of ingredients, and you don't need grammar to read that. There are enough Turkish cookbooks in English that it's easy to learn in advance what the major dishes are and what goes into them. So neither linguistic nor food- technology skills are essential. However, these sources don't tell you one rather important piece of food sociology. Wheat is something of a prestige food in Turkey, culturally labelled as an essential for adequate nutrition (much as milk is in the USA, or meat in Eastern Europe). What follows from that is that people who don't eat wheat are culturally defined as having something *wrong* with them, and that something is poverty. The alternative starch is rice; only the very poor eat a rice-based diet (basically vegetarian, with beans and chickpeas as the main protein source and meat eaten in only small quantities). This is reflected in public eating places, which are classified by the state inspectorate into three classes ("III. Sinif" the lowest, "I. Sinif" the highest); this is displayed in a price schedule on the wall. One indicator of a restaurant's class is the amount of fixed stainless- steel fittings and bolted-to-the-floor formica it contains; it almost seems like the restaurant classifiers operate entirely by readings from a light meter and a magnetic compass. But there is a difference in what's served. The poorest places will have pure rice as the basic starch (they will still provide bread as a side dish, but less of it); the "better" ones will serve "pilav" instead, which is a mixture of rice and rice-grain-sized bits of pasta. Pilav is next to impossible to sort into its components once it's in front of you, and a place that serves it will never have rice available. So, if you have a wheat problem, you're better off going to the very cheapest back-alley eating places, frequented mostly by working-class Turks. There'll be less choice at any individual third-class restaurant, but they all do different things depending on what part of the country the owner comes from (this is often reflected in the restaurant's name), so overall you end up with the same range of options as at the classier joints. Cheap restaurants are smaller, carry less food at any one time, and can't afford to cook anything they won't sell, so they run out of things at random times in the evening and generally close earlier than the posher places; also, small amounts of leftover hot food on a large serving dish tend to get rather sad and dried-up, so it's a good idea to eat early. {Addendum 2005: the formal classification system seems to have disappeared, but the different types of restaurant are still there]. Some more allergy-related tips: - At least in summer and autumn, boiled or roasted corncobs are a common street food, but are only sold at times and places when there are going to be *lots* of people about, like bus stations at rush hour, so don't count on using them as a wheat alternative at evening mealtime. - Turkish delight (lokum) is wheat-free (the main ingredient is cornstarch). However, the white varieties contain cream, and enough kinds contain nuts that people with nut allergies should give any Turkish sweet shop a very wide berth. There are two kinds of sweet shop; one ("pastane") specializes in sweet wheat pastry products like baklava, the other ("sekerleme") sells lokum, marzipan, candied nuts and similar stuff. - Turkish summer breakfasts have something from each major allergenic food category: bread, feta cheese, butter, eggs, tomatoes, tea. Few people are allergic to the remaining items (olives, honey, or jam), though this makes for a weird start to the day. Still, food you can eat won't be far away. In winter, breakfast is soup made from either lentils (mercimek), bony meat scraps (kelle/paca), or tripe (iskembe); but you can usually find a soup place all year round. - Turkish sausages (sucuk) are generally wheat-free and clearly labelled with their ingredients. They have a slightly gluey texture as a result of their composition, which may be a bit surprising for someone used to the bounce of Western salami, but they taste fine. - Lahmacun may look like pizza but doesn't contain cheese. You can also get another cheese-free pizza-like food in most towns: "kiymali pide", freshly-baked flat yeasted bread with a meat/vegetable sauce. I prefer the cheese version, "peynirli pide". The problem with places that serve pide ("pide salonu") is that they don't offer any reasonably filling wheat-free alternative, so if you're eating with someone who can't tolerate wheat they'll just have to sit and watch. - There's always a fruit and vegetable market somewhere nearby. - Dried-foods (kuruyemis) shops and stalls will invariably have many nut and peanut products inside; people with severe allergies to these should be careful. These tend to be located near fruit and vegetable markets. - Oils and fats used in cooking: sunflower (aycicek), olive (zeytin), and butter (tereyag) Maize (misir) oil is used but not in the same amounts. Turkey only imports tiny amounts of food, and all these are produced locally in huge quantities. Peanuts are grown locally but seem not to be used for oil or as a covert ingredient in processed foods. Because the EU blocks Turkish food-oil exports, there are oceans of domestic product available and no economic incentive to cut corners by using cheap alternatives. Rapeseed (canola) and soya seem to be nonexistent, and accordingly so are mixed "vegetable" oils. Butter can get into a lot of cooked dishes; the oils used in cooking are not always easily discoverable, though many places advertise that they cook in butter as a selling point. - Vegetarians are going to have to eat a lot of cheese, and vegans are going to find it hard to get adequate protein. Beans are not a major restaurant food; only the very poor eat them as a primary protein source and the poor don't eat out. - Sheep and goat cheeses are widely available; I didn't look for these specifically so didn't notice exactly which was which. Not all come in labelled packaging (one kind is "tulum" or "bagpipe" cheese, and animal stomachs don't run through litho-offset machines easily) but the shopkeeper will always know. - Dairy-free sorbets are often available at ice-cream (dondurma) stalls, but it is not always easy to identify which they are. Visne (morello cherry) and karadut (black mulberry) flavours seems always to be milk-free; limon (lemon) is anybody's guess, and may have artificial ingredients. Anything in a Western- style package should be treated as extremely suspect, since it will always be made by a subsidiary of a British or American firm; assume it's full of the usual Western chemical garbage unless you can read the label (as of writing, the British-owned "Algida" brand of visne sorbet is OK and dairy-free, but I'd read the label every time). Ice cream sellers don't wash their scoops carefully, so any flavour might contain small amounts of any other. As far as I can tell, peanut is only found in the Western-formulated ice creams and not in those scooped out from big tins, but some places offer to dip your cone in crushed nuts. - Soft drinks are a chaotic assortment. There are old traditional drinks still widely available which are made from only a few pure ingredients; visne (sour cherry juice with added sugar and water), seftali (peach juice acidified with vinegar), ayran (yogurt with salt and water), boza (lightly fermented bulghur wheat or millet), sira (lightly fermented grape juice), limon (lemon, sugar and citric acid) and pure squeezed-on-the-spot citrus juices. However, the creeping Coca-colonization of Turkey (a vicious process in which the transnational soft-drink companies have been responsible for a good many murders in their fight for territory) has meant that an increasing share of the market has been captured by imitations of these with artificial flavours and colours, and tinned versions produced by Western corporations which may use traditional recipes now but certainly won't for much longer if they can get away with it. Even Turkey's leading brand of bottled water (Hayat) is now owned by a Western company (Danone). Turkish coffee still holds its own against instant, but the power of adverts is such that the baby- killer Nestle corporation's product actually sells for twice as much per cup as the real thing across the country, and is the first option any Westerner will usually be offered. Just say no. Tea (a useful source of dietary fluorine) is still the national drink, and is always pure; I suspect Western colas are reducing its use a bit (their phosphoric acid content weakening teeth and bone to a greater degree than tea strengthens them). "Apple tea" is almost invariably chemical crap and has been for years (there's a natural version but you will never be offered that in a restaurant or cafe). If you have an allergy to colours or preservatives don't touch it. Bottled water may come in either glass or PET bottles; if you're sensitive to plasticizers you can usually find it packed in glass. Tap water is sometimes high in chlorine; if that's okay for you, most of it won't do you any harm. [Addendum 2005: that is not true in Urfa and Diyarbakir, see "travels ith an Electronic Bagpipe" on my homepage]. Bottled soda water and "gazoz" (uncoloured fruit-flavoured and sweetened fizzy water) are available everywhere and should be OK for most folks with food-dye allergies (check for benzoate preservatives in gazoz if that matters). The Turkish-made versions of cola and fizzy orange drink that predated the transnationals' invasion have all but gone; they were next to indistinguishable from the globalized products, the only reason for the shift was advertising and marketing dirty tricks. - Except for "light" Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, aspartame seems not to be used much, if at all, thank god. Neither is any other artificial sweetener; no sugar alternative will generally be provided for tea and coffee (you can get sweeteners from pharmacies). Sugar-sweetened colas are still more generally available than aspartame ones, unlike the situation in Britain, and if you ask for cola in a cafe you'll get the sugared version. - I suspect that Turkish beer is right up there in the same league as American stuff in its chemical content. None of it is brewed by traditional artisanal processes. They could probably sell it to fundamentalist Muslims just by relabelling it as embalming fluid. Some Turkish wine is very much better, but I am not enough of a wine buff to name names (particularly since red wine has sufficient anthocyanins to leave me in pain for days). Alcohol tends to go along with affluence, which means high-wheat foods with Western chemical additives. This is even more the case with spirits, though most Turkish men will drink raki (aniseed-flavoured distilled alcohol diluted with water to look milky) on special occasions. I doubt if anyone but portable phone users ever drink Western spirits. [2005: almost everyone now has a mobile phone so that comparison is out. Read "rich and Westernized", anyway]. Alcohol use is no more general than it used to be; you can find it pretty much anywhere if you want, but the culture keeps its use in moderation. (Tourists in resorts are the major exception. Some British people's idea of a holiday is to stay sloshed from the outbound duty-free to the inbound passport control, with only sunburn, sand in their knickers and a vague memory of dancing on the beach to remind them they've been abroad; and the Turks are happy to oblige them). - Western colas may have stomped all over the better traditional alternatives, but McDonalds doesn't seem to be going anywhere and neither are the other Western burger chains. There are only a few of these shitty joints in the busiest parts of the largest cities. [2005: that's still the case]. - Fried fish (trout, sardines) is usually coated with a thin wheat- based batter, even when you can't see it. (An exception is the grilled mackerel you get on the quayside in Istanbul, but this is always sold in bread anyway). This may or may not be a problem for you; it wasn't for us. Fish is only sold and cooked by specialist places that say they're doing it, so you will never encounter it unknowingly as a contaminant. The same goes for shellfish. - For people with skin contact allergies: Turkey is a good place to get pure cotton clothing, particularly underwear. Unbleached cotton fabric is quite widely available (e.g. the open-weave stuff used for the towels in Turkish baths). - If you need mint-free tooth-cleaning products, try an Islamic bookstall or bookshop (recognizable by the number of titles with Arabic script or pseudo-Arabic cover designs, and titles with the word "Namaz"). Really. They often sell chewing twigs (about 15cm long, 1cm thick) that do the same job as toothpaste, and will be pleased to help. The plant is "miswak" - I can't use it as I don't have enough teeth left to chew it. Probably the twigs soften once you've got started on them. I could tell they taste pleasant. There's a strong association between religiosity and use of herbal medicine in general. Most towns have a herbalist/spice dealer (baharatci). Unfortunately herbal terminology is way beyond the comprehension of dictionary compilers. I bought a Turkish herbal when I was there; sometime I'll use it to make up a glossary and add the botanical details from it to the economic-plant relationships file on my website. - Turkish salads are heavily based on nightshades (tomatoes, sweet peppers, chili peppers). But they're made on the spot from basic ingredients, so can get the cook to leave these out if you have to. Some stews are based on aubergine/eggplant ("patlican") - if you have trouble with this you most likely already know how to tell dark squidgy substances apart, but the cook can tell you anyway. Chilis and tomatoes are very difficult to avoid in stewed dishes; nightshade intolerance must be the hardest one to cope with when eating out in Turkey. - I'm not sure how much onion and garlic is used in the homogeneous foods like kebabs and stewed dishes. I eat so much of both that I don't always notice them. Onion often occurs in salad, but in chunks you can pick out, or you can ask the cook to omit it. - Legumes are a common food but always remain visually identifiable. Soya is not used for anything, as far as I can tell. - People with allergies to pets should be okay. Dogs are quite rare; cats are common in city centres, but mostly keep to themselves (the better-fed ones have managed to get themselves adopted by a local butcher, but still never go into the shop, just standing at the door to remind the proprietor it's dinnertime); small birds are the commonest indoor pet in people's homes. Chickens run in the streets in quieter areas but aren't going to leap up to cuddle you. Horses and donkeys are still often used outside the busiest urban centres. - The good news for nightshade-allergic people and asthmatics is that there has been an *extraordinarily* dramatic drop in public smoking (and, I think, in smoking in general). The country used to be one huge ashtray; in four years it has gone to being much more smoke- free than anywhere in Britain. Cigarette advertising has vanished. I have no idea how they've done this (some initiative from the Islamist movement?) but I wish we could do it here. I don't know why this hasn't made world headlines; whatever they did must be one of the most effective public health campaigns of all time. - But auto fumes are *far* worse everywhere than a few years ago. The centre of Bursa smells like its citizens all joined the Solar Temple and are attempting the world's first mass suicide by car exhaust. Small towns are better, but you can get caught anytime in a small alley by some nutcase in an oversized tin can gunning his engine for no apparent purpose other than to disappear in a cloud of blue smoke. While their riders are not such out-and-out arseholes as the average motorist, 50cc motor scooters are an even more efficient method of converting oil into lung damage and get into places even a horse couldn't. (I saw a mosque washing stall in Bursa that had a sign saying "don't wash your car or scooter here" - next time I'm there they'll probably need another sign to tell the same folks to keep their motors outside when praying). - While we were there, new regulations came into force requiring bread to be wrapped. This is going to have mainly negative health effects; surface dirt on bread is not a significant source of illness, but letting it fester all day in polythene instead of getting it fresh from the oven encourages mould growth. - Turkish pharmacies are making one *hell* of a push to sell Western- manufactured infant formula, Nutricia being the leading pusher. For every single pharmacy, it's the dominant item in the window display, with absolutely no health warnings about the consequences of not breastfeeding. This presumably means, as well as overt child malnutrition and wholesale ripping-off of people who are being duped into buying shit they can't afford, that Turkey is in for a Western-scale epidemic of food allergy a few years down the line from kids getting their immune systems fucked up in infancy. All the above is aimed at people eating outside the home. If you're staying with friends or have access to cooking facilities, obviously everything gets much easier. While this all makes for a mixed situation, I suspect that coping with a similar range of problems at an all-meals-provided resort for Western tourists, like those at Bodrum, Altinkum and Marmaris, would be impossible. The Turkish diet, even the subset of it served up in public eating places, remains varied enough that you can omit large chunks of it and still get a good nutritional balance; leave what we can't tolerate out of a British-oriented hotel-food regimen and we'd be edging beri-beri. Independent travel is the way to go if you have any sort of food intolerance. Incidentally, a wonderful book with many insightful things to say about the current Westernization of Turkey is Orhan Pamuk's "The New Life", recently published in English translation by Faber & Faber; though reading it while travelling from one end of the country to the other by bus, as I was doing, is not for the faint-hearted. Both my English and Turkish copies are stuffed with bus tickets as bookmarks, which is rather like keeping your eye test results in a copy of "King Lear", "Oedipus", or "Samson Agonistes". -------- Jack Campin's Home Page: http://www.campin.me.uk --------