Karen Schewina
Since I arrived in Turkey, I have this nightmare: I open the fridge, which has turned into some strange kind of biotope for obnoxious organisms. The smell is breathtaking, and I can hardly identify the things I have put in after the last visit in the nearby supermarket, as everything is covered with a thick layer of mould.
I remember that entering a Turkish supermarket for the first time, passing the shelves, I felt lost. Not only because I didn’t know what to buy, but also because I was amazed with the big amounts of food, I was suddenly supposed to take home. I spent lots of time walking up and down, looking at the people instead, what they were choosing, in which tone they were talking to the cashier, how many plastic bags they were using to carry their new purchases. In my earlier stays abroad, I had already gained the experience that visiting a supermarket in a foreign country can be the first step to get to know a foreign culture: apart from the fact that it´s the perfect place to learn and practice vocabulary, you learn a lot about the new environment, you are finding yourself in.
I have to admit that I have never seen a 15-egg carton or a 10-liter flagon of fabric conditioner before, not speaking of a 1-liter shampoo bottle, which gives me trouble every time I want to hold it in one wet hand – the next time I will just fill it in the nice and handy 330 ml shampoo bottle I brought from Germany.
I concluded that nobody living on his or her own can afford to buy these big amounts of merchandise, so I assume that living in your own apartment in a dormitory or renting a single room from a landlord must be something unusual. As long as plastic bags are for free, instead of costing 25 cents like in Germany, people will use more of them than they actually need, not thinking about recycling, though I noticed that there are attempts to implement a basic recycling system in the supermarkets and even in Istiklal Caddesi. Additionally, I was missing the brown paper bags, I usually put my brown bread in and I miss the brown bread even more.
But even when Turkish students live together with relatives or friends, do they all eat the same kind of food? With my former roommates in Germany, I would buy dishwashing liquid or kitchen towels together, but we could never agree on buying the basic food supplies from our common till. Our eating habits and times didn’t match, the few times we were planning on cooking something together; it started and ended in chaos. It is just difficult to cook for seven people – the average number of heads in a Turkish living community, I assume – if one of them doesn´t like chickpeas, the other refuses to eat anything green or can´t stand the smell of garlic. Though we were living together back then, we ended up buying everything on our own, storing our food in labeled parts in the fridge and on the shelves, politely asking when we wanted to use something bought by somebody else.
This behavior is absolutely possible, considering the variety of frozen food offered in large display refrigerators, which take much more place in German supermarkets, as “convenience food” in general, which includes ready-made dressing, soups and last but not least instant noodles and potato puree for emergency cases. It seems that Turkish people are more willing to spend their time preparing their food, instead of buying cooked and peeled potatoes in the fridge or choosing from a large variety of ready-made pasta sauce, salads or pancakes and other little snacks – all of them available in single portions in Germany.
Even discount markets in Germany as “Aldi” or “Lidl” offer in addition, specials like the necessary ingredients for cooking Indian, Thai or Spanish food, which you can find as well in a normal supermarket – I considered myself lucky when I found at least coconut milk on the highest shelf in a middle-sized Turkish supermarket, hidden by some huge glasses of cooked tomatoes. There you would be also able to buy fresh cheese and different kinds of sausage, which are recently being produced in a “light” version. Buying exotic fruit like pineapple and mango throughout the year can be seen as another bad habit of German consumers. Some years ago I was shocked when I saw strawberries being offered in winter, wondering whether they had ever seen the sun.
The only thing German people would buy in big amounts is “Müsli”: it´s an exceptional case, and the packages actually contain more than 725 grams. Talking about these differences in consumer behavior, my Erasmus buddy comments grinningly that Turkish people store food for the 3rd world war. Thinking about the 3kg rice packet I encountered last week, I wasn’t sure whether I should starting laughing or not – in the end I didn´t.