Thursday, May 8, 2008

Turkish Food I Don't Like

In the pursuit of still having not much to say, I've settled on the topic of Turkish food. I decided to talk about the food I dislike not because I'm in a slag-off-Turkey mood, but because I like pretty much all the Turkish food I've ever had. To list and describe the food I do like would take too long.

Turks tend to believe that their food is famous the world over as the best food in the world. Periodically, a newspaper makes a claim to this end. On this I have to disagree. I still think Italian is the best, but that's neither here nor there. One thing that happens to me here is that, even though I really like Turkish food, I get really tired of Turkish food all the time. Americans are spoiled this way, in that we can have pretty good food from almost anyplace in the world, often only a phone call away. A few years ago, I remember getting really excited when the McDonald's near us started delivering, because it presented a new way to be lazy. I'm not even a big fan of McDonald's, but that's another thing that happens here-- food like McDonald's or Domino's that tastes pretty much exactly the same no matter where you go starts to be like home-food or comfort food. I ate way more double cheeseburgers than I'm comfortable with in the last trimester of my pregnancy mostly because I was homesick. Then I'd go home and guiltily eat a lot of fruit and raw vegetables to make up for it.

Another note on Turkish food is that there are some foods here that Americans know as Greek food. Baklava and dolmas come to mind offhand. Obviously this is because of a shared cultural history and border and population shifting, and it's probably because we have a lot more Greeks with restaurants in America than Turks that the Greeks have claimed these foods in our minds. But any Turk will adamantly and angrily tell you that every food you ever thought was invented in another country is, in fact, Turkish (and I'll certainly give them dolmas, because dolmak and doldurmak are both Turkish verbs about stuffing and filling). I'm sure the Greeks are just as adamant.

And now, to the list of foods I don't like:

1) İşkembe: This has to be number one because it's one of the most disgusting things I've ever eaten. It's tripe soup. Now, that in itself I don't hold against it, though I'm not a big fan of offal in general. I've had kokoreç (fried, spiced tripe) and it was all right, though the smell is nasty and I wouldn't go out of my way to have more. I've even had the bits of sheep's head on a platter (brain, cheek, and tongue) in more than a few drunken hazes, and while I wouldn't call it yummy (though the cheeks were pretty good), it also wasn't as bad as it sounds. But işkembe is foul. It's like they just boiled the tripe in milky water and served it up. You're supposed to mitigate this boiled tripe taste by loading the soup with garlic, vinegar, salt, and other spices, but that barely helps because the original tripe taste remains, and lingers for another 24 hours in your burps. There is a nice habit here of eating soup (or sheep's head or sheep's head soup) after a night out drinking, so you can always find a 24-hour soup place. I was brave once about the işkembe, but after that, I'll stick with lentil soup. Soup after drinking is sensible. Challenging your friends about how many you can eat of the wickedly hot peppers at the soup place is less sensible, but fun. Being hungover burping garlicky tripe taste is not at all sensible. I don't think it's a coincidence that işkembe and işkence (torture) sound so similar.

2) İğde: Apparently, this fruit is called oleaster in English, which wasn't very helpful for me (though I notice Wikipedia also points out it doesn't taste very good). This is one of the foods in Turkey that falls into the powdery, tasteless family. About the size of an almond, it has a rubbery, papery skin that's hard to chew, with a fuzzy, powdery inside that sucks all the moisture from your mouth, is really hard to get out of there, and has virtually no taste. Perhaps it's one of those things that is sublime fresh from the tree, but the one I ate took two hours before all its traces were gone from my tongue, and it felt kind of itchy, sort of like if you scraped a spoonful of fuzz from a peach and ate it. Other members of the powdery tasteless family include leblebi and another hard, dry, white pea-like thing whose name I don't know. These last two are like the beer nuts of Turkey, in that they're served in bars in small dishes. Leblebi are roasted chick peas. All the moisture and taste have been roasted out of them, and the powder quickly turns to a sticky paste in your mouth that's hard to swallow, even with beer. Many Turks affectionately recall eating sweetened leblebi powder as kids, and frankly, it makes me thankful we had Fun Dip and Pixie Sticks. As for the white pea-like thing, it's so hard it hurts to chew, and it also tastes like nothing. In my mind, leblebi and the pea-like thing are best used as tiny projectiles rather than food.

3) Dut: Mulberries. I always thought mulberries were an imaginary fruit only there for the monkey to chase the weasel around in the song. It turns out they're real. They look like albino blackberries. I don't find them at all exciting. While they're not quite powdery and tasteless, they're not as juicy as they look and the taste is hard to locate. On the subject of food I'd only heard of but never seen before coming to Turkey, purslane falls into this category. I'd read about purslane before, but I'd never seen it. It's pretty good, served here in a nice appetizer of garlic yogurt. I once tried to make a purslane soup recipe (it's similar to cress) from Joy of Cooking, but it failed dismally. I did learn, however, from Joy of Cooking, that purslane was Ghandi's favorite food.

4) Amerikan salatası: I think a translation isn't necessary. This is an appetizer made of cooked-to-death peas, carrots, and potatoes mixed with mayonnaise. There could be some lemon juice in there. That's it. Yuck. Most Turks don't believe me when I tell them we have no such salad in America, at least not that I've ever seen, and America is home to some pretty gross salads, like those involving any combination of Jell-O, marshmallows, and pineapple. I've heard that Amerikan salatası used to be called Russian salad, but they changed the name during the Cold War, and unlike Freedom Fries, this political re-naming stuck. My friend who did her Peace Corps stint in Russia confirmed that this salad can be bought by the vat there, so it's probably true that this salad was originally Russian.

5) Starches: One thing that's great about a Turkish meal, in my opinion, is that no one seems too concerned about having four different kinds of meat in one sitting. Fine with me. Great even. Americans should take heed and just go ahead and do this, because probably most of us secretly want to anyway. Another Turkish habit I'm not keen on though, is having three different starches in one meal. One starch is okay. Even two starches work if one of them is bread and the bread is good. After that it gets silly, with bread on the table, plus fries and rice on your plate. Sometimes it's even fries, rice, and mashed potatoes. After I've admitted my love of the meat thing, I won't be hypocritical and claim my issue with starches is about health-- it isn't. I recognize it's cultural, and just as I used to think it was 'wrong' to have chicken, beef, and lamb in one sitting, I think it's 'wrong' to have all the starch. I just like meat better than rice and bread. And as for bread, the baguette kind you get here is lame. Wonder Bread tastes better. It's like Kleenex. I'm not sure why they adopted this foreign kind of bread when the various traditional pides are great. And I'll never get how one person can eat an entire baguette of this Kleenex bread at every meal. People are always on my case that I don't eat tons of bread, especially when I was pregnant, but I still refuse to accept that plain white bread is anything other than a stomach-filler and certainly not a source of nourishment.

6) Kuru fasuliye: Literally, this means dried beans, but when referring to a prepared food, people are talking about an unpleasant concoction of white beans in oily red water with bits of meat. A similar dish can be made with chick peas (nohut), which isn't good either. Kuru fasuliye is one of those dishes people get really excited about, but which aren't the least bit exciting.

7) Falım: This is a brand of chewing gum BE loves. Falım means 'my fortune,' and each piece of gum has your fortune written on the wrapper. The gum is hard, only slightly sweet, and would taste like it's right out of the rubber tree if not for its faint flavor of something like spumoni. I figure if I want hard gum with no taste, I might as well chew something I find under the seat on the bus, though admittedly that gum doesn't have my fortune on the wrapper.

8) Zeytinyağlı mezeler: Zeytinyağı is 'olive oil,' and mezeler is 'appetizers.' Specifically, this refers to a family of appetizers involving a vegetable that has been cooked so much it's pretty much a mushy, gray cellulose ghost of its former self, which is then served in olive oil and lemon. No matter what the vegetable originally was, it turns out tasting like olive oil and lemon. Not terrible, but not thrilling either, and certainly not worth having more than one at your table because they all taste the same.

9) Ayran: A drink made of water, yogurt, and salt. Okay, I've actually never tried ayran because it looks like milk and I have an issue with milk. I hate milk so much I gag from the smell of it and can make myself nauseous if I think about it for too long. I get the willies having milk on my skin. I don't like drinking out of a glass I know had milk in it once. I don't like touching a cold glass of milk with condensation on the outside caused by milk. And I definitely will not drink anything that has the word 'milk' in its name or that looks anything like milk. Ayran looks just like milk. And it sounds gross anyway.

And that's it. Those are all the foods in Turkey I don't like. I told BE the subject of this post when I asked him how to spell 'iğde.' Naturally, he was immediately indignant that I don't think all Turkish food is the best food in the world, but he felt a little better when I told him I like pretty much every other Turkish food I've had besides these. But each food I've chosen here is near and dear to his heart, and he clucked and gasped in disbelief at me as I listed each one, and then took it all a little personally. That's a funny thing, how much people absolutely love these foods and get really excited about them, even though they're short on taste or unpleasant in texture or downright nauseating like işkembe.

I know I've said negative things about some of the more beloved and sacrosanct Turkish foods. I hope no one finds this post too upsetting. Turks have a way of getting overly upset about surprising things, so fingers crossed I don't find myself getting busted for insulting Turkishness or some such nonsense.

But that's another topic altogether.

29 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with you about most of the foods you listed, particularly the işkembe. My husband's Mum cooked it for us and all the family and I tried a bit but absoletly hated it, and I eat pretty much everything put in front of me. She wasn't too insulted but luckily we haven't been given it again since.

I also have an issue with starches, oh so many. Personally I don't think there's any nutritional value in that white bread and rice, pasta, floury things like borek etc are just energy and don't have any other nutritional value. Also the incredibly sweet desserts like baklava etc - to me they all taste of sugar and water so aren't that impressive. Also those pudding recipes contain loads of flour and can be a bit glutinous. turkish food is great, but nutritionally I doubt whether cooking the hell out of everything is the best thing to do.

Do keep writing even if it's about random things! I'd love to hear your thoughts on 301 by the way.

Vicky

Anonymous said...

Yes I agree with you, especially about the weird fruits. I so actually like 'American' salad (or Russian salad as it is known elsewhere. The Spanish do it for tapas too. The problem here is the mayonnaise is very low quality.

I like kuru fasuliye if I cook it myself - but fail to understand the excitement it causes. Most Turkish food is acceptable and some is very delicious.

It is obvious that most of it has developed in order to fill up large families on little money. Hence the popularity of soups, borek and poca (lots of dough, little flavouring, dolma etc.

Anonymous said...

Whoops some typos in the above comment - should read 'I do actually like'. I was also sure I closed brackets. Apologies for lowering the standards on your otherwise very literate blog!

Stranger said...

301 is a post I'm fomenting. I can't find much information about its previous incarnations though, so I'm trying to think of a way to go about it without being very knowledgable.

I'm with you on the sweets, Vicky, though I can't actually say I don't like them. I'm sort of neutral. Some of the puddings are okay, but most are merely tolerable. And yeah, the syrup sweets... I eat them but I don't love them. My mom makes baklava sometimes using honey and that's way better. Another thing I don't care for are the bakery cakes here. They're beautiful to look at, but don't live up to their promise-- they're all sort of sugary and bland. But again, that's a Turkish attempt at a foreign food which usually falls short anyway.

I don't get the overcooking thing either. My MIL was appalled that I eat raw spinach in salads, and BE realized he liked cooked vegetables the first time I made them crunchy. But BE goes apeshit if there's even the slightest hint of pink in his meat. It turns his stomach when I eat mine rare, and he is convinced that I eat chicken rare as well. He always asks me if it's done, and won't eat it until he's carefully picked through it all.

I'll bet American salad is okay if the vegetables aren't mush and the mayonnaise is good. I learned to make the mayonnaise tolerable by adding a bit of balsamic vinegar to it. Balsamic is now find-able in Istanbul.

No apologies for typos! I read over my posts several times, and I still find typos after I've put them up...

Anonymous said...

Hmm. 'Russian Salad' used to be called 'Russian Salad' here too. The name got changed during the early 70's. I don't know if it was simply the 'bufe' owners deciding to play it safe by not labeling anything 'red' or if the state was involved in it somehow. I'm suprised nobody is filling you guys in on stuff like this. The political polarization here wasn't always along the axis you observe today, and it was far worse during the cold war. A considerable legacy of that period still lives on (the May Day thing is one obvious recent example).

Anonymous said...

Hmpf. It turns out you DO know it was renamed! Grr. Why didn't I see it on the first read? Perhaps it has something to do with sacrilage you committed against iskembe making me careless. Sorry about that.

Stranger said...

And I'm sorry for my careless assault of işkembe, that Most Holy and Perfect of Soups. Every time I tell my husband it's one of the grossest things I've ever eaten, he makes a noise like he's been stabbed.

I find it interesting that the foods I genuinely dislike are ones that are so near and dear to most Turkish hearts. I think the only way I could make it worse would be to say I don't like İskender kebab (which I DO like).

Looking back on the post, the sentence about the name-change WAS less than clear because I refer to it as 'Amerikan salatası' then 'Russian salad' in the same sentence. This was because I wasn't sure if it was called 'Rusya salatası' or 'Rusyalı salatası' (I'm pretty sure it's the first? The second would be salad made of Russians, wouldn't it?) and I was too lazy to check.

I think the name change is kind of funny. The whole May Day thing, however, was not funny, especially this year. Last year was a little bit funny, when the demonstrations spilled into the Gypsy neighborhood in Dolapdere and the Gypsies just roundly beat everyone off regardless of which side they were on. I don't know why, but it cracks me up when the Gypsies go crazy.

Anonymous said...

Actually it is called 'Rus Salatasi.' My sister and I still call it that partly because our mom used to, and partly because the stuff you buy is so inferior to what she'd make that it ought to be called something else anyway (no no I don't mean it that way).

Many Turks do in fact dislike dishes based on sakatat, it is just that zealots are very loud. Iskender is definitely more uniformly popular.

Were you here when the Gypsies could still walk around in the city with their belly dancing bears? I think they banned it (and enforced the ban) a while ago, but I am unsure when exactly.

Stranger said...

I find many of the sakatat haters still like işkembe and kokoreç. For awhile, the only huge disadvantage of joining the EU anyone talked about was that they would ban kokoreç.

I've never seen dancing bears here! It's a good ban, and a good one to enforce. I saw some in Austria and they were pretty depressing...

Kataroma said...

Well, let me tell you that living in Italy I can get awfully sick of Italian food too. The first few years I was here I had these awful cravings for Thai food, Mexican or even what I now realise is Turkish food - dolmas and baklava! I also could not eat the amount of pasta people eat here. It's refined white flour people - eating it twice a day is not good for you.

Luckily, we do have a good Pakistani restaurant around the corner (extremely exotic here!) and there's a great Ethiopian place about a 20 minute walk away so I can occasionally fulfil those spicy food cravings - but I'd kill for a decent Thai meal right now!

My least favourite Italian foods:

-fried scamorza (a type of cheese) - bleugh - greasy fried, rubbery cheese. Not really my cup of tea.
-Tuscan bread - bread with no salt. Completely tasteless.
-Italian breakfasts - they usually have hard, dry biscuits (fette biscottati) with a sugary espresso or cappuccino. Sometimes they have rather stale, sugary cornetti (ie like the French croissant but with much more sugar and less taste). Not healthy and not yummy.
-gnocchi - here in Rome they're usually overcooked and gluey.
-polenta - big slab of tasteless cornmeal. LUcky I don't live in the North where they eat it all the time.
-meat here - unfortunately it's very expensive and generally of bad quality unless you pay bucketloads of euros.

Stranger said...

*dribble*

Kataroma, you're making me hungry!! And I just had one of those multiple meat kinds of meals.

What I wouldn't do for a slice of Tuscan bread...

But what it really means, I think, is be careful what you wish for. I lived in Italy for only about 6 weeks, and though I was in food heaven, I admit I was starting to crave other things...

Gilbert said...

Iskembe and kokorec I agree are not fit for human consumption. My MIL went to all the effort of buying the freshest tripe from the best butcher and cleaning it as much as possible and cooking it herself to convince me it was wonderful. It didn't work. You just cannot get rid of the underlying smell of uncleaned-public-toilet-in-the-summer. I beg to differ about the kuru fasulye and the white bread - I love them both, washed down with a pot of ayran.

Let me add a couple of my own to the mix. Firstly, kabak tatlisi (pumpkin stewed in syrup). I have a sweet tooth and I like a dessert to round off a meal, but this is an abomination. It has the taste and consistency of furniture polish. Mind you it could just be that I don't have the pumpkin-appreciation gene. An American friend of mine invited us over one year for Thanksgiving, and she had baked a pumpkin pie. I was eager to try it as all my American friends had raved about it. I was singularly non-plussed. I commented that the taste of cinnamon was nice but why bother with pumpkin if you had apple available? The texture would be much improved. My friend laughed, and is still my friend.

My other pet hates are not prepared foods but two fruits which Turks go crazy about: quince and erik (green plums).
A quince has all the tender loving succulency of chipboard, and is sour with it. All my in-laws and my immediate family (including my sons) love it; I refer to it as 'tahta meyvesi' (wood fruit). Eriks are hard, green and sour and Turks dip them in salt. They serve them as dessert in our school canteen, which given the complete lack of sweetness I find unacceptable (see comment at the beginning). I bought some eriks the other day for my wife, who likes them. She complained that the ones I had got were too small so didn't taste nice! The expression on my face meant something like '... ?'

The really irksome thing is that these fruit appear in consecutive seasons. We have just finished quince season (hooray) but we are now into erik season (boo).

Anonymous said...

It`s true that unseasoned Iskembe tastes horrible, but vinegar, garlic sauce and hot pepper turn it to a very delicious thing.

Stranger said...

Gilbert, I'm right with you on the kabak tatlısı. I had it once where it was tolerable, but most the time it turns my stomach. And I like pumpkin pie. There's just something amiss with the kabak tatlısı. And it's one of those things MIL is always giving us (we both go 'No thanks,' but she goes, 'Oh, no this is a new recipe, it's different!' and gives it to us un a Tupperware to take home). Even the baby spits it out. I also don't much care for un helvası. Flour and sugar syrup. Who comes up with this? I'm with you on the ayva and erik too. Green plums are for throwing and ayva is another one of those bitter foods that sucks all the moisture from your mouth. I just didn't include them on the list because I disliked them before coming here.

Osmancan, you should be happy I don't like işkembe even with all the stuff in it because it means more işkembe for you!

Anonymous said...

You like chocolate-banana MILKshakes.

Stranger said...

Indeed I do like chocolate banana milkshakes.

But I don't like vanilla milkshakes because they look like MILK.

sandyhoney said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
sandyhoney said...

I agree with most of what you say - but I do like the white bread and fusuliye... I always thought the kocorec smelled good, but I never tried it.

My MIL makes killer desserts, though, some kind of coconut pie. When she found out I liked it, she couldn't stop piling it onto my plate... I hadn't seen that dessert elsewhere so I assumed that it is one of her inventions.

Stranger said...

Kokoreç smells nice from a distance but from close up there's something off about it. I learned this the hard way once while waiting to meet a friend at that ring of restaurants near Burger King in Taksim. Right behind me, they threw a fresh load of kokoreç on the griddle which at first was okay, but as the steam enveloped me it got nasty. And nastier. And then I kind of smelled like kokoreç for the rest of the evening.

Anonymous said...

I have just discovered we have a mulberry bush (actually large tree) in our garden. The mulberries are only albino before they are ripe, they turn black like blackberries and are quite palatable.

Anonymous said...

sorry u married the wrong guy who takes you to places where mezes are overly cooked and you are forced to eat all kinds of starches at one time...that's bad but not everyone shares the same eating habbits...it depends which kind of a family you live with... don't get me wrong i'm not mad or anything but yet i hate generalizations

Stranger said...

Rebecca, I saw some red mulberries at the market last week and they looked nice! Now I can't figure out why they sell the unripe ones. Maybe it's along the lines of green plums-- not for me.

Anonymous, believe it or not, I'm capable of going to and choosing restaurants with or without my husband. But you wouldn't know about things like that.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'generalizations' when all I refer to are matters of taste. I didn't even generalize about all mezes, just the zeytinyağlı ones. This is the time of year when both celery root and artichoke are available in zeytinyağlı form, and though they're quite different vegetables in texture and taste, they're virtually indistinguishable as a mushy, grey zeytinyağlı meze. I feel sorry for the vegetables.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not mad or anything but I suggest you read more carefully before commenting.

Anonymous said...

i saw your web site information about turkish food i respect you maybe you dont like some kind of turkish food maybe all !!!but could you tell me how many kind of turkish food do you know ??and cold you give me inform about osmanli otoman kitchen=turkish kitchen .thanks if anyone want to ask me something or speak or discus my email mustafakorukus at hotmail.com i will wait any guestion or answer of mine !!!

Unknown said...

I wonder what kind of an impressions you would have of food of the Aegean region. Istanbul is a hodge podge of food from all over, some good quality, some bad, but in the Aegean region I believe we have a smaller, yet more refined and healthy cuisine going on. This can be said of many different parts of the country too. The authentic refined cuisines of small towns or rural areas tend to usually trump the rich but arguably bland and unauthentic dishes invented within the urban cuisines of the big cities. I have always been fond of village restaurants in seaside villages in the Aegean region myself where you can sample a good variety of local greens and produce and fresh seafood. Other snacks such as gozleme and bazlama are to die for too, the same they make em there.

Stranger said...

Forgive me if this seems snooty Anonymous, but I think you've made a really common grammar mistake with defining and non-defining adjective clauses. When I wrote "Turkish Food I Don't Like" it means "I like pretty much all Turkish food except for these few things." If I had written "Turkish Food, Which I Don't Like" it would mean "I don't like any Turkish food."

Anyway, it'll give me a cool example to use next time I have to teach adjective clauses.

Also, I wish more restaurants had authentic Ottoman food. I had it once, and it was fantastic, but I've never been able to find Ottoman food at an affordable price...

Mete, Aegean food is among some of my favorite in the world. And you're absolutely right about local cuisine. It's so so so so good, and in Istanbul, mostly only available in people's homes. I have a neighbor now from Antep, and her cooking is incredible. Even when she makes food I normally hate, like cabbage, it's totally yummy.

Anyway, I wrote this post in 2008. I still don't like the foods I listed here. But now I've been in Istanbul for almost 10 years and I'm not bored of the food. It's such a wonderfully tremendous variety-- how could I get sick of it?

X.K. said...

Great post! But while you educate us on the names of Turkish delicacies, you may want to spell Gandhi's name right.

Stranger said...

Of for fuck's sake. Taking me to task for a spelling oversight I made 5 years ago? Please.

Anonymous said...

I am from Turkey and have been living in the US for a very long time so I can relate the homesickness. I can also relate to the weird Turkish food such as the tripe and lamb skull. I even think igde is an odd fruit as well. However, I don't think you had the good mulberries. American salad is in fact russian, called vinegret in russian.

I know this blog is what you don't like. Turks do think the world revolves around Turkey and would get offended easily with anything that undermines Turkish culture. I am just curious, what did you like in Turkey and Turkish cuisine?

Erin said...

I have been living in the Usa for almost 15 years because our family business and the bizarre thing is i have one and only "favorite" food that belongs to American culture' "Smoked BBQ" Food culture is more than just tasting the food it also involves creating the culture itself! I also absolutely disagree about how Mc Donald are the same in both countries! All my American friends who visited Turkey were amazed how KFC's chicken and Domino's pizza tastes totally different than the USA'! The problem is in American culture they will consider everything without 1 pound of cheese on the top of the meal as ethnic food and trust me most of them have very biased "ethnic" understanding! Yes Americans have a lot of different restaurants from around the world because there is no such a cuisine that is called american cuisine so they have their own version of "Chinese ,Mexican or Japanese food "! Everting is about sauces and cheese and most of them think foods without sugary sauces and cheese are not good enough or "very interesting" :)) LOL i love my American friends and husband but America is one of the worst isolated country in the world! You will be welcomed as long as you act like one of them! Don't get me wrong it is not a bad thing but not realizing it makes it worse! Thanks god i assimilated my husband enough to not going out for dinner and demanding all the diverse Turkish cuisine every night! :) he thinks it is like a fantasy and it is sexy! :) now our son 8 years old asks for pastirma ( yes i can make my own pastirma at home) and tripe soup ( walmart sells tripe for mexicans) for dinner with lots of garlic and vinegar! His friends bully him couple times at school during lunch time because they think my son eats monster food and it is disgusting! ( i don't allow him to eat the lunch that school proved because everything is full of hormones and pesticides!) Of course he is smart enough to say i only eat what my mom cooks for me. :) Well! I also see how much you get homesick in a foreign country! Presumably a Turk will never understand why people always talk about weather here in america and American will never understand why Turks always talk about food when they gathered! I think this is the reason why we are so sensitive about not only our food but also our the food culture! But i want to congratulate American business and marketing management to spread all the unnecessary fast food culture around the world to help them to catch up with their own obesity! That works!